Something Without Wheels (Patreon)

Some of you may already know that I joined the ProMods team as an asset artist for their Canada project last summer. It's been a nice opportunity to expand my technical skills, stretch my creativity and make some new friends. I needed a little break from my vehicle projects this week so I decided to work on this sculpture which will feature prominently in Sicamous.

This particular asset poses some interesting challenges. The main feature of this sculptures is a set of steel panels with artwork cut out of them. Modeling the cutouts would not only be prohibitively difficult, but would also yield a uselessly high-poly model. The only way to represent this detail efficiently is with alpha transparency. However, that still required tracing out/re-creating the artwork, element by element. Most of the panels have been photographed, but some seem to only exist in Street View:

If you've ever tried tracing with Photoshop's pen tool, I imagine you have an idea of how tedious this was. However, after roughly a work-day worth of tracing, I have all but one panel complete, and I'm pretty happy with the results.

Here's a better look at the texture. There's a special material 'flavour' that remaps the specular lighting to use a limited range of the alpha channel (32-255 instead of 0-255), so that very dull areas aren't mistaken for transparent areas.

Hopefully you guys don't mind seeing things that aren't trucks/trailers/wheels here. After all, part of ATS' charm is having beautiful places to drive!