“Need for Speed: Rivals” Livery Designs:
In Need for Speed: Rivals, I was given a lot of creative control and overall direction in regards to the look development for the vehicles. I created the overall aesthetic for a large percentage of the roster. Listed below are some of the cars, their inspiration and the final designs.
918 RSR. The Racing livery was based around Eibach branding, and made extensive use of 80′s neon hues against charcoal black. The Street livery is an homage to prior NFS game boss cars. Particularly around the original Most Wanted and Carbon eras.
Porsche 911 GT3
The Porsche 911 has long been the default sports car for the discerning gear head (petrol head). For good reason, and this particular car is the 911 GT3. The Racing livery, with Alpinestars branding is a classic take on the Porsche body lines. The Street livery or “Flat 6 Taxi” is self explanatory. The black and yellow “checkered cab” look.
SLS AMG
The big Merc’ may be retiring from production, but its impact upon the automotive world will be felt for years. The Racing livery pays homage to the F1 team from Mercedes in the color scheme, while the title sponsor is Recaro. For the Street livery, I took inspiration from the color of the E-Cell Prototype. Then splattered it in black paint and the character picked out in negative.
McLaren P1
The most breathtaking (performance wise) hybrid, in direct competition with the Porsche 918. The basic racing livery pays tribute to the cars’ UK creators, yet uses a lime green base color to contrast the black/charcoal elements of the car. The street livery was a bit of a stretch, given the nature, and price of entry of the car. Knowing that this car will be in extremely limited production, I had to guess at what someone with too much money would do to it. 🙂
Ferrari Enzo
For the Racing livery on this car, we kept it Japanese, with an old school Bride livery. Since the car was kept clean and monochromatic for the race look, I took it the other way for the Street livery. With Alpinestars branding, I used a charcoal base color, with neon green/yellow used to pick out detail, as well as the greenhouse. I also used a tire tread pattern, and some more splatter to apply pattern to the rest of the car. Using different levels of specularity, the car would be able to jump out at the user.
Ferrari 599 GTO
The 599 GTO is the hard version of Ferraris GT cruiser. Falken Tire was the chosen sponsor for this particular prancing horse, so the basics of the livery were predetermined. The blue/green, the door pattern. Working within that, and fitting it to the curves was self fulfilling. The street livery is where I got to cut loose a bit. Playing with colors, flashes, and splatter effects, I put together the green/white livery that you see below. Bits of techno graphics, mixed with organic shape from the splatter, blending between the white base coat, and the green striping below. Fun stuff.
Lamborghini Veneno
Batman doesn’t drive a Murcielago, or even an Aventador… Bruce Wayne would own a Veneno! The Racing livery for this car was a no brainer. The red and black of the classic Yokohama/Advan livery allowed me to play with the fantastic shapes that appear all over this car. It’s so fun to work with! For the Street livery, I pulled back a bit, and went with the heritage Gulf Racing colors (Blue and Orange hues) mixed with some white.
Lamborghini Aventador LP700-4
The big bull, the Aventador. Long had the Murcielago soldiered on as the big V12 bull in the stable. Now, the Aventador takes up the mantle. And what a beautiful replacement it makes! For the Racing livery here, I went with a tribute to an old school livery. The HKS racing livery adorns the mighty Lamborghini in powdery hues of pink and blue. On the opposite side of the coin, the Street livery is very subdued, with a highly saturated blue paint color, and black accent designs.
Ford Mustang
The Mustang race livery would be more at home in what was the American Le Mans series (Now the “United SportsCar Championship”). Whilst the street livery was an homage to the P-51 Mustang fighter plane. With a matte green body, and accents picked out in gloss red, the car featured USAF iconography, right down the pinup girl on the front wings. There’s a little drift influence going on as well, as there is a particular name in drifting that is literally the poster child for the Ford Mustang.
Ford GT
The Ford GT is easily one of the most beautiful car designs, of all time. The racing livery is Le Mans inspired, hearkening back to the original GT40 in design, with a modern sponsor and palette. Hankook tire branding features prominently on the door panels, while the orange hue is used to pick out design features on the fast Ford. In contrast to most of the race liveries, I chose to leave off a specific race number.
The street level livery for this car was a “Speed hunters” theme. I worked with the Speed hunters crew on the first year of their launch, while I was still an employee of the Need For Speed team. They’re a great crew, and have grown the site into a strong online automotive lifestyle presence. Blue Ford GT’s with white striping is always pretty sexy. The tone on tone “GT” stripes over the top of the car were to be a satin finish, on a gloss car.
