Agricultural spray drone — exploded view

An agricultural spray drone is sold on things a photograph cannot show. The buyer is choosing between machines on redundancy, sensor coverage, spray accuracy and serviceability — and all of that lives inside the airframe or is too small to see. Field footage shows a drone flying over a field, which every competitor also has. The harder constraint is credibility: the people evaluating this hardware are engineers, so anything approximated in the mechanism is immediately visible to them.

I worked the way I would have as a systems engineer: from the published maintenance documentation and CAD dimensions rather than from photographs, so component counts, mounting and assembly order match the real aircraft. Off-the-shelf parts — the brushless motor and ESC, the long-range radio modem — were built to their manufacturers' published dimensions; the airframe, covers, arms and spray system were modelled from documented specification. The film moves inward: the radio and flight controller materialise on the top plate, the centre cover seats and its fasteners engage, then the arm assembly builds from wireframe into carbon before the whole aircraft resolves in a hero shot. Materials carry the engineering read — woven carbon on the arm tubes, anodised aluminium on the motor bells, matte moulded plastic on the shell. Lit low-key so form is drawn by reflection. Compositing, callouts, glow and grade in After Effects.

A 27-second film that shows the engineering rather than describing it — usable as a launch or trade-show piece, an investor-deck asset, or cut into stills for spec pages. It also demonstrates the thing that separates this work from a rendering studio's: the mechanism is right because it was read off documentation, not inferred from the outside. Self-initiated study.