Virtual
The 911 GT3 RS
Some machines aren’t driven; They’re negotiated with.
- Role
- Creative Direction, Animation, Simulation, Rendering, Editing, Sounds Design.
- Date
- 2026
- Collaborators
- Rhassan Rachdi
The idea
Most of what makes a GT3 RS fast is invisible. At speed, the air presses the car into the road, and you never see it happen. The wing, the splitter, and the diffuser are all shaped by something you can’t look at.
This piece is about making that force visible, and about the feeling that comes with it.
A GT3 RS is a race car with a license plate. Driven wrong, it can kill you, and it demands your full attention every time you touch it.
Some machines aren’t driven; They’re negotiated with.
The feel.
I went retro and grainy, dramatic and a little horror-adjacent. Nothing here is meant to flatter the car. The shape does the work, because that silhouette is one of the most recognizable on earth, and in near darkness you still know exactly what you’re looking at.
Environment Design
A real wind tunnel is mostly plain: a big fan or bank of fans, a long duct, and a test section.
Mine deliberately isn’t. Because faithful realism is not the goal.
The air in this piece comes from a sci-fi turbine, part jet engine and part machine no real lab would build.
The tunnel is meant to feel like a place built around a subject it doesn’t fully understand, so the machinery is exaggerated to match the stakes.
The turbine is the heartbeat of the room, and the source of the whole simulation, so it roars in intimidating red light before emphatically turning on.
The air still behaves like air, but everything around it bends toward the concept.
The cuts between views feel like security footage with no operator, as if someone is watching from far away and keeping their distance.
The camera barely moves because the car isn’t the thing in motion.
The air is.
At the end, the car cuts to the track, coming up on turn 2.
It has been held still the whole time, and it was never tamed.
Spa Francorchamps, Ardennes, Belgium.
The track is Spa-Francorchamps, a legendary circuit set in the forests of Belgium and home to some of the biggest GT3 races in the world.
It was a deliberate choice, and not only for its status. It was chosen for its second turn, Eau Rouge.
Eau Rouge is a steep downhill plunge into a compression, followed by an uphill climb, all taken at enormous speed.
Eau Rouge is arguably more iconic than the circuit itself.
It’s also one of the most aero-heavy, downforce-demanding corners in racing, which makes it exactly the challenge the GT3 RS was built to excel at.
And it did.
Nerd Alert!
Everything below follows the order the work happened, not the order the piece plays.
The Process.
- Loading model
01
The Car
Sketchfab has some great GT3 RS models; however, most are either unoptimised or game-ripped. So, they only served as references.
Most aspects of the car were newly modeled using the reference models as a backdrop.
- Loading model
02
Environment Design
The lighting was deliberately dim and mostly backlit. I used two "tube" lights behind the car. This helped create that silhouette look across the piece, as well as give some contrast for the wind simulation vortices to shine.
The environment itself was straightforward modeling and texturing in Blender.
03
Wind Simulation
In Houdini
The setup: the car as a VDB collider, wind stemming from a grid of 12 spheres, then the solver is driven by a wind force along the y-axis. It's a simple, basic setup, but it does the job!
Cost scales brutally with resolution: both the resolution of the collider VDB and the voxel size of the sim. So the real work was deciding where detail mattered and where it didn’t.
04
Laser
Back to Blender,
The laser was technically simple to model and rig. The hardest part was getting the look right.
Real wind tunnels use sheets of light to slice through smoke and reveal the vortices, and that’s the look I was chasing. But the physics produces violent, spiraling chaos, while the look I wanted was a clean, graphic cutout. A perfect laser fought the simulation.
So I made it imperfect, letting it bend and branch so the chaos blends in as the light catches the smoke around it. It reads as a clean shape while the air stays honest. Balancing simulation quality against compute time was the other half of the fight.
- Loading model
05
The circuit
The circuit outline is widely available everywhere on the internet.
The challenge was modeling everything around it.
06
The Vegetation
The vegetation at Spa comes from Botaniq.
In this shot, the trees sit far from the camera and are smeared by motion blur, so they only need to read as believable at a glance. Botaniq is realistic enough for that and light enough to fill a whole treeline without dragging the scene down.
It’s also easy to customize, so I could vary the trees and keep the forest from looking copy-pasted.
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07
Animation
The car has the classic car rig, animated alongside a spline.
There was also a large amount of camera shake on the transition shot. This was very useful to the concept, as we're inside the shakey windtunnel, but it also does a great job masking the transition!
Two birds in one stone.
08
Rendering
Days....
DAYS....
But it's all worth it.
Next project
Investigation Ground Simulator.png)