Dodge Challenger SRT-8 392.
This car was to have 2 livery designs, but they liked one of them so much that they asked for a 3rd, so that they could use it for another tier. The racing livery here is more Formula Drift than any other race series. The 5Zigen branding is front and center, and the white/blue two tone works well against the visual bulk of the car.
The street level livery for this car was a “murdered out” or flat black with gloss black stripe design. In contrast to so many carbon fiber roof inserts, and carbon hoods, I decided to go with sticker bombing the entire roof, and the central hump in the white finished hood.
The third livery was originally the first “Racing” livery, and was NASCAR inspired, with the huge numbers, and manufacturer logos adorning it all over.
Chevrolet Corvette (C7 Stingray)
The newest Corvette model was always going to wear a yellow and black racing livery, there was little doubt of that. It’s the ambassador of the american sports car. The second livery was the “Street” livery, and it had to contrast it’s brash yellow brother. The design was to be somewhat understated. Minor graphics, and sponsor logos, to balance against the full on race visuals of the other livery.
BMW M3 GT-S.
This beastly incarnation of the M3 needed to have a “Racing” livery, so I developed a number of roughs with differing graphics, and the “Sparco” livery was selected to move forward. Perhaps because it looks somewhat like the old NFS: Most Wanted (The original), “hero car”. The second livery type was a “Street” livery. Something that would be somewhat subtle, but have enough flash to set it apart from the other M3’s roaming in the game. There are some subtle tone on tone graphics, paired with a blacked out hood and trunk/boot lid. An additional flourish is in the sticker bombs placed either side of the car.
Audi R8 V10.
The brief was the same through my run of cars. 1 Racing livery, and 1 Street livery. The plan was to allow players to choose a base color which would pair with the livery. The Racing livery contained elements that I carried over from previous installments of Need For Speed. The sponsors changed up, as NFS managed to snag the Michelin license (We could never lock that down for the series before). The Street livery, I wanted more of a Formula D feel. Something a bit more two toned, with the tone on tone German “Schnell!” (Faster!) theme on the doors, and a smattering of A-symmetrically placed and rotated sponsorship logos.
Aston Martin Vanquish.
My brief from Ghost was fairly simple: The car needed to have a “Racing” livery. So I developed 4-6 offerings ranging from classic to outrageous and the clean and classic feeling “Hankook” livery was selected to move forward. The second livery type was a “Street” livery. Something that would be along the lines of a “Gumball Rally” or other high end road rally. Given the English lineage of Aston Martin I went away and created a variety of proposals. We ended up with the classic WW2 “shark face”, and a few UK flags placed about over a BRG finish.
Designs from “Need For Speed: World”:
Koenigsegg CCX Elite edition.
Working hand in hand with supercar manufacturer, Koenigsegg, I designed a complete rebody of their CCX. I was very happy to have them approve my design on the first pass! Retaining only the original passenger compartment area, headlamps and tail lamps from the original car, everything else has been modified!
Chevrolet Camaro ZL1
For the next original “Elite” car, we selected the newest, most powerful, Camaro as a muscle car with potential to gauge interest in a new game mode for Need For Speed: World. Drag Racing! Unlike the CCX Elite, the ZL1 was designed to be somewhere between a hot rod, a NASCAR and a Hot Wheels.
Mitsubishi Eclipse GS-T
Around the second anniversary of Need For Speed: World, we had designed and built a new Elite! This car was made to bring the Elite level of tuning and design down to the price point of entry level players. The whole brief was “Elite for the Streets”. I designed the car to have a lot of firsts for Need For Speed: World. We added a tuner styled roof scoop, a Mitsubishi branded intercooler in the front bumper, and a polycarbonate window in the hood. The hood window allowed us to have the engine compartment modeled, and be visible to the players. On top of the heavy exterior styling, our lead modeler Vinod Raju took that next step, and added Mitsubishi branded sub-woofers and speakers. And to be just that one more step above, our audio engineer Joel Deziel added some audio that could be activated with a key press!
Dodge Viper ACR
We wanted to push into new territory for our next Elite, and selected the Dodge for the task. Not only featuring an aggressive makeover of the body, the car featured player activated lights and sirens, making it the first functional police car for the users.
McLaren F1
This would be the last Elite car to be designed and built for Need For Speed: World (The new developers are not creating any new content that I know of). Knowing that this car has a huge following, and a deep heritage, I took great care to retain the DNA of the original supercar design. That said an Elite car needs to set itself apart from the pack, both in performance and appearance.
