I chose to design an aftermarket automotive head-up display (HUD) for my final project of advanced geometrical design. The demonstration video was not a requirement, but I think it better represents the scale and intent of the product.

I started with a design in Code V, which is an optical design software package. I then exported it to 3DS Max where I textured and modified the model a bit.

I then modeled a rough enclosure and found a very nice free BMW car model from Turbosquid, I believe. After some animation and fine-tuning, I came up with the final video:

It turned out that the toughest part was the rendering because of all of the raytrace materials. I ended up going with mental-ray and it took 2 computers in parallel about 80 hours to render. The process was sped up a lot by using mental-ray’s fast motion blur, but you can see the inaccuracies from this.