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[Harmful Mechanic]

Thanks guys. There will definitely be more; once I nail down the style I need to slap together a two-deck carrier and a fighter, at least.

The concept, such as it is, is flexible midtech armed-courier ships, weak offensively, but hard to disable and fast. With trade coming up, it seemed like a good time to design some ships around dedicated blockade-running.

Helmut: Thanks for the feedback! I agree on most points; the black outlines are a holdover from when all the ships were roughly 25% smaller. I'm not sure about the texture; I was thinking of adding surface grime and discolored panels here and there, but largely keeping the smooth armored surface (hoping to keep as much inside Illustrator as possible, to preserve scalability). We'll see what works! Tinkering proceeds apace:

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Also, if anyone's interested, I can put together a pack of just the slot sockets for others to use; I'm itching to do a few sets of them.

[Ryxsen1421]

That's more like it! They look more like a clean and organized Kerbal warships. Cant wait to have 'em land on Moho and Mun!

[Debido]

@Soren: it's a good start but a lot of work to get them to fit the vanilla theme, and fitting the vanilla look is fairly important. Overall the design is ok, and is interesting enough. You've laid down the foundation but you've got many days of work in PhotoShop with pixel pushing to give them a greater detail and apparent size using various techniques and sub-pixel editing.

One problem with keeping the smooth appearance is that you no longer have a sense of scale, they just look like cartoon ships. Have a look at the ship art from the game in Photoshop under 1600% zoom for half a day or so trying to understand and replicate the techniques there.

[Harmful Mechanic]

@Soren: it's a good start but a lot of work to get them to fit the vanilla theme, and fitting the vanilla look is fairly important. Overall the design is ok, and is interesting enough. You've laid down the foundation but you've got many days of work in PhotoShop with pixel pushing to give them a greater detail and apparent size using various techniques and sub-pixel editing.

I'm hoping to avoid actual pixel-pushery where possible; not because I don't agree that more depth and detail is needed, but because I want to speed the process of making new sprites up as much as possible, and because it's fun to make Illustrator do the tedious work for me. Right now I have Pixel Preview turned on and I'm experimenting with antennae and streaks of grime and dirt on the hull.

It'll take a nice long time, but hopefully the end result will be more interesting for it.

[MShadowy]

Started work on a little freight hauling frigate, the Ashnan class, today.  Probably a vaguely similar hauling profile to a hound, though not as fast and likely slightly less combat capable.

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At 200% zoom.

A dumpy little utility ship.

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I also started work on trying to sketch other small utility craft in anticipation of the coming update but those sketches turned out pretty bad.

The concept, such as it is, is flexible midtech armed-courier ships, weak offensively, but hard to disable and fast. With trade coming up, it seemed like a good time to design some ships around dedicated blockade-running.

Damn I like these little ships; nicely designed.

[Debido]

@Soren: it's a good start but a lot of work to get them to fit the vanilla theme, and fitting the vanilla look is fairly important. Overall the design is ok, and is interesting enough. You've laid down the foundation but you've got many days of work in PhotoShop with pixel pushing to give them a greater detail and apparent size using various techniques and sub-pixel editing.

I'm hoping to avoid actual pixel-pushery where possible; not because I don't agree that more depth and detail is needed, but because I want to speed the process of making new sprites up as much as possible, and because it's fun to make Illustrator do the tedious work for me. Right now I have Pixel Preview turned on and I'm experimenting with antennae and streaks of grime and dirt on the hull.

It'll take a nice long time, but hopefully the end result will be more interesting for it.

Let me put it this way, if David Baumgart, a professional digital artist for games, the original author, knew from experience that using illustrator to speed up the process would work - he would. But he doesn't.

I'm just predicting that your ships are going to look somewhat jarringly different from vanilla, and that is not a good thing for any gameplay experience.

Anyway it doesn't matter, it's the fun of creating the ship art that is the most enjoyable part of the process.

[Wyvern]

Started work on a little freight hauling frigate, the Ashnan class, today.  Probably a vaguely similar hauling profile to a hound, though not as fast and likely slightly less combat capable.

Ooh, neat.  I could see two obvious niches for something like that - option one is all those bits on the bubble-nodule sections are maneuvering jets... option two, they're built-in mining laser turrets.  (Or you may have some other plan in mind... but those are the things that occur to me.)

[Harmful Mechanic]

Started work on a little freight hauling frigate, the Ashnan class, today.  Probably a vaguely similar hauling profile to a hound, though not as fast and likely slightly less combat capable.

