ETS 2 Coaches: How SCS Builds a Long-Distance Coach

A coach is not just a long truck. That is the main lesson from SCS Software’s latest Coaches update, where senior vehicle artist Vitalii talks about what it takes to bring a long-distance coach into Euro Truck Simulator 2.

Vitalii is responsible for the whole visual side of the vehicles: exterior and interior modelling, textures, materials and animations. He also works with the production and research teams so the coaches match their real counterparts.

He went to see the coaches himself

Vehicle artists at SCS normally work from photos and scans collected by a dedicated reference team. This time Vitalii travelled to see the real coaches in person. The photos SCS shared show the team in high-visibility vests around a white Scania Touring, photographing door seals, light clusters and the driver’s area up close. For an artist, that kind of access saves weeks of guessing.

The tools

The workflow will sound familiar to anyone who follows vehicle modding:

• Blender for modelling
• Substance Designer for his own tileable textures
• Photoshop for texture editing
• Maya with SCS’s custom exporters to get assets into the engine
• Marmoset Toolbag now and then for light maps

The hard part: all that space

Vitalii has worked on truck interior reworks before, but coaches are a different scale. A coach cabin is a long, open room full of seats, curtains, luggage racks and windows, and every bit of it costs performance. The team had to find new ways to keep the detail high while holding polygon counts down. Animations also needed a rethink, because doors, mirrors and other moving parts on a coach do not work like their truck equivalents.

What players should notice

He says the team paid particular attention to the atmosphere inside the passenger area, and that small details there are meant to make the space feel lived in. His bigger point is about pace. In his view, coaches will push people to slow down, look at the scenery and see the ETS 2 map from a different angle than the one they know from a truck cab.

That fits what we know so far. Coaches look set to reward smooth, unhurried driving, which is a very different mindset from chasing a delivery deadline.

Source: SCS Software blog. Images and video: SCS Software.