On January 21st, 2024, the Carolina Hurricanes hosted the Minnesota Wild on their annual NASCAR theme night. I was tasked with creating unique social media content that would “break the feed” and get fans excited for the game.
I challenged myself to create a custom Hurricanes themed racecar, that I would then composite onto a wet race track. I could easily make the wrap in photoshop and warp it onto a car, but I would be stuck with that single angle.
After talking with Tanner Witt, a Graphic Designer for Kauling Racing, I learned that all NASCAR creative teams render their car designs out in a 3D software. The most popular one being Blender.
If the car was made in 3D, I could get any angle I wanted and we could use it in more pieces of content. Only problem is that I don’t have any experience with 3D software.
I spent a little over a week learning as much Blender as possible, and got to a point where I was somewhat confident. I found a model of a 2018 NASCAR Chevrolet Camaro that could work as my base.
I created the wrap in Photoshop and went for a storm cloud theme. No racecar is complete without a ton of sponsor logos. So, I used a bunch of organizations and entities that fall under the Hurricanes umbrella as the “sponsors”. After the Hurricanes wrap was done, I made another one for the Wild.
Using this Cars movie poster as inspiration, I wanted the composition of the graphic to have the Hurricanes car in front of the Wild car on a wet, rainy race track at night. So, I rendered out both cars in Blender with a camera angle that shows a nice side view of the cars coming out of a turn.
I brought those images into Photoshop and did my composite.
After that, I wanted to create a “reveal” trailer for the car. Again, taking inspiration from Cars, and the iconic opening scene where Lightning McQueen is in his trailer giving himself a pre-race speech.
I placed the racecar in a studio scene, rendered out four different animated cameras in Blender, and imported the frames into Premiere. After utilizing a sound bite from Kevin James at the 2007 Daytona 500, and some sound design, the trailer was complete.
Our Motion Designer, Nathanael Wilson, was also able to utilize a render of the racecar as a transition element for in-arena use.
Overall, super happy with how this project turned out and how quickly I put my newfound 3D skills to the test.