Spoiler

At 200% zoom.

A dumpy little utility ship.

[close]

I also started work on trying to sketch other small utility craft in anticipation of the coming update but those sketches turned out pretty bad.

That's an appealing little tortoise; It might be interesting to give it a single slot, or even none, and make it rely on drones for protection.

Damn I like these little ships; nicely designed.

Why thank you. Still not there, but I'm optimistic. I might have to go in and pull some gradient meshes to get enough depth.

I'm hoping to avoid actual pixel-pushery where possible; not because I don't agree that more depth and detail is needed, but because I want to speed the process of making new sprites up as much as possible, and because it's fun to make Illustrator do the tedious work for me. Right now I have Pixel Preview turned on and I'm experimenting with antennae and streaks of grime and dirt on the hull.

It'll take a nice long time, but hopefully the end result will be more interesting for it.

Let me put it this way, if David Baumgart, a professional digital artist for games, the original author, knew from experience that using illustrator to speed up the process would work - he would. But he doesn't.

And if I were aiming for perfect fidelity to a histogram of the vanilla sprites, that would be of catastrophic importance to me. But I'm not, so it isn't. What gave you the idea that I was? (Also, I'm a different sort of professional, not an amateur. Feel free to make detailed demands! I'll invoice you). I'll grant you that I'm not at the point of an acceptable match with vanilla yet, but I don't imagine I'm far off, either. A wee bit more depth, a splash of color in the highlights and shadows, more and better greebly bits.

I'm just predicting that your ships are going to look somewhat jarringly different from vanilla, and that is not a good thing for any gameplay experience.

Again, if the goal were to perfectly replicate existing work, I'd be picking a different method. Obviously! I have a Wacom tablet right here, and I've seen the relevant blog posts. But I'm curious whether it's possible to get reasonably close, to the point where it's not obvious to a casual observer, using nothing but vector artwork. (And given the stable of tools I haven't used yet, I'd say the chances are good).

Look, I can tell from your post count that this matters to you. And ultimately, you're going to be disappointed, because there's always going to be a gap between what you think my goals ought to be, and what my goals actually are. It's very likely that I will decide they're good enough at a point that drives you crazy, and you're welcome to never play the nonexistent mod that I haven't made yet that doesn't use them on that basis. Everybody wins.

[Debido]

@Soren: you're offended and upset, I apologise for that, I was intending to give you some advice to ensure you can produce high quality sprites inline with the styling used by SS and most everyone else.

Do. Don't. Whatever makes you happy. I have no vested interest or expectations. The only other suggestion I would make is not to presume that my post count has any meaning to me either.

[David]

(Regarding using Illustrator: It may well be a good tool for doing a lot of stuff, I just have very little experience using it due to Photoshop being almost the sole drawing tool I've used for my entire career so far. I *wish* I knew Illustrator better but I simply don't have projects where it'd be valuable for me to take the time learn it versus doing "good enough" with what I can manage in Photoshop. And speaking of, I do indeed use some of the vector drawing tools in Photoshop, generally for laying out curved sections of ships and increasingly for the faction logos. The bulk of the drawing is however done with digital painting and pixel art techniques, as per the blog post I wrote on all of this.)

[Sathe]

Soren: For casual observer, you are really, really far from Vanilla.

[Nanao-kun]

Soren's sprites definitely aren't bad though. I could easily see a different game based around Soren's artstyle.

[ORMtnMan]

I will say from experience getting sprites close to vanilla (without kitbashing) is really hard. A good chunk of the great quality mods on this site would be considered "not close to vanilla" if you really get down to it. That said, those are some awesome sprites. they don't fit with vanilla and they don't have to.

Debido wasn't being antagonistic (or crazy). He was just giving helpful (in his view) opinions which is the point of this thread. .

Debido helped me out immensely when I started, because it was my intention to get my sprites close to vanilla. As close as I can at least.

EDIT:

I'm sorry I should not have added to the tangent (that has nothing to do with sprite critiques).

To get it back on track, I lightened up the Aegis (which I keep working on because I can't get it perfect  )

Now I think it looks less black heavy and busy.

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[Nanao-kun]

ORMtnMan, that's some serious improvement since your first version.

[ORMtnMan]

ORMtnMan, that's some serious improvement since your first version.

Why thank you! I think it is done for now as I really should move on to other things in the mod...