Personal flair

Each Maserati client can have a made-to-measure GranTurismo Convertible thanks to an outstanding personalization program. The offering includes the soft top, available in six colours, as well as the many exterior paint colors. The materials on the interior and exterior can also be specially selected for a practically infinite number of combinations.

To produce a car configurator that could best reproduce this range of personalization options, Maserati reworked its online platform in collaboration with Autodesk. The project began in February 2009 and involved three different teams (post-production, 3D graphics and programmers). The work was wrapped up six months later after lots of hard effort. "We spent many hours a day on rendering over a period that topped four months,"reflected Alessio Morena, co-ordinator of the graphics squad.

One of the main innovations was the setting for the car: "for the first time the car was presented in a real context rather than a virtual studio" explained Luca Giraldi, Maserati's Internet Manager. "This means that clients can have an even clearer view of how the GranTurismo Convertible would look in a particular environment". This modification meant tweaking the configurator even more. "The location obviously affects the reflections off the car", continued Morena, "so, before each rendering, we had to continually adjust the background as well as analyse the data for defining the 12 viewpoints of the car".

The programmers had to write 16,000 lines of code and the graphics team produce more than 18,000 images before the configurator was complete; most of the images were used for the animation of the hood opening and closing. The developers can be rightly proud of the exclusive content they have created.