City Bus

While on my path to familiarizing myself with Blender3D, I worked on various personal projects to learn the ins and outs of the software and 3D modeling in general. One of the smaller projects I worked on was this city bus model and animation.

Inspired by the city buses of Berlin, I put together this model and then made a small scene featuring two buses driving by. I tried my hand at using freestyle outlines and toon shaders for this model. My intention was to create more of a drawn look for this particular project.

Idea:

The idea to model and animate the bus came after working on some of my other larger projects. I wanted to pivot a little and do something a bit different from what I had done before. I always wanted to make something more grounded and pedestrian in nature like a bus. I took a lot of the design language and styling from the city buses used in Berlin to create this model, including the yellow livery.

Process:

Like with every other project up to this point, everything started with modeling in Blender3D.

It took me some time to get the dimensions and features of the bus to my liking. My idea was to create a kind of low-poly style model that could be inserted into simple-looking scenes. As I continued working on the model, I had the idea of trying out toon shaders and freestyle line art to add a more drawn character to the scene.

After getting the main model of the bus completed, I focused on the road scene and streetlights to put the model in context. I then made a simple animation that could be looped and replayed on social media sites like Instagram.

Conclusion:

This project functioned like a bridge in my modeling journey. Prior to this, a lot of my work focused on highly fictional and speculative concepts, but I wanted to try my hand at something more real. Making this simple bus helped my try out new techniques and flesh out ideas that prepared me for other projects down the road.

I definitely feel emboldened to tackle this model again and do more with it later on. As I get better at making scenes, I can definitely see a place for this model in them.