ROVEROMA

Reimagining Comfort in Cosmos

overview

The Vogue Singapore x Brythehall Digital Exhibition on Spatial.io brings Katie McIntyre’s philosophy of ‘feminine futurism’ to life, presenting a vision that reimagines the male-dominated automotive industry. At its center is Dakini, a concept car that bridges fluidity, elegance with futuristic design, encouraging audiences to consider how technology and aesthetics can evolve beyond old conventions.

Duration

10 weeks

Team

Katie Mcintyre

Vaishnavi Mehta

Creative Director

3D Designer

My role included transforming Katie McIntyre’s concept car into a high-quality virtual model embodying her philosophy. Optimized for Spatial.io, the model is part of a suite of assets—including logos, social media icons, and interactive elements—that craft a cohesive digital brand presence.

Focus Areas

3D Design

Motion Design

3D Asset Optimisation

Experience Design

intent

I was brought on to change the color, material, and finish (CMF) of the concept car, Dakini, creating it in three color versions: white, black, and blue. The next step was rigging the door/sunroof so they could be animated to open ↔ close. After that, the model needed to be uploaded for a digital exhibition, requiring the file size to be extremely small while still maintaining the desired CMF for display. This meant I had to remesh the model and make anywhere from 10 to 1,000 tiny tweaks to get it to a place of visual harmony.

Starting point of the concept car, Dakini

exploration

I started off by making the white version of the car first. I figured if I made it white, I could separate the hue, letting me focus solely on the value structure. That way, I could see which elements needed more emphasis based on shape and texture. As I began with achromatic rendering, it allowed me to position a spectrum of environment lighting—from ambient and indirect to area and directional—into the scene. This setup helped me get a good read on depth and dimensionality from the get-go.

Tools

Blender

Adobe substance 3D painter

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Photoshop

sharpie

paper

Testing multiple sets of lighting

Intial value structure for the concept car

Dakini in varying environment lighting, color, material and finishes.

Dakini in Black version with all the shader materials used

challenge

Once Katie and I were happy with the environment lighting, color, material, and finish for the concept car, we decided to use the blue version for the digital exhibition. Since the exhibition was designed with large virtual windows showing the sky, the blue version felt like the perfect fit for the concept car, Dakini (which translates to 'Sky Dancer' in Sanskrit). Despite all the textures and optimizations, the file size still stood at 458 MB. I also animated the door and sunroof to open and close. Now the real challenge began: how to achieve the desired result under 80 MB to make it uploadable?

3D Modelling software - Blender viewport

Example of a 3d model in a distorted edges

Original file received had similar issue as the image in right - really complex mesh with distorted edges

Example of a 3d model with edge flow

New version of the model has lesser vertices and cleaner edge flow to reduce the file size

outcomes

After a lot of tweaking, some luck, multiple rounds of reading through Blender documentation (the software I was using for the concept car), and exploring how to translate specific materials effectively into the virtual environment, I managed to reduce the file size to 78 MB. This process included simplifying the complex model from over 5 million vertices details down to just a few hundred thousand, optimizing the textures to use fewer colors, and using area lighting to create color variations, which reduced the number of separate color files needed. Finally, we uploaded it to Spatial.io for display

Dakini in 3 versions