Turning A Nissan Skyline GTT34 Into A Mad Machine

3 Months
Dec 11, 2015
3 min read

On my second year of university, I had the pleasure of photographing Neil Hall's beautiful, white Nissan Skyline R34 GTT. The vehicle has been very well kept and is pretty much entirely stock which is something quite rare with these kinds of cars. I was very lucky to witness it in it's full glory.

The original plan was to model the vehicle over summer break with 3Ds Max using the photographic reference I took, along with a couple of blueprints. However, I had the opportunity of modifying the model and tune it accordingly for one of the second year Modules; Mechanical Asset Creation for Games.

The "only" requirements for the module was that the mechanical asset had to be designed to look like it could fit the Mad Max Universe whilst sharing its max tri-count with a character asset (60,000 tris).

"Being a quick and nimble vehicle, the skyline, with some modifications, would be the perfect car for life threatening situations." This is what I wrote in my proposal for the project and I still believe it! What can be better to have on your hands during an apocalypse that a reliable, fast and (not as nimble with huge wheels) easy to modify Japanese Import vehicle?

The design idea was to simply look at the Mad Max Universe, along with some "real life reference" (such as Mighty Car Mod's Mad Max) and make decisions within the universe's mindset.

I instantly knew I wanted a clean look for the car, (slightly because I didn't want to destroy my tutor's car) it felt right to leave most of the core shape intact and look at how the driver could have adapted it as time went along. The first major thing was obviously the wheels and how they would fit into the body.

It would be very difficult to do any off-road driving in a desert area with very low clearance, getting stuck in the sand isn't an option when you're getting chased down by bandits.

As such I cut the car's body to fit the huge Off-road wheels with huge suspension springs, rose the car's height so it didn't have any issues clearing dunes and welded in the side skirts to protect the wheels from impacts since they don't fit inside the body (as well as helping out with dust control).

For protection I added two steel beams, sharpened like blades at each end of the front skirt, as well as a bullbar to minimise damage from collisions and spikes on the rear spoiler so bandits have to think twice before lunging themselves onto the vehicle.

Since light is never enough, specially in a post apocalyptic situation with desert storms and dark nights I added a front high-beam LED strip (which is bound to last a lifetime) and a good old fashion rally car style halogen light beams on the roof which even though energy consuming, are incredibly handy at night.

Finally I decided to incorporate the exhaust pipes into the side skirts, both because I wanted to close off the floor of the chassis with aluminium diamond plated armour and to prevent sand from getting in, which is never a good idea.