CASESTUDY

Making the Invisible Visible

CGI for TQ’s Compact E-Bike Motor

How we used CGI to articulate TQ’s hidden drive system, revealing complex engineering in a dynamic, consumer-friendly way. 

TQ, a German engineering company, is renowned for its innovative approach to designing compact and powerful drive systems for e-bike brands such as Trek, Scott, and Pinarello. Their latest motor system, a testament to their innovative spirit, is designed to deliver uninterrupted power in an ultra-small form, quiet, efficient, and beautifully engineered. But the challenge was clear: how do you communicate something that’s both technically complex and physically hidden inside the bike?

Our partnership with TQ was instrumental in developing a two-part CGI campaign that brought clarity, energy, and visual storytelling to their latest product. This collaboration ensured that the campaign was not just visually appealing, but also technically accurate and credible.

Part One: Telling the Engineering Story

At the core of TQ’s innovation is a simplified harmonic pin ring, a central gear mechanism that replaces the bulk and complexity of traditional motor components. This unique design enables constant rotational power with fewer moving parts, making the motor smaller and lighter while also enhancing its efficiency and performance, a key advantage for e-bike users.

To tell this story, we leaned into metaphor and structure. The film opens on a dense field of traditional motor cogs before transitioning visually, bursting through to reveal TQ’s harmonic drive at the centre. From there, we progressively build the motor around this core, layering components while explaining key benefits through dynamic animation and motion.

Once the internal mechanics are understood, we shift focus to the whole system, highlighting the elegant interface display, simple thumb controller, and modular range extender battery. The entire sequence stays grounded in TQ’s design values: precision, efficiency, and ease of use.

Part Two: Showing the System in Action

For the second part of the project, we brought the motor into context, showing how it integrates into Trek’s new Fuel EXe trail bike. Using full CGI, we created a photoreal forest environment that matched the live-action assets from the campaign. We employed advanced rendering techniques to ensure visual consistency across still images, film, and motion content, resulting in a seamless and immersive viewing experience.

Through a series of x-ray-style reveals and dynamic camera moves, we explored how the motor, controls, and battery work together inside the frame. The goal here wasn’t to overload the viewer with technical detail but to help them feel the benefit of small size, low noise, and smooth, uninterrupted power delivery without slowing the film down.

Strategic, Scalable Content

Beyond the core film, we delivered a library of modular content that is not only strategic but also scalable. Ranging from looping short clips for social media to interactive, scrollable sequences for use on websites and product pages, these assets helped extend the value of the campaign and provided TQ’s team with flexible tools to support everything from product marketing to technical training.

This project is a strong example of how CGI can bring genuinely hidden features to the forefront, making the invisible visible and doing so in a way that speaks clearly to both consumers and engineers alike.

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