GR#115 - Space Ships - Topdown

[Lachie Dazdarian]

Also, sorry for barging in, but try to shade wings with lower tones or higher tones, depending if they are closer or further to the screen compared with the center cockpit part. Another way to add the third dimension into the design.

[PypeBros]

First thank you for your annotation. Yes my particles affect every color they overlap, so if the ship emits a trail and i let the particles overlay, the booster's colors are affected, too.

But there's more than just "where the particles go": a real beam of energy would scatter light in all directions, including towards the ship. And then, it makes some part of the ship lighter than others. For instance, the "legs" of your ship: they'll get more light from the rear of the ship than from the front, so you should shade them to the opposite of what they currently look like.

My intention was to create a spider-like ship. If you know it, you realize the 8 legs, the head and the abdomen. The newer version points the shape out very well.

That's still a bit too subtle, imho. Those "legs" tubes are currently masked by the large wings that surround the ship. Maybe if you had the "legs" going futher onto the ship, it'd be more obvious. You could also make the abdomen wider than the "head".

Now of course, it all depends on whether you want subtle allusion or immediate recognition.

[Szyu]

So here is the new Huntershape.


I played with the colors because I really couldnt get myself to be happy. So what do you think? And I think the spider shapes comes out clearly here?

[Kazuya Mochu]

if the ships are going to be rotating in game and you don't want to make every rotation sprite (which I understand), maybe you could paint them as if the light was coming from above, in wich the surfaces that are parallel to the camera plane are brighter, and the more perpendicular they are, the darker.

so a slanted surface would be sort of half way between the two. other then that you could also gradually darken the parts that are further away from the light.

[Grimsane]

yeah sorry I didn't clarify that much, and got slack with my edit.
something more like this and some little diagrams roughly showing most likely interpretations in 3D due to the shading, rather lazy but hopefully it illustrates the point. like everyone else has also commented if you want to make something seem higher on the Z axis then you should use lighting cues to imply it, like I tried somewhat on the left most, and illustrated next to is the intended effect.


and that's more what I meant about the wing tip guns, actually spriting guns, and I could see it was meant to look somewhat arachnid so to you're merit you did convey that somewhat, one suggestion to push that though is to have the cockpit where the spiders head would be, not on the thorax, as it'd break the parallels to spiders slightly

new design doesn't look bad, is it the player ship or fleets of enemies? if you have different models and variations upgrades, you could try doing several of each theme, using something like bigger vessels to represent stronger variations. also you have quite a lot of banding still present especially on the 'legs', other than that seeing a marginal improvement over your first iteration

[Szyu]

@Grimsane:
About the weaponry and the question of player ship or not:
Because the game is meant to be an Asteroids-like, i thought it could happen to become boring, if the player hasnt some points he could achieve. So I thought of different ship types the player can unlock (And other things too of course). This is why there isnt a "Players ship" oder "Enemys Ship".
It is the same with the weaponry. Different weapons are going to be unlockable. My idea was to render the weaponry independently, because the player has the opportunity to modify the ship classes. Each ship has Weapon slots, where a Turret of a weapontype can be placed. So this is why I dont have any weapons on the sheets.

 And its the same with the engines. There are many Engine types with different trail colors. The screenshot I posted above was with a red trail. But there can also be a green, yellow, purple and so on.

Im glad you like the improvement

@Kazuya:
That is what i am trying but I dont have the knowledge yet, so I have to experiment a little bit more

@Grimsane again:
In my opinion, there is isnt a marginal improvement, but rather a vast one

[Szyu]

I tried to use everything I know yet to create a new graphic. So this is how I tried it and the result:


Feedback would be kind.

[Kazuya Mochu]

it does give the viewer a better sense of form and volumes! I like where it is going!

[pistachio]

Edit (of one of the other ships) utilizing the tips mentioned:



By the way this seems like good ref material, and looking at that, you might wanna try out hue variation/more values on the latest ship seeing as it's probably made of metal.

Keep it up man, thread gets more awesome with every post!

[Grimsane]

great improvement and nice to see you utilizing what you've learnt some quick things I'd suggest to improve it would be



to try eliminate the banding on the round parts, try something along these lines, style dither to ease the transition of your colour count, also just boosted the contrast slightly to emphasis the metallic nature of the vessel. I know it's still a WiP but still need to emphasis you should try avoid banding, also a couple structural suggestions in the edit too, and those pipe like features looked strange as a support so I suggest some cross pillars of some type like hinted in the edit

keep it up, it's great to see you're art evolving so rapidly

Pistachio's edit is really exemplifies the type of approach to shading that works and reinforces far more realism, which partly comes from doing away with inner outlines all together and would be one approach to keep in mind, and also good example of reinforcing top down perspective with the flow of lines and lighting for the most part, I think parts like toward the engine look a bit confused in regard to the perspective but I think that is due to attempting to stay faithful to your initial design, also note there is quite a bit of banding but it all works rather well, and is an example of acceptable/effective banding.

hope you don't mind, I probably could've edited the original to show somewhat the gist of my crit regarding what I think is clashing but I couldn't resist the chance to edit something this lovely