Chapter 3: Reading Briefs & Asking the Right Questions

Created by Sarah Choi (prompt writer using ChatGPT)

Reading Briefs & Asking the Right Questions for Vehicle Concept Artists

Vehicle concept artists turn sketchy intent into coherent machines. That work begins with reading the brief and interrogating it until the design is both inspiring and buildable. Whether you sit on the concepting side shaping direction or the production side specifying details, and whether you are working within an indie team or a AAA studio, the goal is the same: extract the real problem, translate it into concrete decisions, and choose deliverables that unblock partners quickly. This article explains how to read briefs deeply, what to ask across roles and studio scales, and how those answers shape the collaboration map and the artifacts you will produce.

A strong intake starts by assuming the brief is incomplete. You treat it like a hypothesis about a vehicle’s role in the game, the terrain and medium it traverses, the faction identity that shaped it, and the tech level that makes it plausible. You then test that hypothesis with targeted questions until you can commit to silhouettes, orthos, cutaways, callouts, and paintovers that anticipate downstream needs. The rest of the process is reducing unknowns while protecting the fantasy that makes the vehicle desirable to players.

Understanding roles across indie and AAA changes how you query and how you package results. On small indie teams, the brief may arrive as a paragraph in chat and a few references. You will be both the interpreter and the enforcer of constraints, so your questions must be practical and fast: who needs what decision by when, and what is the smallest artifact that unlocks them? In AAA, briefs often arrive with a feature one‑pager, a systems spec, and a style guide. Your questions must reconcile multiple sources, resolve contradictions, and record tradeoffs so the franchise remains coherent. Indie deliverables combine pages and evolve in place; AAA deliverables are discrete and versioned, each tied to a gate in the pipeline.

Reading the role in the brief is the first anchor. Role is the promise the vehicle makes to the player and the job it performs for the game. You should identify the verbs it enables—sprint, drift, charge, tow, transform, bombard, scout, escort—and the constraints that protect balance. Role determines silhouette energy, stance, and motion language. It sets your initial A/B/C exploration axes: armor versus speed, payload versus agility, intimidation versus stealth. If role is vague, you ask how it wins, loses, and contributes to team composition, and you ask which edge cases must be avoided so the vehicle does not encroach on another class’s fantasy.

Terrain and medium narrow physics and shape logic. The same role must look different on sand, snow, mud, urban steps, jungle roots, volcanic scree, shallow water, deep ocean, stratospheric flight, vacuum, or low‑gravity moons. You read for ground clearance, contact method, and environmental hazards. Questions about slope limits, ford depth, dust or spray density, temperature extremes, and magnetic or corrosive effects become decisions about intakes, filters, seals, tire or track pattern, rotor diameter, wing loading, radiator placement, and sensor shrouds. Terrain and medium also set where you place VFX emitters and audio sources and how you plan material wear. In engine‑heavy projects, asking for the intended camera distance and FOV is part of terrain: what reads at 20 meters on a third‑person chase cam is different from what reads in a cockpit at 90° FOV.

Faction identity turns engineering into worldbuilding. You read for manufacturing culture, values, and visual grammar. A faction that prizes salvage will prefer bolted flanges, mismatched panels, exposed hoses, and stencil typography; a pristine technocracy favors seamless skins, magnetically latched hatches, and luminous seams. If the brief says “third faction,” you probe for their emblem geometry, color discipline, material palette, and signature lighting so silhouettes and details align with that grammar. You also ask where faction identity bends to gameplay needs, such as mandated readability colors for enemy versus friendly, and how skins or monetization might flex markings without breaking IP rules.

Tech level sets plausibility boundaries and animation opportunities. You read for power source, propulsion method, control systems, and maintenance doctrine. A diesel‑electric hovercraft implies different intakes, exhausts, and heat signatures than a compact fusion tilt‑wing. Tech level constrains how tightly you can pack mechanisms, how thin armor can be, how quickly parts actuate, and which materials are available for panels and glazing. Your questions probe for numbers: typical speed and acceleration, range and refuel time, ammo capacity and reload behavior, sensor fidelity and countermeasures. When numbers are unknown, you anchor them by analogy to a known vehicle family already in the project or a real‑world proxy, then validate with design and physics teams.

