3D Vehicle Art for Games

3D vehicle art is the production of drivable and static vehicles as engine assets. Unlike most assets, a vehicle has to work as four things at once: an exterior that reads close up, an interior the player may enter, a rig with moving parts, and a physics body the game drives.

A complete vehicle asset includes:

- Exterior mesh built to the agreed triangle budget
- Interior geometry where the player enters the vehicle
- A pivot hierarchy for wheels, steering, turret, hatches and doors
- Collision, wheel colliders and physics setup
- An LOD chain covering cockpit distance to horizon distance

Military and armoured vehicles, aircraft and rotorcraft, civilian and urban traffic, watercraft, and stylized vehicles for casual and mobile projects. Single hero vehicles and full fleets, realistic or stylized, matched to your existing set.

Common requests:

- Armour and transports: APCs, tanks, technicals, support equipment
- Aircraft: fighters, transports, helicopters, UAVs
- Civilian traffic: cars, vans, trucks, buses, background variants
- Stylized vehicles for mobile and casual titles
- Livery, camouflage and faction variants on a shared base

Both, and the answer changes the estimate more than the vehicle type does. An interior the player enters is effectively a second full asset: cabin geometry, instruments, seats, and sightlines checked from the driver position. We ask this at the brief rather than discovering it in review.

Interior scope usually falls into one of three levels:

- None — the vehicle is never entered, exterior only
- Simplified — visible through glass, not entered; low-detail geometry
- Full — the player sits inside; instruments, seats and camera positions designed

Yes. Wheels, steering, suspension travel, turret yaw and pitch, hatches, doors, landing gear, rotors and control surfaces get pivots, hierarchy and names matched to what your vehicle system expects. Suspension geometry is built to allow real travel rather than clipping into the body.

Rig delivery covers:

- Pivot hierarchy for every moving part, named to your convention
- Suspension travel clearance designed into the geometry
- Turret and hatch rotation axes placed correctly
- Attachment sockets for weapons, cargo and effects
- Import verified in Unreal Engine or Unity before hand-off

Yes, when they are scoped at the brief. Damage work ranges from texture-level wear through detachable panels to fully wrecked variants, and the cost difference between those is large. Deciding the level early is what keeps it predictable.

Damage scope levels we work to:

- Texture-level — scorching, bullet holes, dirt, no geometry change
- Detachable parts — doors, panels, wheels that can be removed
- Damaged variant — a second mesh with deformed geometry
- Destroyed variant — wreck state, often with separate collision

Yes. Realistic vehicles are built from reference and technical drawings with mechanically coherent detail and material accuracy. Stylized vehicles follow a defined shape language with readability carried by silhouette. Most projects need us to match an existing fleet rather than define a look.

The practical difference:

- Realistic — reference and drawings, PBR, plausibility under close inspection
- Stylized — exaggerated proportions, simplified forms, silhouette-led
- Either way — your existing vehicles are the style guide

Yes, and it is the most common assignment. Send vehicles already in your build and we reverse-engineer the rules: proportion treatment, panel density, texel density, wear language, rig standard and naming. New vehicles then join the fleet instead of standing beside it.

What we ask for:

- Two or three existing vehicles, ideally source files with rigs
- Your technical spec: triangle budgets per LOD, texel density
- Screenshots or footage in your actual in-game lighting
- The rig standard and naming convention your vehicle system uses

FBX and OBJ as standard exchange formats, with source files on request. PBR texture sets at the resolution each tier justifies, full LOD chains built for the real viewing range, collision and wheel colliders, and physics assets where the project uses them.

Standard delivery package:

- Exterior and interior meshes in FBX plus source files
- PBR texture sets, plus liveries and damage variants where in scope
- LOD meshes across the agreed chain, interiors dropped by distance
- Collision hull and wheel colliders
- Rig with pivot hierarchy and attachment sockets

Vehicle cost is driven by scope layers rather than by the vehicle itself. The same tank quoted exterior-only and quoted with interior, rig, damage states and physics differs by a wide margin. We quote per project once those layers are decided.

What moves the number most:

- Whether the player enters the vehicle
- What moves on it, and how your vehicle system expects it rigged
- Whether damage states and destruction variants are in scope
- How many liveries and variants share one base

Yes. We start by reading what exists — mesh, UVs, rig, pivot naming and conventions — and tell you honestly whether continuing or rebuilding costs less. Rig standards are the usual deciding factor: an inconsistent pivot convention across a fleet costs more to patch than to redo.

How the handover works:

- We review the existing asset, spec and rig standard
- You get a straight answer on continue versus rebuild
- One vehicle is delivered for calibration before scale-up
- Your naming, pivot and folder conventions are adopted, not replaced
- Throughput ramps only after that first vehicle is approved