Chapter 2: Deliverable Types

Created by Sarah Choi (prompt writer using ChatGPT)

Deliverable Types for Vehicle Concept Artists

Vehicle concept art is a chain of decisions crystallized as artifacts that other disciplines can build from. The same deliverable can serve different goals depending on whether you operate in a small indie team or a large AAA studio, and whether your seat leans toward exploratory concepting or production‑minded specification. This article focuses on the deliverables themselves—why they exist, what problems they solve, how they shift across team scale, and how they plug into a collaboration map. It also dives into the foundational set most vehicle artists touch regularly: silhouettes, orthographics, exploded views, cutaways, callouts, and paintovers.

Roles Across Indie and AAA

In an indie setting, roles collapse and deliverables must do double duty. A silhouette sheet may be the art direction pitch, the gameplay readability check, and the marketing mock in one. Orthos often become the basis for a quick greybox or even a final in‑engine proxy. Exploded and cutaway views are created only when they unblock a partner—usually a generalist modeler or programmer—so you bias toward clarity over completeness. Paintovers act as the glue across everything, clarifying proportion, material breakup, and motion language without spinning up a new document.

In AAA, specialization creates a denser stack of artifacts. You will craft dedicated silhouette passes for faction language and LOD testing, separate orthographic packages for modeling accuracy, and formal cutaway and exploded sets for rigging, physics, and materials. Callout pages multiply to cover hinges, recoil paths, damage break lines, cockpit ergonomics, emissive signatures, and shader hotspots. Paintovers become precision notes on top of clay renders, photogrammetry, or blockouts, often at several review gates. The scale requires tighter naming standards, version control, and traceability so that any partner can open a file and understand decisions without a meeting.

How Deliverables Solve Problems

Every page answers a question. Silhouettes resolve identity at distance and speed: what class is it, which faction, how threatening, how friendly to the player, and does it remain legible at the intended camera height and FOV. Orthos remove guesswork: how long is the wheelbase, where are the pivots, how thick is the canopy frame, and what are the clearances at full suspension compression. Exploded views untangle assembly order and expose serviceability: how does the gearbox come out, where do hardpoints bolt in, and what’s the hierarchy when the rig is built. Cutaways prove plausibility and cooling paths: where does intake air go, what is the ammo feed route, and how do batteries or tanks anchor safely. Callouts bind intention to location, turning a page into instructions: which hinge rotates around which axis, how far a panel travels, which fastener type holds a bracket, and where the center of mass sits relative to the footprint. Paintovers accelerate iteration: instead of rebuilding a model, you overlay decisions about panel seams, material reads, and stance, reducing churn.

Silhouettes

A silhouette sheet is a set of small, high‑contrast studies that prioritize the outer contour and major negative spaces over surface detail. On the concepting side, silhouettes are your fastest way to search for stance, proportion, and role. You test readability against the game camera by framing silhouettes at expected screen sizes and placing them on grey backdrops with motion blur halos. On the production side, silhouettes lock the identity that all future detail must serve. A good page includes front, side, and rear micro‑thumbnails to test recognition from approach angles, with a small notation of expected pose or transformation if the form shifts during use. In indie contexts, a single sheet can carry the faction’s language and the upgrade ladder for years. In AAA, silhouettes become a category system—light scout, medium utility, heavy assault, support—and a baseline for marketing silhouettes and UI icons.

Orthographic Views

Orthos are the blueprint views—front, side, rear, top—drawn to scale with metric rulers and datum marks. Their purpose is to eliminate ambiguity before modeling begins. Concept‑side orthos prove the proportions, placement of functional features, and the relationship between wheels, wings, thrusters, and body volumes. Production‑side orthos go further by capturing pivot locations, neutral positions for moving parts, and clearance arcs indicated by thin overlays. Dimension notations tie to studio metrics: door heights, seat ergonomics, and collision volumes. Indie pipelines sometimes accept partial orthos when speed matters, while AAA pipelines expect full sets with mirrored and asymmetrical notes, layer organization, and consistent naming so the modeler can import views directly into their DCC as image planes without reformatting.

Exploded Views

Exploded drawings separate a vehicle into major modules to show assembly order, connections, and substitution points. Concept‑side exploded views show how fantasy mechanisms could reasonably assemble—thruster pods, weapon hardpoints, intake trunks, canopy frames—so the fiction feels engineered rather than magical. Production‑side exploded views identify bolt patterns, interface flanges, cable routing trays, and gasket lines. They reveal where rigging pivots live within the shell and which subassemblies must remain rigid. Indie teams use exploded views to prove kitbash potential and maintenance logic for gameplay systems such as repair or crafting. AAA teams also use them to plan damage modeling, variant swaps, and manufacturing consistency across a fleet, making it clear which parts are unique and which are shared across classes.

Cutaways

A cutaway removes outer skins to reveal internal architecture at rest, highlighting plausibility, safety, and gameplay‑critical paths. For concepting, a cutaway gives you the gift of consequence: once you place a battery, gearbox, ammo bin, or fuel tank, the exterior form must justify vents, doors, and armor thickness. For production, cutaways are the road map for rigging and physics: suspension geometry, steering links, gun recoil buffers, landing gear shock absorbers, and cable slack all become measurable. In an indie team, a single cutaway often doubles as the lore canon for how the machine works. In AAA, cutaways are consumed by multiple departments—designers verifying functional roles, tech artists plotting constraint solvers, VFX deciding on exhaust plumes, and audio shaping mechanical clacks and whines from the visible components.

