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Please Read Devs: The SDF Ships

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Jun 18, 2004 Starfisher link
There's no polite way to say this.

THAT took you a MONTH!?

Don't get me wrong. It's an interesting ship design, and your depiction of it is clean and fairly detailed. But a month?! I've never used Illustrator... maybe it's slowing you down or something. Is it like Photoshop in any way?

Jun 18, 2004 Arolte link
Remember, that's counting the Pelican also. As I said I was working with it on and off from time to time, not nonstop over the course of a month. That's mainly because I had to deal with 19 credits of college courses during most of the contest period. It could've been less, maybe even a week's worth of total hours, I'm not even sure anymore. I don't think it really matters. A deadline was set and I made it with whatever time I had.

Also, anyone who knows me knows I'm a perfectionist when it comes to art. I often spend a lot of time tweaking a certain area, only to come back and do it all over again if I feel it doesn't look right. There's a little more detail in the design than what you're seeing. A scaled down gif image obviously loses some of it, but I had to make it fair for all the 56k equipped judges out there so I had no choice.

The interface of Illustrator is similar to Photoshop but the similarities end there. Illustrator is a vector based program whereas Photoshop is a pixel based program. Basically Photoshop is ideal for continuous tone image work, photo manipulation, and web design. Illustrator is ideal for designs which require freehand forms (via mouse), ease of editability, ease of scalability, and extensive manipulation of text.

If you have access to Illustrator I suggest you learn it. I was reluctant to when I first started college but Iater on I learned that only made my job harder than it should've been. Now I use it almost everyday. Once you get the hang of it you'll get hooked on it. It's very helpful if you want to do concept work, where you may decide to change something else later on. It's much easier in that respect.
Jun 18, 2004 roguelazer link
If you're like 99% of the world and can't spend $650 to learn a program, start out your vector graphics learning with Inkscape. I kinda prefer it to Illustrator, but since I have never played with Illustrator for long periods of time, I'm not the world expert on it.
Jun 18, 2004 Urza link
Actualy star, getting 3d stuff to look really good takes a lot of time. i've had a chance to play with one of the best 3D programs (3D S Max) which is relitivly simple to use, and even with it, it still takes a lot of time
Jun 19, 2004 Sheean link
Sorry for not sending it, but I had lot's of stuff to do for school. But now I'm done with that so here it is! - itīs 22.6 MB big, and my mother told me never to send big files with e-mail.

* The original submission:
http://sheean.localnetsys.com/SDF_ship_contest/
* The submission crammed in a zip:
http://sheean.localnetsys.com/SDF_ship_contest/sheean-ships-and-stuff.zip
* The ship models in Blender format:
http://sheean.localnetsys.com/SDF_ship_contest/sheean-blend-files.zip
Jun 19, 2004 Urza link
Sheean, i just checked that stuff out. prety nice dude, keep it up