(Insert stupid Blog name here) - Streaking!

RSS Bot · November 9, 2008

Well, since I've had a number of people* tell me that they really liked my 15th entry in the Lead contest, I thought I'd post an entry about it.

*That number would be "three".

This was by far the easier of the two illustrations. No 3D here. Just drawing. As always, it started out with some rough sketches. The idea I wanted to convey was a sense of speed, as the player's ship hurtled past the energy walls, and fired away at oncoming ships. So I wanted lots of streaks and blurring to get across that speed:

As messy as it was, the sketch had the dynamic I was looking for. Of course, translating that into the final art is the trick. The sense of urgency often found in sketches almost never makes it through to the end of the process.

The drawing went pretty fast. The player's ship was based on the Seeker from Space Academy (bonus points if you can remember the annoying robot's name without looking it up), but I made it sleeker and more fighter-like (I used to draw ships like this all the time when I was a kid). The enemy ships were a cross between the Death Gliders in Stargate SG-1 and the original Cylon Raiders from Battlestar Galactica, although Dave Dries pointed out that they looked more like croissants. I prefer to think of them as evil, flying, space croissants:

As I often do, I drew the other elements on a separate sheet of paper, so I could change them more easily as needed. The little "+" signs are registration marks, so after I scan everything in, I can align them later:

Then, there was the usual round of re-drawing the art as vectors in FreeHand:

And painting it in Photoshop:

The painting went pretty fast, but it just looked too empty. In order to gain that sense of speed the sketch had, I really needed to add star streaks to it. I couldn't think of an easy way to do it, until I figured out something I could do using After Effects.

After Effects is an Adobe program used in special effects work and video compositing. We use it all the time at work for animation.

To get the star streaks, first I generated a star field in Photoshop using Alien Skin's Xenofex2. Alien Skin makes some great Photoshop plug-ins, and I own several of their products.

I needed to make it appear as if I was zooming into a corner of the star field. After Effects is all about manipulating virtual "cameras" over time, so I set up a couple of keyframes to do just that. This is the full star field, and the box shows the area I would zoom into:

This is the zoomed-in view:

Next, I applied an effect, which caused frames in between the two keyframes to blur together, sort of like keeping the shutter on a camera open:

This is basically the way the original hyperspace effect was achieved for Star Wars, using computer-controlled cameras and film exposures.

By changing different parameters, I could make the streaks longer or shorter. It took some experimenting to get the desired effect.

After that, it was a matter of dropping the final star streaks back into the Photoshop file, and painting out some of them so they didn't interfere with the rest of the artwork. I also added a "nebula" of sorts, to give some more depth to it, and to make it seem as if the enemy ships were emerging from the center of it:

Finally, I made several variations on it, including dropping it into a couple of Atari label templates that I made (I don't use the online one, in case you were wondering).

For most of the contests I've entered, I've made Atari-style variations "just in case" that was the preference of the programmer. But I don't favor them. Actually I find that whole thing a bit perplexing. I would think after all of the work a programmer went to to make their own game, why would they want to "give credit" to a company that had absolutely nothing to do with it? Why make their game look like "just another" Atari cartridge?

Anyway, my entries for the Incoming! contest won't have any Atari-style labels among them. I decided to take a different approach with that one. But that will have to wait for another blog entry.

One that will feature... explosions!

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;showentry=5448