The Making of: Orbital Decay, Part 2
Sunday, August 30th, 2009…or how to make the graphics (when you’re not an artist).
I planned Orbital Decay as a solo enterprise and making the graphics took most of the time: out of the 5 months it took for the project to finish, 3.5 were allocated for the graphics. I opted out for a retro-pixel art-”16 bit graphics” style, as a homage to that gaming era and because I wanted total control for the details on the assets, a thing pixel art is good at for this small resolution (e.g. ports, turrets, hatches, etc).
For each ship, I followed, more or less, a routine: researching for a design (this included the general shape and the details, big and small), 3D modeled the shape and the rough details with Truespace, rendering a side view of the ship, then start editing at the pixel-level in Photoshop. The whole process usually took about a couple of days to a week, intricate ships like the Radiant Star or the Aru Destroyer took even more.
Here’s how this worked, in visually comprehensive but not exhaustive way:
Perspective View
Making of, frame by frame
