What type of reference materials do you use for weapons and ships? When you start out to design anything how do you get inspiration for the task?asked by Cyberwolf / Solo
TL;DRThey start by working out how a thing functions, then do reference digs on real-world equivalents and sci-fi, using distinct design languages for each manufacturer, which will become more distinct over time.
Do you walk around the office, surf the internet, watch Star Trek...?
Sure, sure, well the absolute first thing that I tend to do, is find out how the thing works. That's number one. Does it fold in this way, do things deploy from this location...
Form follows functionEB: Exactly. So then we'll go ahead and do a reference dig, for things that do the same thing. Like, landing gears for example, or how guns will deploy, what does the housing actually look like, so we have tons of references to help us actually figure out those sections, and then we start figuring out how do we communicate the personality of the ship, and that'll come through, getting old Russian helicopters for MISC for example, or stealth actual contemporary stealth planes, like the SR-71, for Aegis, things like that, or like I mentioned before, Mustangs or muscle cars for things like Kruger, so we have a language that we want to define for each manufacturer, so we'll go ahead and do reference digs for those, for the elements that we want to incorporate for that look. And it doesn't really, we'll look at sci-fi, we'll look at WWII references, so we'll grab whatever works, and take the elements that we really really like.
Right. I think to also round that out is the, now that the manufacturers and the ships are starting to fit into a manufacturer, we've had to start defining what those manufacturers actually look like, so, if you, for example, come up with a new ship that is from Aegis or Anvil, well, there's a distinct language that needs to be applied to those manufacturers that gives them that particular look. For example, MISC would be.
MISC would be old Russian helicopters, so it's ah, they have a lot of funky looking shapes, which is what they're basically known for, at least their older ships are like that Some of the new ones are a little bit more streamlined, but that's cause they're new. They're coming up with the times now. Anvil, for example, they have a lot of fighters, military ships, they have more of sort of a blocky look to their design, Aegis is a lot sleeker, things like that so, yeah.
So, we're taking things forward, and moving them forward is going to be a lot more refined by manufacturers. The ships will actually start becoming more distinct by that manufacturer type.