Vehicle and Props Design

|| Chen TianYao （0367550)

|| Vehicle and Props Design | Bachelor of Design (Honors) in Creative Media

|| Week1 - Week 14

Exercise - Fundamentals of Vehicle Design

Project 1 - Pre production

1.1 Proposal

A few weeks ago I put together my proposal. I'm planning to design a vehicle set in a wasteland-punk world — similar to the "Junkertown" vibe from Overwatch — a war machine converted from an RV, with the body built from a repurposed camper/motorhome.

1.2 Week3

I've started sketching some drafts and picked the first one in the top-left to refine further.

1.3 Week4

I finished the greyscale pass on the vehicle. Mr. Kannan feedback the proportions need adjusting — the engine looks too small and doesn't convey enough power/strength.

Week 5

I added color to the vehicle and adjusted the proportions — I slightly enlarged the engine, slightly shrunk the gun barrel, and added a character.

Week 6

I added color to the vehicle and adjusted the proportions — I slightly enlarged the engine, slightly shrunk the gun barrel, and added a character.

Project - 1 Final submission

Project 2 - production

I've started drawing the interior line art. Since this is an RV, I wanted it to include basic survival facilities inside, plus a lot of electronic equipment, to give the vehicle's controls a sense of complexity and precision. Mr. Kannan quickly gave feedback on the proportions — he said the exterior looks too small while the interior looks too spacious, and the interior looks too flat/squashed.

I started coloring, and I shrunk the overall room size, turning the bed into a toilet. Mr. Kannan's feedback was that it looks too clean overall — I could add more clutter.

I pulled a few clutter/prop references from the internet and pasted them onto the desk/floor, and also refined the tires.

Project - 2 Final submission

Project 3 - production

I started building the 3D model in Blender based on the 2D sketch, and Mr. Kannan said I need to create a turnaround for the vehicle, including the back view.

I started working on the other side of the vehicle.

I started painting the vehicle's textures, and dressed up the model with ground terrain and vegetation/foliage.

FINAL SUBMISSION

Therookies Submission:  The Rookies - Vehicle & Props Design, by CHENTIANYAO

Experience

Over these fourteen weeks I designed a wasteland-punk war vehicle converted from an RV, moving through the full pipeline from proposal to final 3D render. I started with rough thumbnail sketches and picked one silhouette to develop, then pushed through greyscale, color, and interior line art passes before rebuilding the design in Blender and texturing it with environment dressing. Each project stage forced a different kind of problem-solving: Project 1 was about nailing the exterior silhouette and proportion, Project 2 was about designing a believable, lived-in interior, and Project 3 was about translating a flat 2D concept into a coherent 3D turnaround. Working under Mr. Kannan's regular feedback meant the design was never static — almost every week involved revisiting a decision I thought was finished and adjusting it again.

Observation

Looking back at the process, a clear pattern emerges: my first instinct was consistently to prioritize storytelling detail (electronics, survival gear, clutter, greebles) before proportion and readability were locked in. This showed up twice in very similar ways — once with the engine/gun barrel scale on the exterior, and again with the interior feeling too spacious and too flat relative to the exterior shell. Each round of Mr. Kannan's feedback was about scale, weight, and spatial believability rather than content, which suggests that "wasteland-punk" aesthetics (mess, improvisation, salvage) are easy to add on top, but proportion and volume have to be right first or the added detail just makes the problem more visible instead of hiding it. The move from 2D to 3D (Project 3) also exposed inconsistencies that flat sketches had let me ignore, particularly needing a full turnaround including the back, which isn't something a single hero-angle illustration forces you to resolve.

Findings

The main takeaway is that proportion and structural logic should be resolved and locked before adding surface detail, clutter, or texture — detail amplifies whatever proportions already exist, good or bad, rather than fixing them. Building a full 3D turnaround early, even from a 2D concept, is a more reliable way to catch scale and volume errors than relying on a single confident 2D angle, since a strong front-view illustration can hide problems that become obvious from the side or back. Iterative critique also proved most useful when it targeted a single, specific issue per pass (engine size, then barrel size, then room proportions, then clutter) rather than trying to fix everything at once, which kept each revision focused and made the design's overall improvement traceable step by step across the trimester.