The brief from the team lead was “Food truck, but set in the 1900s.” To ground the design in historical reference, I gathered images of early market carts and street vendor stalls, I also spent some time in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 looking how they built their carts and wood furniture.
My goal was to reinterpret the idea of a modern food truck into a more primitive state. I approached this by designing a normal market stall with wheels mounted on the sides and foldable support legs that allow it to shift between two states, a stable market setup and a movable wheelbarrow-like configuration. This helped sell the idea of a moving food vendor while keeping the design believable for the period.
Textured and Wireframe
Shader Setup
Original Shader Example
Textured Static Mesh
Building
Building the asset was fairly straightforward. Most of it was created from simple boxes with mirror and bevel modifiers
The more challenging aspects were the wheel and the folding leg mechanism. The wheel was constructed primarily using Array modifiers, and while the modeling process itself was not particularly hard, achieving the look I wanted while keeping the geometry optimized required some iteration to avoid unnecessarily raising the polycount.
The folding mechanism for the legs required more experimentation. Since I couldn’t find a suitable historical reference, I designed the system myself. The idea was inspired by a locking mechanism I noticed at my gym, which seemed mechanically simple enough that it could plausibly have been built with the tools and technology available at the time.
