Project Horizon: S-100 Vehicle Exterior

The Turner S-100 is the most popular and widely used mining vehicle on the frontier. As part of the 100 series, the S-100 is the smallest and most agile vehicle in the lineup. It features removable floodlights for illuminating mining areas, a rugged suspension system capable of handling even the harshest lunar surfaces, two size-3 mining lasers for breaking resource deposits, ample trunk space for storing materials, a comfortable interior, and a dual-function system for seamless switching between traversal and mining modes—plus much more.
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I designed the S-100 from scratch, following the robust yet simple design philosophy seen in real-world industrial vehicles. The entire vehicle was modeled, textured, and optimized using Blender, and was rendered in UE5. I employed trim sheets, packed decals, and tiling textures to reduce the number of textures needed, ensuring high fidelity even in close-up views—no crunchy baked Substance normal maps. All decals, branding, and trim sheets were created using Blender and Photoshop. After modeling in Blender, I exported the vehicle to Unreal Engine for staging and rendering. The model is around 200k polygons and uses parallax occlusion mapping to enhance the depth and detail of the trim sheet. The vehicle took about 1.5 months to make, and the showcase environment was made in a couple of days.

To ground the vehicle in a realistic setting, I built the staging environment inside UE5 using Quixel materials and photoscanned rock assemblies. The distant landscape was created in Quadspinner Gaea and imported into UE5 as a nanite mesh. Both the terrain and the environment utilize UE5's nanite displacement for added depth and quality. The lighting setup for the renders employs virtual shadow maps and Lumen, without hardware ray tracing or path tracing, allowing me to fine-tune the textures and materials under the in-game lighting system.

The Turner S-100 is part of Project Horizon, where it will be one of many available vehicles. Now that the exterior is complete, work on the interior and animations is underway!