Space truckers
As part of the world-building for the Max Q universe, we wanted to make the space around the station Buxiu QiXi feel alive. One idea we settled on was to have essentially a highway of gas-hauling vehicles, carrying mined gases from one of the planet’s satellites to a refining station.
Designs to Model to In Game
We had two key designers on the process, one of whom modeled the in-film version. The designs needed to feel like they were part of the already established shape language of the submersible shuttles.
Design Drawings
The first design drawings were done by Ted Kasparek
Then they were further refined and modeled by Shu Ning
The hauler in Unreal Engine
Because there were going to be potentially around a hundred of these on screen at once, we needed to use Unreal Engine blueprints to add variation to the coloring, the number of tanks being hauled per “truck,” and the markings and designs. Then, hierarchical instances were used to create the highway, pulling truck variations randomly from pre-baked static meshes.