Callouts

A callout page is where you bind language to numbers. It can be a collage of detail insets with arrows and labels, or a tightly composed instruction sheet focusing on one system. Concept‑side callouts articulate the design grammar: panel seam logic, fastener typology, hinge families, greeble style, and emblem geometry. Production‑side callouts carry tolerances, pivot coordinates, travel ranges, and hierarchy names. They are the antidote to “I thought you meant…” moments. In an indie pipeline, callouts tend to be lean and focused on the riskiest unknowns. In AAA, callout suites often include materials and livery zoning; cockpit control clusters with font sizes scaled to FOV; emissive intensity guidelines for headlights, DRLs, and status lights; damage break lines and deform order; and shader considerations for pearlescent paints, holographic HUDs, and energy shields.

Paintovers

Paintovers are rapid feedback overlays on top of 3D blockouts, clay renders, screenshots, or photographs. On the concept side, you use paintovers to search before you commit: shifting proportions, testing panel languages, moving hardpoints, and auditioning color and material balance. On the production side, paintovers become precise change requests: widen a wheel arch by a set dimension, pull a pivot forward by a measured offset, tighten a panel gap, shift an emblem to a livery safe zone, or reduce high‑frequency detail in areas that break LODs. In indie teams, a single paintover thread can carry a vehicle from blockout to final. In AAA, paintovers sit at multiple gates—direction lock, modeling WIP, rig test, lighting pass—shortening feedback cycles while preserving the original design intent.

Packaging and Traceability

Deliverables live or die by how discoverable and trustworthy they are. A vehicle handoff package works best when each file answers one primary question and references related pages clearly. Even in small teams, establish a consistent root naming scheme for the franchise, faction, class, and variant. Keep scale notes and unit conventions on every page. Record change logs where stakeholders can read what changed and why, and always place a single “source of truth” proxy mesh or measurement sheet that other teams can reference when questions arise. In AAA, treat the deliverable set like a product: versioned, attributed, reviewed, and archived so a new teammate can reconstruct intent without hunting through chats.

Collaboration Map

Vehicle deliverables are consumed by many partners, and their questions shape what you include. Designers want role clarity, interaction verbs, and balance constraints, so silhouette read and collision envelopes must be unambiguous. Level design needs footprint, ground clearance, camera height, and ramp performance, which orthos and callouts must codify. Tech art and rigging require pivot placement, travel limits, hierarchy naming, and non‑intersecting arcs; exploded and cutaway views become their starting point. Animation needs motion beats—door timing, landing gear fold order, recoil duration—which benefit from paintovers and motion thumbnails. VFX asks for exhaust, vent, and impact locations with scale cues for particle tuning; callouts prevent guesswork. Audio needs mechanical sources and state changes—turbo spool, gear shift clacks, hydraulic hiss—which cutaways and exploded views reveal. Materials and lighting want paint systems, trim zones, emissive signatures, and expected luminance; orthos and callout pages anchor these. UI/UX needs cockpit legibility, font sizes, icon zones, and diegetic screens; cockpit orthos and HUD callouts resolve them. QA and accessibility look for color‑contrast, screen shake, and motion readability; silhouette sheets and paintovers predict risks early. Marketing wants hero angles, emblem placements, and brand grammar; silhouette and key art pass provide consistent identity across campaigns.

Indie vs. AAA Cadence

Indie pipelines privilege speed and combined pages. A single document might carry silhouettes, a side ortho, a cockpit cutaway, and key callouts, supported by iterative paintovers on the same canvas. This economy keeps the team moving and is often sufficient to ship. AAA pipelines privilege granularity and durability. Each deliverable is purpose‑built and owned by a gate: silhouettes for art direction, orthos for modeling start, exploded and cutaways for rigging kickoff, callouts for implementation QA, and paintovers as a continuous correction layer. The cadence is slower per item but scales across many contributors without loss of intent.

Concept vs. Production Mindsets

Concept‑side focus is choice‑making under uncertainty. Your deliverables are light, iterative, and aimed at narrowing ambiguity and aligning fantasy with gameplay. Production‑side focus is specification under constraint. Your deliverables are explicit, measured, and aimed at making a vehicle buildable, optimizable, and extensible. The best vehicle artists weave both: they explore in silhouettes and paintovers, then solidify with orthos, cutaways, exploded diagrams, and rigorous callouts.

Closing

Deliverables are the language that turns taste into teamwork. When silhouettes read, orthos remove doubt, exploded views and cutaways reveal inner logic, callouts bind intent to numbers, and paintovers keep iteration cheap, every partner can do their best work. Whether you operate in the quick‑switch indie rhythm or the distributed precision of AAA, mastering these artifacts—and tailoring them to your collaborators’ questions—is how vehicle concept artists turn imagination into machines that feel inevitable to build and unforgettable to drive.