Cyan Grey tasked me with helping to visualize Wabtec’s RailGhost, a low-profile robotic AI-powered rail-yard platform designed to travel beneath railcars and provide access to areas that are difficult, dangerous, or time-consuming to inspect manually.
Project Credits:
Company: Wabtec
Agency: Cyan Grey
Primary Software Utilized:
3D Studio Max, VRay, After Effects
Contributions:
CAD conversion, Technical Direction, 3D Production, Animation, Rendering, Image Generation
CAD to Motion
For this project, I started with work-in-progress CAD files and developed a full animation-ready system that could communicate how the sled moves, articulates, and responds to the constraints of the virtual rail yard we built in 3D Studio Max.
Mechanism Development
The sled’s feet and drive components were studied, rigged, and animated to show how the system moves through low-profile rail-yard environments.
The animation rig detects wheel proximity and tucks the feet away, reflecting the intended behavior of the real RailGhost. I coded it to spin the wheels automatically for me also which was a huge help. Getting this to work real-time in the viewport was a fun math challenge.
That’s One Huge Railyard
The massive scale of the rail yard contained hundreds of rail card and over 60 tracks. Rail-Clone and Forest Pack were used to help manage this amount of data.
Human operators were simply static as to not distract from the product.
