Gif compression sucks, but here's a little show off of my attempt at water flow materials.

Another angle of their running animation. Hopefully it reads better than the side view.

There might be other types or more variety in stats later if I am confident I can balance it all, but I have to make the base systems first so keeping everything within few categories hopefully helps with that.

Run - Gets a dash, speed up, handling down. Simple.
Fly - Gets 1-2 extra jumps, higher platforming, cross gaps easier.
Crash - Breaks obstacles. Hits nearby racers harder.
Shoot - Can shoot various triggers to open paths. Can hit other racers from afar without items. Slowest but best acceleration.

The current plan is for all characters to be roughly the same in stats within 1 of 4 types.
Run, Fly, Crash, and Shoot.
Ideally, with only 4 types, balance will be simpler with less of a severe difference in whatever meta forms. Tho making 3-4 types of shortcuts will make tracks harder to keep fair.

Alright last gif, this one is just a funny dance + turnaround I did to get used to the rig for this one.

Mind the flashing lights perhaps, this one shows off the face textures available. Due to size limits I had to make this one pretty quick, so apologies if it's hard to look at.

The treads can be driven too by rotating a bone which animates the texture.

This is a closeup of the can movement, the loop isn't perfect because of my recording but I think it still gets the point across.

This gif shows it actually vending a drink and offering it. I had to put some bones in the rows of snacks as well as a bone on the coil to rotate it and an additional bone on the front most snacks so they can move independently. I think it came out pretty well for my skill level.

This gif shows the main talk animation.

The next two are for the talk animations. This one shows how it's arms pop out from the sides.

I wish it were easier to do all the Gifs in one post, maybe I need a thing to combine gifs or something idk.

This last Gif showcases the Expressions and Texture Set slider for changing outfits. I'm using a set of driver bones to move the UVs using the shader.
The Face Selector object can be hidden or otherwise shrunk to a very small size and hidden inside the model when not needed.