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[Erick Doe]

really nice turtorial ,but....
i made a thread for this...
look for the spriters thread with   symbol.
it would be really nice if you could submit it there.

Well, like I stated earlier. This is not a tutorial per se. It is just a "let's draw" of a spaceship. And I had no idea when it would be finished. Anyhoo, I'll probably start working on a new ship right away.

[TheHappyFace]

Well, like I stated earlier. This is not a tutorial per se. It is just a "let's draw" of a spaceship. And I had no idea when it would be finished. Anyhoo, I'll probably start working on a new ship right away.

ow sorry that mistake. me and not completly reading stuff......
still it would be really nice if you could make a turtorial out of those pictures 

[Erick Doe]

Well, like I stated earlier. This is not a tutorial per se. It is just a "let's draw" of a spaceship. And I had no idea when it would be finished. Anyhoo, I'll probably start working on a new ship right away.

ow sorry that mistake. me and not completly reading stuff......
still it would be really nice if you could make a turtorial out of those pictures 

That's not a bad idea, HappyFace. I might just do that.

[Erick Doe]

I just love how it retained its original shape! 

[K-64]

 

Holy crap that looks awesome. I daresay, with a few tweaks to the shading, it could fit right in with a TriTach ship and nobody would notice

[Erick Doe]

Holy crap that looks awesome. I daresay, with a few tweaks to the shading, it could fit right in with a TriTach ship and nobody would notice

Thanks K-64. I did take a good look at David's original concept art to see how he came about creating his finalized projects. I decided to follow a somewhat similar method and I think I came about similar results. Though it still needs work if it is to look anything like the original game's artwork.

[Erick Doe]

Creating a little mod for the ship. It is nearly done.

Spoiler

[close]

The Mercury-class Bulk Cruiser is part warship, part cargoship. It was designed and constructed from stolen data by a number of rogue Tri-Tachyon engineers. These engineers were lead astray by the vast fortunes that could be made in the civilian sector. The Mercury would be the first in a series of commercial combat craft.

At first glance it seems to take after the Aurora-class Cruiser, though it can mount significantly less weapons. Its flux capacity is also less refined and as a result it can only bring up its shields across 280 degrees. It is also somewhat slower. However, on the up side the Mercury can haul a lot more cargo and fuel and is both externally and internally reinforced with thicker deckplates and sturdier bulkheads.

[Erick Doe]

As promised, a tiny mod that allows you to take the Mercury out for a spin. 

Download

[Archduke Astro]

Superbly done, Erick!

This is a highly inspirational thread. It should serve very well for modders who are indecisive about taking pixels into their own hands and bending them to their will. I especially appreciate your step-by-step explanation of the graphical workflow.

[Sproginator]

Superbly done, Erick!

This is a highly inspirational thread. It should serve very well for modders who are indecisive about taking pixels into their own hands and bending them to their will. I especially appreciate your step-by-step explanation of the graphical workflow.

Indeed

[Erick Doe]

Superbly done, Erick!

This is a highly inspirational thread. It should serve very well for modders who are indecisive about taking pixels into their own hands and bending them to their will. I especially appreciate your step-by-step explanation of the graphical workflow.

Indeed

Thanks guys!

[Erick Doe]

Started working on a destroyer.

First the outlines. Notice the hammer-like extention at the front. This ship will have enough mass to ram other ships and push them out of the way:


Coloured in the ship's parts:

[Erick Doe]

Mercury Demonstration Video

[Erick Doe]

A helpful quote from David on the Mercury and drawing ships in general:

Oh, boy. There's an awful lot that can be said and I sure as heck do a lot more than standard pixel-art pixel pushing. It's important to know how to use the full range of tools available - pixel brushes, soft brushes, selections, very careful use of dodge/burn and the various colorization and adjustment tools, vector shapes and lines and the effects that can go on them, etc. Plus a broad swath of general art skills - composition & colour use especially.

Definitely read everything here: http://androidarts.com/art_tut.htm (And actually I suggest you read everything on his webpage [ http://androidarts.com/ ] because buried within all the thoughts and designs is a ton of great art advice. Especially have a look at the ship section on this page: http://androidarts.com/spaceconquest/gamedesign.htm

I've pulled up your ship in Photoshop and I'll just list some thoughts that come up.

- I see you pushing dark lines to true black far too readily. On the 'raised' portions of the ship the dark lines should only be relatively dark and may actually be a midtone. It's really important to get a feel for how a colour will look next to another colour -- mid-tone blues in a field of light cyan will read like near-black in a dark gray field.

- Likewise, I see you push shading toward light tones without a good appreciation for their effect on the overall composition. Using the full range from light cyan to dark black everywhere equally makes the sprite look both flat and too contrasty.

- It looks like you used a sharpen filter/tool a bit too heavily. If I want to lessen the sharpening effect, I'll copy the layer, run the sharpen filter, then put it at like 50% transparency then flatten it back down; it's like half of a sharpen filter. But I usually do that only to certain sections of the sprite and I'll often just touch up with the sharpen too set to a brush.

- It looks like you haven't used per-pixel transparency around the edges of the ship; it's just black pixels. This should be a bit softer, though not uniformly softened (as that'll just look blurry). Some rounder parts need more anti-aliasing than other harder parts, and it also depends on how sharp you want certain parts of the ship to appear. Antennas will often have a lot more pixel-jankery that breaks some of the rules I otherwise use on hull edges.

- The airbrushed shading is erratic. To get really fine control, you have to use selections as masks or just do the shapes in vector, lock transparency, and be very mindful of your use of an airbrush to give some shading over the ship. There's ... a lot to be said for various methods of how to do this and it'd probably take it's own blog post.

I guess in general just look very closely at the art I've done for Starfarer; the sprites are all there! I do some weird stuff with small-scale painting that few people really do much of, it's true, but a lot of it is just subtle shading over careful use of shapes. It's not like I can just sit down and draw a perfect circle or arc of hull! That's totally a circular selection or shape made with the pen tool.

Not sure how useful any of that is because, honestly, when I draw I'm pulling from my entire body of knowledge with this stuff, many different techniques, and it's taken me years to learn how to do it. I really ought to do a blog post or series of posts for the Fractal Softworks blog on all this.

... hope it helps a bit though. I recommend those links I gave especially.
And good luck with your spaceship-drawing!

Regards,
David Baumgart

[Hyph_K31]

The 'hammer-ship' (how does Mokarran sound for its name? part of the hammerheads latin name) already seems like a ship that would only be used by the player, with that ram.