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[banano of doom]

sup, FS
did you miss the old good Elysium?

[AxleMC131]

sup, FS
did you miss the old good Elysium?

Heh. Looks a bit fragile, and could use some cleaning up (and again, hiding of the very obvious Aurora bridge there) but otherwise a neat ship.

[banano of doom]

Heh. Looks a bit fragile, and could use some cleaning up (and again, hiding of the very obvious Aurora bridge there) but otherwise a neat ship.

better?
and it's supposed to be fragile.
but, compared to the original, it's kinda fat

[Drokkath]

I'm no sprite artist but I can kitbash things in my own way. I have this rather unused clunker since .8 came out when I was busy unredacting the redacteds for myself.



Not much to look at even when I look at it. Symmetry is intentional but the color scheme and overall odd angular areas are not that much. Good robust super-mortar firing ripper in battle but otherwise a derelict and dormant beastly slab with potential of giving maximum frontal assault fire barrage upon re-activation. I still like it, I just don't find myself using it due to its rather one-dimensional focus. More of a fan of ships I can use as polymaths.

-snip-

Nice colors! Not a fan of anything luddic as far as lore and factions go but I do like the green color they use. Especially on those ships, gives them this vibe of representing a thick life-abundant jungle planet.

As far as designs of them go. I like that beige/desert-colored frigate the most.

[MajorTheRed]

@ King Alfonzo :
Thanks for your advices, really appreciate it. It really helps toupgrade sprites.
A question a little bit odd, but how do someone "grebble" in a good way? Any time I try, it seems that they pop to much in my face and I only see pixel after that...

[AxleMC131]

A question a little bit odd, but how do someone "grebble" in a good way? Any time I try, it seems that they pop to much in my face and I only see pixel after that...

"... how do someone "grebble" in a good way?"

Well, I'm sure MesoTronik would have something much more helpful to say, but the short answer is "It isn't easy."  

[King Alfonzo]

@ King Alfonzo :
Thanks for your advices, really appreciate it. It really helps toupgrade sprites.
A question a little bit odd, but how do someone "grebble" in a good way? Any time I try, it seems that they pop to much in my face and I only see pixel after that...

It's something of an acquired skill that requires patience.

For an example, I'll have a random stab at that hound-combo sprite you made. This isn't what I think you should do with it - just an example of how to greeble. First, apply a dark colour to the region you're going to greeble.

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Then draw random lines and shapes with a 2 pixel paintbrush tool in a midrange colour to produce pipes or maybe substructure - you don't know at this point. Just keep the shapes and ideas in your head. For inspiration, look at HELMUT's sprite junkyard, Tiangdong ships or D-class ships from the game.

I need to stress this - use a paintbrush, not a pencil. If you use a pencil, it looks very pixelly - the use of the paintbrush helps reduce this. Further, aim to use the eye-dropper tool here instead of making up a new colour - just grab a colour from somewhere else on the sprite, and use that one. Helps keep the colours uniform.

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Then highlight the shapes you just drew, thinking about what each of these shapes are, and what they could be. Struts? Pipes? Underlying machinery?

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Then apply a dark colour, to see if you can make these shapes you're thinking of pop out, or make entirely new shapes using the dark colour.

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Yes, the greeble may be ruined - at several points you will ruin the greeble. But this is a process of refinement. Just apply dark, midrange and light colours over and over and over again, adding in details you might like, then drawing over them when a new idea comes. In this case, I think "No, wait, maybe there should be an understructure, like a ship structure underneath the armour layer..."

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...then I change my mind a bit, going through with a darker colour and make some plates and gaps...

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I don't really like that, but I do kind of like making the engine more exposed...

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...and then I think that the front can be encased in substructure (like before) while the back is more exposed engine...

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I just refine over and over, until I find a sort of structure I like. I then do the standard touch-ups as if I was doing a normal sprite.



It's still not perfect, but you get the idea. Just keep going, over and over, backing out to an unzoomed view and wonder if it looks alright, and do not be afraid to start over - just make sure you paint over what you've done previously, as sometimes greebles can just magically form when you do that. Hope this helps.

[Tartiflette]

Here is a pretty good and thorough tutorial on ship design and greeble:

http://androidarts.com/spaceships/spaceship_design.htm

It should answer all of your questions.

[Drokkath]

As far as I'm concerned with ship design(s). I'm no stranger to it as I've built quite a few ships in Starmade and KSP. Picturing a ship design in my mind is as easy as making a cup of tea.

The only major aspect I don't share with majority of people is that I personally don't really like having greebled areas on a ship, only hull pattering though. I prefer a ship that is a closed-cockpit/closed-bridge (think Battlestar Galactica's CIC room but instead of a map table there's only a single and dedicated pilot seat and a lot of monitoring screens from external but heavily protected cameras and overall it's kinda like the Space Jockey's pilot room.) -heavily armored beast that has no visible external thrusters or visible engines and instead uses something much more alien and powerful means to fly around. Propulsion systems such as in X-Com's alien ships, Elite's Thargoid ships, Farscape's Moya, Alien's Space Jockey's "Derelict" ship, Stargate's (1994) Ra's pyramid ship and the list goes on.

After all, flying in the depths of space there is that risk of getting into unintentional shooting gallery areas that are introduced by the nature of the Universe itself.
And as far as SS' ships go (both default and mod-default ships) I'm not as much bothered by the heavier aesthetics for some odd reasons even I have no idea of how and why that's not bothering me as much.  

[MajorTheRed]

@King Alfonzo : wow, thanks you very much, this is really impressive. You should make this tuto available in its own post! Really appreciate the "artistic" aspect of how it works.

I mostly found difficult finding both interesting shapes for the ships and textures for panel and greebles. Hopefully with this guide, and the Tartiflette's link, it will "unlock" this problem of my imagination.

The support on this forum is always really stunning! Thanks guys!

[Lucian Greymark]

As far as I can tell there are two major groups of spriters on this site. People who are making mods that they want to tie in as closely to the original art as possible, and those who are not. The people who ARE making those mods want everyone else to make the same kind of artwork so that everything looks uniform. Idk if that's a good or a bad thing, but I do know for a fact it's driven away a lot of new spriters who just like a different style. Tone it down a bit with pushing Fractal's greebling style on the new spriters. Just a bit, I understand you want to impart skills. But a lot of the language you use is very authoritative.

Just... tone it down a tad.

Thanks
-Someone who was driven away by this community

[Dark.Revenant]

This thread is literally called "spriters judgement thread".  What are you expecting, if not critique?

If a sprite is made in a style that attempts to match the vanilla style, then one of the baselines for its appraisal is its closeness to that style.  If you're not trying to match the vanilla style, there's no problem.

[xenoargh]

Yeah, don’t take, “not like Vanilla” too seriously   Nobody’s really interested in forcing stylistic conventions on folks here; most modders are aiming at a Vanilla audience though, so it probably shouldn’t surprise you that the critique is generally aimed at arriving at a style that fits in.  That, and we all have our biases in terms of taste (or lack thereof)

[Drokkath]

-snip-

Aye! What he said.

[Ryxsen1421]

Yeah, don’t take, “not like Vanilla” too seriously   Nobody’s really interested in forcing stylistic conventions on folks here; most modders are aiming at a Vanilla audience though, so it probably shouldn’t surprise you that the critique is generally aimed at arriving at a style that fits in.  That, and we all have our biases in terms of taste (or lack thereof)

I agreed with this one, my current goal is to just make something that vaguely resemble with vanilla style. so that they look somewhat natural instead of something outta place.