As you interrogate the brief, you also map collaborators. Designers answer role and balance; systems engineers define curves, cooldowns, and mass ranges; physics and handling specialists translate verbs into suspension travel, steering limits, downforce, and drift parameters; level design validates footprint, step height, ramp pitch, bridge width, and camera offsets; tech art and rigging need pivot locations, travel arcs, and hierarchy naming; animation needs motion beats for doors, landing gear, thrusters, reloads; VFX asks for emitter placement, scale references, and state changes; audio needs mechanical and environmental sound sources; materials and lighting need paint systems, emissive signatures, and luminance targets; UI/UX needs cockpit legibility and diegetic HUD zoning; QA and accessibility need contrast, motion safety, and readability thresholds; marketing needs hero angles, emblem placement, and brand story. Knowing who owns which question helps you tailor each deliverable and schedule reviews that matter.

Your first deliverables should reflect the questions you’re still answering. If role clarity is the block, you begin with silhouettes and value comps that contrast the contested axes, annotated with the verbs and handling intent. If terrain uncertainty is primary, you produce comparative footprint and ground‑clearance sheets, test ramp angles, and show intake and seal strategies with cutaway notes. If faction identity is unsettled, you expand a material and panel language page and a lighting signature frame. If tech level is unclear, you provide cutaways or exploded sketches that show battery, tank, or magazine sizes, cooling flows, and plausible service access, then ask stakeholders to accept or adjust. Each page ends with explicit questions, due dates for answers, and what decision that answer will unlock downstream.

Indie and AAA contexts change cadence but not logic. Indie teams benefit from combined pages that travel fast: a single canvas carrying silhouettes, a side ortho in scale, a cockpit cutaway, and targeted callouts, with an evolving change log. AAA teams benefit from discrete, versioned artifacts: silhouette boards for art direction sign‑off, measured orthos for modeling kickoff, exploded and cutaway sets for rigging, cockpit and HUD sheets for UI, material and livery guides for lighting and marketing, and iterative paintovers for each gate. In both cases, you document assumptions and lock decisions once risk is retired.

From the production seat, reading the brief means hunting for specification gaps. You look for missing pivots, undefined neutral positions, ambiguous clearances at full compression, unassigned hierarchy names, and unbudgeted shader complexity. Your questions focus on numbers and names, not taste: millimeters for panel gaps, degrees for hinge travel, coordinates for camera and emitter pivots, target triangle counts and texture memory by LOD tier, and file naming conventions for variant kits and skins. You treat every unstated constraint as a risk and either codify it in a callout or escalate it for a decision.

From the concept seat, reading the brief means guarding the fantasy while pruning ambiguity. You look for mismatched references, stray adjectives that introduce conflicting style guides, and verbs that imply incompatible physics. Your questions focus on the picture that lives in everyone’s head: do we want aggression or approachability, menace or grace, utility or spectacle? You show the difference in side‑by‑side paintovers and ask which path serves the story and the role. You then translate that choice into the next measurable deliverable.

A practical intake flow keeps you moving. You start by rewriting the brief in one paragraph that states the role, terrain or medium, faction identity, and tech level in concrete terms. You add two sentences for player fantasy and core handling feel. You list five non‑negotiable constraints and five open questions with owners. You then produce the smallest artifact that disambiguates the biggest unknown. You gather a 24‑hour or next‑review answer, update the one‑pager, and escalate only if cross‑team contradictions remain. That rhythm lets you discover while building trust.

Well‑formed questions are how you lead without overstepping. When you ask, “What is the maximum ramp pitch this vehicle must climb in level three’s canyon?” you invite level design into a precise decision. When you ask, “Can the heavy assault chassis share wheelbase with the utility variant to reduce model count?” you help production and monetization. When you ask, “Are enemy headlights locked to 3000K–4000K while friendlies remain 5000K–6500K for quick reads?” you give lighting and accessibility a simple rule that improves gameplay. Good questions cut meetings in half and eliminate loops of avoidable rework.

Red flags in briefs deserve proactive handling. Vague roles that sound like two classes at once, terrain promises that clash with level geometry, factions that borrow incompatible aesthetics, and tech claims that break the world’s power ceiling are all signs you should propose two or three concrete alternatives with pros and cons. Present them with silhouettes, a small ortho strip, and a mini‑cutaway that proves or disproves plausibility. Your job is not to win an argument but to create choices the team can evaluate quickly.

Closing the loop means translating answers into artifacts others can trust. After role, terrain or medium, faction, and tech level are nailed down, you lock silhouettes, produce orthos with datum marks and pivot notes, draft cutaways that show interiors and cooling paths, assemble exploded views that clarify assembly and rigging, issue callouts with ranges, tolerances, and hierarchy names, and keep paintovers running as fast correction layers throughout. Each page carries the same scale, naming, and file hygiene so a new teammate can step in without friction. Reading briefs well is not separate from drawing well; it is how your drawings become the operating system for a team building machines that feel inevitable to drive.