Chapter 4: Research Packets

Created by Sarah Choi (prompt writer using ChatGPT)

Research Packets for Vehicle Concept Artists

A research packet is the bridge between curiosity and production. It turns raw reference into a compact, decision‑ready bundle that art direction can approve and downstream teams can build from without guesswork. For vehicle concept artists on both the concepting side and the production side—across indie and AAA—the goal is the same: assemble fieldwork, blueprints, teardown studies, and ethical citations into a package that locks vocabulary, narrows proportion ranges, and supplies sound and motion cues that match the fantasy. A good packet reduces meetings because it answers the questions collaborators haven’t asked yet.

The spine of a packet is a short thesis that explains the vehicle’s purpose, the player fantasy it must deliver, and the constraints it must respect. That thesis frames what follows and keeps the packet from being a scrapbook. Fieldwork is the first pillar, because photographs and notes gathered at tracks, airfields, shipyards, factories, farms, and museums teach the eye what engineered truth looks like. A packet should include carefully captioned images that show stance at realistic camera height, intake and cooling paths that can be traced, hinge and latch behavior documented across open and closed states, wear patterns where hands and tools act, and cockpit legibility captured at a focal length that approximates the intended FOV. When permitted, dimensions such as wheel diameter, door aperture width, or nacelle mouth diameter provide concrete scale anchors. Notes about smell, heat, vibration, dust and spray behavior, and the sound of mechanisms entering and exiting states become practical cues for VFX and audio later on.

Blueprints and technical sheets are the second pillar and they convert mood into measurement. A packet benefits from side, front, rear, and top orthographic snippets taken from public technical manuals or manufacturer data where licenses allow, with simple rulers and datum lines overlaid so proportions can be checked quickly. Key ranges such as wheelbase and track, canopy frame thickness, rotor disc and mast ratios, nacelle wall thickness, and door or landing gear clearances should be extracted and stated as bands rather than single numbers to preserve creative room while preventing drift. When a project is stylized, the packet still profits from real metrics by establishing believable limits that can be bent deliberately and consistently across a faction.

Teardown studies form the third pillar by revealing how things assemble, fail, and are serviced. A packet should include at least one sequence that deconstructs a relevant mechanism into modules with interfaces and fasteners labeled clearly. This might be a pushrod damper stack with rocker geometry and reservoir routing, a landing gear telescoping leg with bushings and locks, a tracked suspension bogie train with torsion arms and road wheels, or a fuel cell stack with tank saddles, regulators, and humidifiers. Each teardown image should live beside a small diagram showing the service path, the failure mode the game might depict, and the keep‑out volumes that rigging and physics must honor. This is where greeble grammar becomes engineering grammar, and it guards the project against pretty but unbuildable inventions.

Research ethics are not an appendix; they are part of the packet’s credibility. Every image should carry creator and source in its metadata, along with license notes and usage limits. Museums, bases, and private owners deserve respect and, when applicable, explicit permission for close‑ups and measurements. If the packet references proprietary drawings or paywalled content, it should record that the material is for internal study only and it should be transformed into original diagrams before any public‑facing use. Brand and trade dress look‑alikes should be abstracted into rule statements and geometric families rather than copied. The packet should contain a modest “no‑fly list” that warns against silhouettes and signatures that would land too close to a recognizable make or model.

A taxonomy makes the packet findable and reusable. Rather than a simple folder name, each packet should carry structured tags that describe role, class, power source, chassis type, suspension family, drivetrain layout, cooling strategy, cockpit pattern, livery zoning, lighting signature, and environment. These tags enable future you—or a teammate—to surface the right packet when another project needs a light scout hover, a heavy tracked hauler, or a tilt‑wing gunship. Inside the packet, a table of contents with stable section names means modeling, rigging, physics, VFX, audio, UI, materials, lighting, and marketing can jump directly to what concerns them. Even in a small indie setting where the same person wears many hats, the act of naming sections clarifies thinking and speeds iteration.

Specifications transform reference into commitments that other teams can act on. A research packet should graduate from raw images to a one‑page spec summary that states proportion bands for wheelbase, track, overall length and width, ride height, and ground clearances, as well as wing spans, rotor diameters, nacelle axes, or hover emitter spacing for air and field‑effect craft. It should declare target mass ranges, center of gravity height, and the location of primary hardpoints such as suspension pick‑ups, engine or motor mounts, battery or tank saddles, seat belt anchors, hinge posts, weapon or sensor pylons, and tow hooks. Where numbers are uncertain, the spec should provide a best‑fit band and identify who decides the final value and when. These values can be copied forward to orthos, cutaways, and callouts to reduce transcription errors.

Sound and motion references complete the sensory picture and are often neglected. A packet should pair video clips and audio recordings with short captions that state what the team should hear and see when the vehicle idles, launches, shifts, boosts, brakes, and absorbs bumps. For combustion machines that means intake drone, exhaust character, gear whine, and decel pops; for electric and hybrid machines it means inverter and motor harmonics, gear reduction tones, and the handoff between regen and friction braking. For aircraft and hovercraft it means rotor or fan beat, intake whistling, actuator clicks, and field coil hum if the fiction supports it. On the motion side, clips of suspension squat and rise, steering self‑centering, nacelle or nozzle gimbal, landing leg deploy and settle, and door and canopy timings give animation and physics targets to hit. The packet should tie these references to the same distance bands the camera will use so audio mixing and VFX sizing remain honest to gameplay scale.

The packet is most useful when it shows its working rather than hiding it. Orthographic tracings derived from photos should document the vanishing system used and the scale anchors chosen. Camera‑read boards should display the vehicle proxy at far, mid, and near distances under representative lighting and motion blur, with a sentence under each frame that states what the player must be able to identify. Cutaways should reconcile the exterior promise with interior truth by placing dense components where the silhouette and stance implied them. Exploded views should clarify assembly order and identify which modules are rigid, which articulate, and which are designed to break away under damage so destruction states do not improvise in conflict with design intent. Callouts should bind hinge arcs, recoil travel, and clearance envelopes to actual coordinates and hierarchy names so rigging and implementation remain synchronized.

Different studio scales change density but not purpose. In a small indie team, the packet can live as an evolving single document that starts as mood and ends as specification, with a simple change log noting proportion shifts, hardpoint moves, and material decisions. The same canvas can carry field photos at the top, tracings and teardowns in the middle, and a concise spec sheet and camera‑read frames at the end, ready for a direct handoff. In a AAA studio, packets should be versioned and split by consumer, with an art‑direction facing overview, a modeling and rigging technical pack with measured orthos and cutaways, a physics and handling pack with mass and CG estimates and kinematic ranges, and a presentation pack with sound and motion references for VFX, audio, and marketing. The taxonomy should let these pieces be searched and reused across projects without breaking their lineage.

A research packet is not done when it is pretty; it is done when it removes ambiguity. That means the thesis connects to rules, rules connect to measurements, and measurements connect to images and recordings that any teammate can use without a meeting. It means fieldwork is captioned with intent, blueprints are translated into ranges that match the game’s scale, teardown studies label interfaces and fasteners, ethics are visible in attribution and a no‑fly list, and sound and motion are treated as first‑class design materials. When you build packets this way, you speed concepting because choices are narrower, and you speed production because guesses disappear. The result is a library of trustable artifacts that let teams invent boldly within shared constraints and ship machines that look, move, and sound inevitable in your world.