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[Orikson]

Does this get rid of this 'noise' problem?

Yes. With its streamliners fined tuned to its magnetic propulsion drive. Hook it up with a matter dissipator system to propel air (and any other matter smaller than a station) in front of it away and you'll have a silent slipstream.

Warning: Driving into another ship is highly unadvisable. The ship may rip the other apart but risk of being caught in the follow up explosion is still present.

Disclaimer: Silent capabilities of this hull only applies to its own inner systems and in-built weapons. Further modificatiom without supervision of the company will result in: explosion, subsequent injury and you being fired.

Thank you for listening on <manufacturer name here> safety briefing of the <hull name here>.

[Ryxsen1421]

Yes. With its streamliners fined tuned to its magnetic propulsion drive. Hook it up with a matter dissipator system to propel air (and any other matter smaller than a station) in front of it away and you'll have a the silent slipstream.

Warning: Driving into another ship is highly unadvisable. The ship may rip the other apart but risk of being caught in the follow up explosion is still present.

Disclaimer: Silent capabilities of this hull only applies to its own inner systems  and in-built weapons. Further modificatiom without supervision of the company will result in: explosion, subsequent injury and you being fired.

Thank you for listening on <manufacturer name here> safety briefing of the <hull name here>.

Hehe, that's not what I meant tho'. but still, I enjoyed reading that with a certain accent. thanks for the briefing I guess?

[whatdoesthisbuttondo]

Some WIP for a faction mod, camouflage in space  

The being flat part is intentional, lore-wise the ships are rather functional, primarily military designs engineered for
easy mass production.

They'll probably get a couple of "modernization program"  alterations as well that each add minor features to the same basic
design, like for example the various combat value improvements the soviet T-72 has seen over the years.

This one is a mainline combat frigate.

Oh and yes, the camouflage isn't only because it somewhat fits the theme, but also because it conveniently hides me
being horrible at spriting  

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Tartiflette]

If it wasn't for the black outline that would be a very decent sprite, so good job already. I get a strong D.S. Tech vibe from it, which isn't bad either. (most image links are dead but there is a download available in the very last post of the thread)

[whatdoesthisbuttondo]

Thanks for the feedback Tartiflette, getting outlines right has given me a lot of trouble indeed, I have it all in separate layers but haven't worked out a good enough technique yet,
I'll keep working on it though 

Thanks for the DSTech link btw, I didn't know that mod yet, but that is pretty close to the overall design style I had in mind, very useful for getting some inspiration.

[Tartiflette]

But vanilla ships do not have any black outlines, if you want to match that style you should get rid of them altogether!

[whatdoesthisbuttondo]

Yea, outline is probably the wrong term, I'm not really an expert in the field. What I was aiming for is that "fade to shadow" type
effect that vanilla has on the Astral for example.

Guess I made a mistake with setting up my layers, I started "filling" the outline, and so it became part of the shape instead of
just an orientation, and I'm missing a proper "base color" layer.

I've tried a couple different approaches to fix it, but not with good results yet. Guess I'll have to fix my other layers by pixel
painting and make sure to avoid that mistake in the future.

[whatdoesthisbuttondo]

Another attempt, with a new color layer. Guess it is technically better now, still not really happy with how it turned out, overall kinda more blurry than the first one, and the shape doesn't come out as good in game. Turns out the camouflage makes dodge/burn rather difficult to get it convincing.

On the plus side, I fixed my layer setup, so I can now rework it easily until I get a good result.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Tartiflette]

I know it is a popular method, but I would advise against using dodge and burn. they are destructive tools that compress the luminosity on either side of the range. Meaning using both on the same patch of a sprite will create banding in the values. A single luminosity layer would be preferable, or even better a normal layer with subtle changes in the color between shadows and highlights.

You can check my Paintjob Tutorial for a few spriting tricks.

[whatdoesthisbuttondo]

Hah, thanks for the reminder. I knew that guide already, but reading it yet again and it kinda dawned on me that I was treating my camo paintjob as base material, and the results were always poor.

So I added another layer below for "base material", kinda light grey, brush-painted my shadows and highlights on top of that in two extra layers. Even just adding the paintjob as simple overlay yielded much better results compared to my earlier attempts, I'll have to play with this technique a little more when I got a couple hours.

Thank you so much for your advice (and tutorial), really appreciate it.

[Tartiflette]

No problem, glad to hear you are making progress.

[King Alfonzo]

No replies for a little over two weeks!? Obscene!

Currently working on a mining / scavenger faction, who use dodgy (but cheap) ships. Here's a WIP of the 'cockroach', which is a buffalo analogue made up of a solid core, with lots of cargo bits bolted on, then cut-up asteroids bolted on top of that. Very sturdy, decent cargo capacity, and very low supply consumption, but ungodly slow both in the battle and campaign layers.



