Art Development: Germans Part 4

Okay…it’s been long enough…time to move onto the next stage of showcasing the development of the German art.

In the last blog, if you remember, J. had provided 4 different potential “directions” we could take…here’s the art direction I gave him based on those illustrations.

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Hey J.

So I’ve gone round and round in my head on this, and I’m settling on the #1 as the 95% German battleship.

The reason I say 95% is I’d like a few tweaks.1. The ducted fan portions of the ship need to be tweaked slightly. First, use the off center and the additional ducted assembly on the hull as shown in B. Then, elongate the ducted fans smewhat and ensure that they better match the attached illo; i.e. specifically the three “segments” of the pipes, with the first two with the largish round vents…on the smaller ships you’re likely to only have one ducted fan section, so it’s important that the “three segment with two segments have two largish vents” is clear and distinct as “the German” ducted fan look.

2. Minor thing, but my Lev posse pointed out that having a crows nest on the back mast, right in the smoke, just wouldn’t work.

3. Please find attached the Baden battleship. I’d like to try and mirror this ship, which has four large guns mounted in each Location. But they’re not the “biggest” guns, like the British. So my thinking is that on A, the rear gun appears slightly smaller than the two front…drop the two front guns to a single gun and make it slightly smaller.

Then, the key will be to create a turret on either side that’s close to that size. If you look at the attached illo, you’ll see a decent sized turret on the right side of the ship…I’d like to mirror that…note that I realize that due to the smoke stacks and basic size of the ship, the turret as shown in the attached illo may simply be the largest size we can get away with…if so, that’ll be close enough to the game stats (as I’ve mentioned, all we need to be is “close”, not exact).

I think we those tweaks, we’ll be good to go.

Note that I believe the “top part” of C could be used almost exactly as is on a Light Cruiser; i.e. the SMS Wiesbaden, though we’d drop the two turrets in the back to one and then create 3 turrets up front, one bigger and two smaller. Just wanted to point out that you’re already well on your way towards starting to design the other ships.

Let me know if you’ve any questions…if not, look forward to seeing hopefully a final of the new battleship.

Thanks!

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Based upon that feedback, he provided the following.

So that looked fantastic, but I have to admit, sheepishly, that I spent a day or so reviewing them and wondering what was bugging me that didn’t seem exactly right…and then it hit me…the size!

So I asked him to re-size the as they should appear to each other; i.e. left retains the size for looking at the details, the right showing their ‘real’ size in comparison to each other..

So then it was time to work up the orthographics. One of the fascinating aspects of working in this style is that you often are surprised by what the top of the ship will look like and in this case, I was. Not necessarily in a bad way…I just had something a little different in my head based on my pre-conception of what the side was like.

Ultimately, of course, I agreed with all of J.’s instincts here and I’m very happy with how the German ships turned out.

Next up, moving into colorizing!

See ya next duty shift!

Randall