Automotive / Environment / Real-Time
McLaren 720S Spider
An automotive environment built in Unreal Engine 5, with a McLaren 720S driving through it. Everything renders in real time.
The goal was footage that looks filmed rather than rendered. The environment does most of that work, since the paint can only reflect what is actually around it.
I built two sets. The studio came first, for checking the paint against neutral lighting. The forest came second, procedural and made with PCG, to see how the paint holds up somewhere that throws harder reflections at it.
CarStudio
For fast iteration on colour and look during Sequencer playback I built CarStudio, a small web server running on the local network that handles paint colour swaps, lighting changes, and camera moves. The whole car recolours in a single click. Lighting, backdrops and cameras can all be driven from a phone browser, no need to sit at the workstation all day to judge a look.
Material
All of it runs on one master material. Every colourway on the car is just an instance of it with different values. The layers that matter are exposed as a handful of parameters: base roughness, clear coat roughness, metallic flake intensity, tiling and the paint colour.
How it fits together
The phone never talks to Unreal directly. A small server sits in the middle. It serves the panel, proxies commands to the editor's Remote Control API, and streams finished renders back out.
- Project
- McLaren 720S Spider
- Year
- 2026
- My role
- Lighting, shading, environment design, render pipeline
- Tools
- Unreal Engine 5, Movie Render Queue, Blender
- Artist/Developer
- Shawn Meo
*Personal project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or commissioned by McLaren Automotive. All marks belong to their respective owners.