Missiles and fancy Trails
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Team 12, week 5 This week started working on the last required weapons for our game. The missile and its trail was prioritized. I started making a missile concept without having our projectile concept in hand, this had remained undone for two weeks so I decided to work from the ship concept instead. I made a concept for the missile in Cheetah3D, a 3d modelling software with the intention of being user friendly and fast, ideal for concept working. I focused heavily on using primitives to build the design as this is more time efficient than making a polygonal mesh. The design itself was inspired by the fact that the missiles work in a non-aerodynamic environment, so instead of wings, the missiles would use four attitude control thrusters (stabilizing thrusters). Considering that the ship has a steampunk inspired design I thought a mesh with intricate thrusters and many fuel canisters and would do. I reason that the amount of thrusters on the missile would require a large amount of fuel. I was not too happy with the design as I felt it lacked the streamlined exterior of a popular missile design. I removed the upper part as to keep the intricate thrusters and added a curved tip. The tip would then get a ring of ”wings” with the purpose of stopping the missile when entering softer substances. I quickly colored the missile in dull colors with a decent disconnect to the background.
I was told that the missile had been over-worked and needed to be simpler, which I myself can see to some extent. So I decided after hearing that the projectile concept still hadn’t been made to try and compose a scene where the missiles would appeal more whilst being simpler. The concept was made in a haste and should be expanded on, but does however show a pretty clear image of the three weapons available in our game with a somewhat unique appeal.
I came to the conclusion that the smoke emitted from the missile had enough room for appeal and could give a clear iconic look to the missile gameplay-wise. The trail was produced in Cheetah3D using a spiraling mesh rendered in the alpha channel and then exported into After Effects for texture. Simple ramps were used to achieve a matte glowing look. Sorry for bad quality, I was unable to generate a gif with an alpha channel. The current missile sprite does not reflect my previous design choices but works well as a placeholder and a base for expanding upon. The reason I won’t finish the rocket currently is due to the amount of changes in the game scale and atmosphere.  |
