Phlakes?
aaaayy it's my thing, thanks for the words yaomon.
Speaking of DDP, take a look at
the old CC of it, I haven't read through it in a while but IIRC there's some good stuff.
I've made a lot of spaceships in my time, and it wasn't until I started working on
this thing that I actually liked what I was drawing (and I still don't even like what you can see there, only really the newest enemies-
)
Those are all pretty okay, but they only got that way after doing several dozens that looked really ugly. What I've settled on at this point, for designing ships, is this (and note that this is entirely personal/subjective and what works for me might not work for you)-
- Scribble a bit with a general idea in mind (this one was "long thing with two things sticking out at the back", in keeping with this thread's phallic imagery)
- Flip it
- Refine it by eliminating large gaps and weird curves/angles (this also depends on the particular style you're going for, the ships for this game have lots of sharp angles and small details)
- Take a couple colors and start building shapes (the question probably on your mind now is "how do I know what shapes to build?", and the last section of this post will cover that)
- Keep doing that (one big thing to keep in mind here is that light colors come forward and dark colors go back, so you want to use that fact to create depth)
- Keep doing that more until it's done (I've run out of things to say)
This one didn't turn out so great (probably because I made it in like five minutes just now) but it gets the point across. A lot of people prefer line art, but for me, I've found that this way feels more like I'm discovering shapes inside the silhouette and/or building it up and out like clay, as opposed to having to draw every shape directly from my head, which usually ends up stiff and awkward (okay this phallic thing was a bad idea)
Anyway, aside from all that I have two big suggestions, which also apply to pretty much everything anyone could ever make (honestly you could just ignore the rest of this post and just worry about this part)-
- Look at tons of references and see how those ships are designed, from their basic silhouette to each individual panel and detail, and ask yourself why it was made that way, even if the answer is "I don't know"
- practice practice practice practice practice practice
Three of the most important things in making spaceships (which I've learned after many years of making spaceships) are general design knowledge (i.e. what shapes look good together), 3D spacial reasoning, and experience. Those are all things that you'll naturally acquire over time through the aforementioned references and practice practice practice practice practice practice. I didn't mean for this post to be this long so I'll stop now.
