Stylized Transit Bus & Signs | Rift City Rebels

One of my larger responsibilities on Rift City Rebels was creating this bus for the rapid transit station level. Hand-painting stylized textures is one of my favourite things to do in 3D, so this was an exciting challenge. From the beginning I knew I didn't just want it to be a static prop in the background: having the autonomously operated hover-bus driving around was a great opportunity to breath life into the environment! Plus, once it's driving around maybe we could have the doors open and close, and the lights flicker, and the hover-wheels vibrate, and—

Yeah, okay, I just wanted more excuses to do fun stuff in the material graph. The bus wheels and doors are fully vertex-driven animations, controlled through easy-to-use parameters that can be changed through blueprints or keyframed in a level sequence. Different sections of the bus are masked with a combination of vertex color to isolate the animatable parts, while a combination of vertex color and an emissive map were used to allow the emissive color and intensity of five different types of lights across the bus to be controlled independently.

I also created some of the electronic signage you can find in the transit level! The sign electronics flicker and change the displayed information using just one texture set by offsetting the UVs of affected areas over time.

It was important to me that even though our game was set in the near-future and technology had evolved and changed, the environments still evoked iconic "Winnipeg". I referenced a lot of photos of old-school Winnipeg busses while working on this, trying to make something simultaneously futuristic and retro.