RONAL Wheel Aesthetics

RONAL is one of the leading makers of light alloy wheels, based in Härkingen, with around 7,000 employees and plants in twelve countries. Under its own name and under the Speedline brand, its wheels…

• Client: RONAL AG
• Built by: Geyst AG (Jan Stalder)
• Period: 2021

RONAL is one of the leading makers of light alloy wheels, based in Härkingen, with around 7,000 employees and plants in twelve countries. Under its own name and under the Speedline brand, its wheels run on the road and in motorsport.

For a long time RONAL sold mainly to vehicle manufacturers. With its move into the consumer market, which Geyst supports from the brand redesign through to product staging, a wheel suddenly has to be desirable, not just fit. Every year the group shows its new models in the "Wheel Aesthetics" campaign: short films, always the same camera, always the same light, produced by an outside supplier, and for every model the work starts from scratch. In 2021, at Geyst AG, Jan Stalder sees in this not a production but a pattern, and proposes bringing the films in-house. Geyst and RONAL agree to the experiment, and within three months a pipeline is built in Unreal Engine 5 that turns a CAD file into the finished film.

• A pipeline in Unreal Engine 5 • CAD file in, film out • One base scene per brand • The cameras "Legacy" and "Geyst" • 4K as film and still • Portrait and landscape • Material configurator for the engineers • About 20 minutes per film

The same film every year

The films from previous years tell the story on their own: R58, R62, R66, R67, R68, R70, in versions of 8 and 12 seconds, and separately for each channel. The camera move stays, only the wheel changes, yet every new model still takes weeks. For a brand that wants to be fast in the consumer market, that is the wrong speed.

One scene, many wheels

The pipeline has one base scene per brand, for RONAL and for Speedline. The CAD file supplied is prepared and dropped in, the materials come from a catalogue, the lighting from fixed setups. Two cameras are ready: "Legacy" for the look the campaign has had for years, and "Geyst" for a fresh proposal of how wheels could also look. The brand stays true to itself and still gets an option for tomorrow.

Twenty minutes instead of weeks

What used to take weeks is now a single run: load the CAD file, set the materials, render. After about 20 minutes film and stills are ready in 4K, in portrait and landscape, in every format the campaign requires. The R68 film follows the previous year's camera move frame by frame, only this time nobody had to rebuild it by hand.

The shade comes from the engineer

A shade that gets lost between engineer, agency and renderer costs more time than any render. So a material configurator is built alongside: the wheel's engineer sets primary and secondary material, colour, clear coat, roughness and metallic, sees the result at once on a material sphere and sends an image whose file name contains the wheel and materials. Production uses the values as they are, without interpreting them.

Built right, once

Technically, it all adds up: the CAD file becomes the finished film in twenty minutes, and the shade comes straight from the engineer. The pipeline is not continued beyond the experiment, but the partnership is. Thomas Richner, Head of Marketing at the RONAL GROUP, says of Geyst's work: "Their creative support has also helped us to make our product world more emotional, so that we were able to address the B2C market successfully as well." What has remained is a conviction that has stayed with Orbit ever since: anything produced the same way every year is worth building right once.