The Driver | 6th Street Bridge

This 3D recreation of Downtown Los Angeles's iconic 6th Street Bridge was created for The Driver, an AR-animated comic series by Chris Hung.

For this project, my role was to create a modular bridge environment for use in The Driver's comic backgrounds, merchandise, and 3D augmented reality animation sequences. As an Angeleno myself, I was very excited to model a real-world location in my home city, and loved getting to see it come to life!

Using client-provided photographs and Google Street View references, I built the bridge's modular pieces in Maya, keeping assembly efficient while still staying accurate to the real-world location. Then, to match The Driver's stylized toon-shaded aesthetic, I developed custom tiling material sets by combining photo textures, Photoshop edits, and hand-painted details. These seamless textures were used as atlases, allowing plenty of variation without losing texture image quality.

The final environment was rendered in Arnold and was later used in both still-image shots and animated AR car sequences.

My responsibilities: Reference study, modular environment modeling, UV layout, material creation/texture painting, general scene assembly.
Software used: Maya, Photoshop, Arnold.

Assets not created by me include the bridge's LED lighting setup, road textures, and road studs, which were made by Chris Hung and The Driver team. Sky HDRIs are from PolyHaven.

All renders on this ArtStation page, except the client poster, are my own. All final renders appearing in The Driver comic and merchandise are by Chris Hung.