Better Performance, Less Costs
2020 | Seoul
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Hyundai Motor's new premium line-up, Genesis had its 3rd generation launched in 2019 with its 6th generation infotainment system based on their ccOS automotive OS. Running high-performance NVIDIA Ohara, it supported a 2560x720 wide front display and two 1280x70 real displays, over-satisfying family entertainment needs.
With the wider and higher resolution display, UX had to shoulder up with passenger expectations of having more intuitive and visually elegant graphics, for instance, USM (user setting mode) and digital cluster animations. Qt5.12 was used as a graphical framework. In late 2020, Genesis GV70 was launched with a huge success in the market. It's also the first model that the real 3D animations were used. Key challenges were to develop a seamless and performant 3D animation scenes that takes least system resources including data storage space, CPU/GPU and memory, yet most elegant and high-resolution 3D animation graphics. 
Source : https://www.genesis.com/
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The project was first launched to support 3D in 2017, but soon faced the biggest issue: a communication between 3D designer and developers. Unlike a gaming console, an automotive infotainment system runs over 100 applications all in competition for the limited resources on the embedded platform, not to mention it needs to support real-time and safety compliances makes it extremely challenging to find the balance point between "design vs performance". It took nearly 3 years to make the first 30% of 3D created, half-way. Kuesa for 3D Studio was introduced to bridge designers and developers: it allows designers work are untouched by developers during the integration process to the system by simply exporting all 3D properties to glTF, a format designed by Khronos, while the developers simply link the file to the system to render on Qt3D.
The remaining 70% of the 3D work was completed in 6 months, productivity increased by 300% while costs decreased by 80% against what it would have been without Kuesa. This stunning result was due mainly to cutting time wasted on arguing for design quality and performance regression balance, now taken care by automated workflow of Kuesa for Qt3D. |
The secret lies in simplicity in workflow. The designers were provided with plug-ins on their favorate 3D authoring application such as Blender, enabling them to produce 3D work without interruption, while developers were provided with ready-made glTF and qml files that can simply be linked to be rendered by Qt3D. The system was already performant, but could be further tweaked with type of materials Kuesa supports, and 3D mesh data. Once the work was created, the rest was left to glTF/Qt3D to be done!