I've only really done the top left-hand of the boat, but there are a few things I don't like:

-The 'asteroid plate' texture and colour is wrong; still working on making it look 'sheared' down.
-Also want to make the asteroid plate look and feel more 'bolted on', hence all the structure joists everywhere.
-The colour needs less brown unless it's paint.
-The cockpit needs redoing
-Backbone structure needs broadening
-the MAIN thing that's bugging me is the cargo containers on the right. I wanted to make it look like they literally took modern day cargo containers, and stuck metal banding over it to keep it there. But for me it looks...wrong.

Any thoughts?

[Orikson]

No replies for a little over two weeks!? Obscene!

Currently working on a mining / scavenger faction, who use dodgy (but cheap) ships. Here's a WIP of the 'cockroach', which is a buffalo analogue made up of a solid core, with lots of cargo bits bolted on, then cut-up asteroids bolted on top of that. Very sturdy, decent cargo capacity, and very low supply consumption, but ungodly slow both in the battle and campaign layers.



I've only really done the top left-hand of the boat, but there are a few things I don't like:

-The 'asteroid plate' texture and colour is wrong; still working on making it look 'sheared' down.
-Also want to make the asteroid plate look and feel more 'bolted on', hence all the structure joists everywhere.
-The colour needs less brown unless it's paint.
-The cockpit needs redoing
-Backbone structure needs broadening
-the MAIN thing that's bugging me is the cargo containers on the right. I wanted to make it look like they literally took modern day cargo containers, and stuck metal banding over it to keep it there. But for me it looks...wrong.

Any thoughts?

Maybe make the asteroid plate similar to how Ahriman's Association ships look like?

It looks perculiarly... brown, that's for sure. I can see the reasons why. Maybe a greyish brown colour scheme?

As for the containers, you could probably change it to grey containers like some factions have (Neutrino is an example) or retain the normal colouring (atgument here is that in order for conventional bulk transport and quick runs, the containers have to match conventional containers to reduce suspicions and load up quickly. Maybe something like how the Xanthus-class of SCY is described.).

[HELMUT]

-The 'asteroid plate' texture and colour is wrong; still working on making it look 'sheared' down.
-Also want to make the asteroid plate look and feel more 'bolted on', hence all the structure joists everywhere.

I tried fairly recently the whole "asteroid plate" idea, and it's a very tricky to get it right, even more so on a small, destroyer sized ship. Ideally, you'd want to finish the metallic hull and then add the rocks on top of it. The Condor, both old and new versions, have easy to kitbash armor plates you can borrow, the Prometheus could be useful as well, especially for that curved prow. After the hull is done, you can try to strap some small asteroids on it, tweak the opacity on the edges, plus some shading... This isn't going to be easy though.

Also, you'll have to get rid of that white background at some point too.

[King Alfonzo]

Maybe make the asteroid plate similar to how Ahriman's Association ships look like?

It looks perculiarly... brown, that's for sure. I can see the reasons why. Maybe a greyish brown colour scheme?

As for the containers, you could probably change it to grey containers like some factions have (Neutrino is an example) or retain the normal colouring (atgument here is that in order for conventional bulk transport and quick runs, the containers have to match conventional containers to reduce suspicions and load up quickly. Maybe something like how the Xanthus-class of SCY is described.).

Wasn't really aiming for the Ahriman's or Helmut's Asteroid ships - those are ships that are converted asteroids. This ship has gotten an asteroid, mined/sheered it down to be armour like, then bolted onto the ship.

The brown is too strong, I agree. I will be using it for paint details, however.

...I might use containers like that. Right now trying to do something stupidly low-tech (like modern day containers) seems a bit wrong (and namely I don't think I'll sprite them in).

I tried fairly recently the whole "asteroid plate" idea, and it's a very tricky to get it right, even more so on a small, destroyer sized ship. Ideally, you'd want to finish the metallic hull and then add the rocks on top of it. The Condor, both old and new versions, have easy to kitbash armor plates you can borrow, the Prometheus could be useful as well, especially for that curved prow. After the hull is done, you can try to strap some small asteroids on it, tweak the opacity on the edges, plus some shading... This isn't going to be easy though.

Also, you'll have to get rid of that white background at some point too.

Probably should have built from the ground up, but I was going off an earlier sketch I had done. I was also aiming to do a ship that had not been kit bashed, apart from specific details (hardpoints, the door, the engines when I get to them). Otherwise I would have gone off my converted 'explodable' condor:

Spoiler

[close]

Yeah, the white background is because I'm working on it in brief minutes I'm free at work, on paint, instead of doing it professional like. I can fix up the white later at home.