Marussia B2
I designed a kit for the Russian designed and built super-car. However, due to licensing issues, the kit was only ever available with a specific in-game purchase. (The manufacturer had decided that they did not want to allow body modifications of the car, by the user. We ended up selling the car with the kit installed as a preset.
NFS: Rhino SUV
The following SUV’s were an experiment in not only cross promotion, but also in adding fictional vehicles to the stable of cars available in NFS: World.
We were approached by the Battlefield Heroes game team. They were interested in having some of our content in their game, in exchange for creating Battlefield themed content in our game. The Royals get a green camo patter, a roof mounted machine gun, and rounded features to their SUV. The Nationals get a more rigid angular design, with roof mounted rocket packs, and a monochrome color scheme.
The following body kits were never released to the public, but we had begun production on a number of body kits/modifications for existing cars, in order to give the users a deeper customization experience.
Lexus LF-A
This is an awesome machine, with a screaming V10. But we only had one body kit available when the car was released in game. To add to the options for the user, I designed my kit based upon Le Mans and Super GT series cars, with aggressive, functional aerodynamics.
Lamborghini Gallardo LP560-4 Spyder
With summer upon us, we were also set to release kits for our convertible supercars. Lamborghini had two cars at the top of our list. The first of which was the Gallardo Spyder. Featuring a widened track and aggressive replacement bumpers and skirts, the kit was more up market, rather than full on racing.
Lamborghini Murcielago LP640-4 Roadster
As one of the most raced cars in the game, we wanted to support the community with additional customization options.
This kit had to be aggressive, yet fit the image of a roadster.
Hummer H1
We also brought a military grade Hummer H1 into the game at one point. To support that, we built two body kits. The first of which was a hard top style kit, with aggressive bumpers, and running boards.
The second kit design was a Baja/rally influenced piece. The accessories really sell the look.
Below are samples of my work from previous projects. As the vehicle concept artist on the 2012 hit, Sleeping Dogs, there wasn’t a lot of time to research, design and review each new vehicle. I had roughly 3-4 days to design the vehicle. This included four plan views, and two 3/4 views, working with art direction and making changes based upon feedback from their legal department.
Asian Sports Car design
This design was to be a flagship sports car. It borrows heavily from major Japanese sports/super cars. The workflow for vehicles for this project required 2 perspective views as well as 4 plan view images. (The top view is included on a secondary sheet provided for the modellers.)
Modern Convertible design
This vehicle design was meant to mesh Asian/European roadster designs into one cohesive car. Elements of the Lotus Elise, Mazda MX-5 and Honda S2000 unite to create a clean roadster. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, this car was never realised as an in game model.
Classic Coupe design
Combining reference from the Jaguar E-Type, the Datsun Z cars, and other significant classic coupes, I really enjoyed creating this car. I would have liked to make this a gull winged coupe! Unfortunately, there was not going to be enough time for code to support such a feature, so standard doors were fitted.
City Car design
What’s an urban open world without a City car!!! Obviously borrowing heavily from the Smart, and even Japanese Kei cars, this was a fun design. It was ridiculously fun to drive in game.
Sport Bike design
Sport bikes are as fun to design as they are difficult! They contain so many exposed mechanical parts! That said, a bike, with minimal fairings and exposed frame looks SO COOL!
Sports Sedan design
Four doors aren’t the things to design. But designing a hot four door is fun. Taking cues from Jaguar, Lexus, Mercedes and even Cadillac, this sedan was a blast to come up with. *Note, for some 3/4 images I created low poly proxy meshes to check proportions and perspective.
Hyper Car design
Using Bugatti and Maserati as sources of inspiration, I was told to get close to the big 1000hp hyper car… But not close enough to get into trouble. What do you think? 🙂
Mid-Rear Sports Car
Going after something between a Porsche, a 350z, and maybe even some Z4, I put together this car to be sporty, and recognizable by its silhouette. The features are of decidedly Asian origin, in order to avoid legal issue. In the end, it was decided that we couldn’t get away with the overall shape, which is too bad. I love Porsche cars.
Hot Hatchback
This is another unused design. The concept was to be a cross pollination of all the European hot hatches, from fast Fords, to Peugeots, and even some of the Impreza WRX STi from Japan.
Asian Supercar
When we first started out designing for Sleeping Dogs, the goal was to retain most of the attributes of the real world cars, and only tweak them so that they were no longer easily recognizable. This explains how closely this concept resembles the Acura/Honda NSX. I incorporated touches from other Japanese sports cars, and modified the greenhouse.
Mike Hayes Design 
really nice works !