The Mill creates a one of a kind render system to craft 200,000 unique fan trailers for EA

We teamed up with Electronic Arts and North Kingdom to deliver an industry first; a custom trailer experience for the mobile app Need for Speed Heat Studio. Tapping into customization on an unprecedented scale, the app allowed users to create their dream ride and then watch it in action as it hits the streets in their very own personalized launch trailer for Need For Speed Heat.

The Mill’s engineering team crafted a unique system to instantaneously render and create nearly 200,000 bespoke fan trailers directly out of EA’s proprietary Frostbite game engine. The Mill’s Los Angeles studio supplied EA and North Kingdom with a powerful computing system to facilitate the renders on this massive scale. A physical render farm at The Mill’s Los Angeles studio was constructed to facilitate the renders of each individual virtual dream vehicle. Supplying an average of 390 fully rendered trailers per hour, over the course of a three week period.

Head of Technology, Tom Gentry comments “This is the first time that the Engineering team has led a big project of this nature in tandem with the Mill Experience team. It was amazing to see what everyone involved could accomplish in our time frame, even our suppliers pulled out all the stops. We had 100 high powered gaming workstations working simultaneously, creating full renders from user-generated content at an extraordinary rate.”

Neil Redman, Software Engineer at EA, comments, “It was incredible participating in a team that all worked to ‘MacGyver’ a system together from what we had available in so little time. Every time we hit a problem someone across EA, the game team, or the Mill had a solution in no time. It was inspiring to have so many groups working together so well.”

Robert Alderson, Lead Architect at EA finishes, “Taking a spark of an idea, not knowing how you are going to pull it off, and then bringing it home to be the success that it was – that’s innovation in a nutshell. This was the first attempt from EA at doing something of this magnitude, and things were often held together with string and duct-tape, but the whole team contributed their personal time to keep things running and there were celebrations as we hit milestone after milestone. The Mill were the ideal partners for this project – a great result from a great joint effort.”

To take your own custom ride to the streets and have the full Need for Speed Studio experience, you can download the app here. You can reach out to our Experience team by contacting hellox@themill.com.