Weapon Platform - Concept and Design

While still relatively new, the Overdrive project has been around for a year and three months at this point. Things changed several times, and I had help from many friends/colleagues in various stages.

The initial concepts of Rattapoom K (Lewis K) were instrumental to understand what worked and what didn't for the look and the language, and it was there that I hit the first creative wall, trying to nail a language I haven't even identified yet.

Further steps with Brennan Massicotte helped in that a lot, but so many good ideas were still in Rattappoom's designs that I wanted to use.

This vertical platform was certainly one. It had a very "evil scifi building" vibe, which worked well while remaining fairly neutral in terms of functions, but the initial prints in hand didn't read the way I wanted.

Now, granted, I could have kept the design for a future faction, with a stronger tie with the blocky shapes of the Enlisted, but ...I really wanted a platform, and I though that I could apply the new shapes developed for the Opulence into this. And so I did.

The sculpting got in part streamed live on our Discord (I do that sometimes, keep an eye there!), and unfortunately I didn't take the usual amount of screenshots this time.

Not only that, once completed, I printed one copy (as I often do) to assess the readability in hand - and I decided to chance a whole lot of stuff. Wider body, thinner beams between the turrets, all very reasonable stuff that however I did not document.

The final piece, cleaned and decimated, reads a lot smaller (as it should: considering the scale, there is room for probably a crew of 2!) and more in line with the fleet.

I'm also investing some thoughts into rationalizing my post-sculpting workflow: I now group all different kinds of components in different collections, so that assigning materials (no matter which kind) becomes really fast.

This allowed me to render both the standard matte shots (which are excellent to undersand what is what) and the Ligne Claire renders that I have been working on and developing for illustrations.

What I'm loving of this is that, having a layered output as a result, I get to edit and clean up the render (for instance, that ugly shadow on the bottom right of the main ship) in a drawing program, and the result is quite solid.

Some hand-drawn shapes, border strokes at 3 PX, and the composition is already better.

Note to self: start preparing TONS of asteroids and wrecks to combined!

Jack