I'd ask Disney to hire you....but they don't seem to be interested in top tier talent anymore.
I do have to ask though, did you combine your older Scimitar's cockpit with the newer Mauler, or is this a completely new one? I ask because the placement of the two upper blasters looks extremely similar to the Mauler, but the cockpit 'bulb' itself looks like the Scimitar's, if however far more rounded off.
I'd ask Disney to hire you....but they don't seem to be interested in top tier talent anymore.
that is VERY insulting to all the great people who have been working on Star Wars. Maybe the stories from the Disney era don't appeal to you, and that is fine, but the designers, modellers, set builders, creature effects people, are all the VERY best people working in their fields.
that is VERY insulting to all the great people who have been working on Star Wars. Maybe the stories from the Disney era don't appeal to you, and that is fine, but the designers, modellers, set builders, creature effects people, are all the VERY best people working in their fields.
Couldn't care less about the story one way or another. Haven't since the original trilogy. Since then, I only care about the art (sets, ships, stations, backgrounds, etc). I'm talking solely about their artists.
They cut several staff that worked on Rebels, along with some of those that started initial work on Resistance who had originally moved over prior to Rebels finishing it's last season (while still working on it too). You can outright see a downgrade of quality in the Resistance promos compared to even the original pre-1st season Rebel work. Its rather insulting to the artists who started on the new series only to get the boot, only to see a lower quality work than what they considered 'acceptable'. Now to be fair, we are only seeing the promos for Resistance and not the final work, so I can't honestly give a viable opinion.
However, a friend's husband worked on Rebels seasons 2-3.
Just before the final season he moved onto a new project that at the time he couldn't talk about but dropped enough hints to be Resistance or something very similar to it - you only can hear someone say 'Quote the Raven, 'Nevermore'' so many timesand not get a hint about Poe/the Resistance, coming from a shading artist. Then got dropped out of the blue in the middle of work being done on Solo long before it released in theaters/was still in production. To be clear, no, he wasn't working on Solo, he was quite clear on that fact. Whatever exactly it was he was working on, he was scathing when talking about quality control dropping. So it made several family & friends rather salty about the whole thing.
Even with Eps.VIII, the dreadnought was....questionable at best, compared to the Finalizer from Eps. VII, which was gorgeous, along with the work done on Jakku. Eps. VII pulled out all the stops and it shows. Same also goes for Rogue One which, personally, I think had the finest CGI & matte work of any of the new movies, bar none. But with VIII? There's a lot of work in it that looks rather slapdash if not outright rushed. Again, to be fair, I'm hearing this second hand from a former artist who worked for them (and he worked 60+ hour work-weeks or more at times during some stretches) talking about quality slippage either in his own department or hearing other artists griping about slippage in their projects, during meet-ups.
I haven't, yet, seen Solo, so I can't comment on it, and won't comment on it til I've seen it. If things improved, good, great. But there was at least one period where rather questionable decisions were being done in several of the departments, and THAT is what I'm referring to when I made my previous comment.
EDIT:
Now, having said my peace, lets get back to admiring Ansel's artwork. Its far more important.
I'm in agreement with Barricade: As far as the Sequel trilogy is concerned, much of what appeared onscreen has been lacklustre at best. Having seen the inventive, often brilliant, and certainly under-utilised concept art however, I place much of the blame at the feet of the respective Directors.
The FO Dreadnaught (in particular the scaling issue) was an exercise in laziness, the gorilla caricature AT-MXs with their scowl-shaped viewports look cartoonish, as does Starkiller base; the made-to-look-like-toys-because-Disney-doesn't-want-to-encourage-gun-violence blasters of the era look about as intimidating as supersoakers, and other more briefly-seen elements such as Han's freighter and the shuttle in TLJ were very obviously rushed. The Resistance cruisers were little better - though they'd be vastly improved without the silly bits of armor plate tacked on with spindly struts. But, many of these elements were insisted upon and signed off by the directors. it's clear from much of the concept work that the teams were driven towards what we had to put up with seeing oncreen.
Beside the glaring issues with story, characterisation, dialogue and overall cohesion, this lack of care and attention to the design of the ST by TPTB has become increasingly offputting - thus at times feeling to me even less like the GFFA than the Prequels. Certainly TLJ didn't help, with Johnson's inappropriate use of what he passes off as "humour".
All that said, there have been IMHO plenty of visual elements to applaud: The Ralph McQuarrie X-Wings, the beefed up TIE Fighters (ignoring the lazily reversed colors), the old Jedi Island with its Force Tree library, the scenery on Jakku, D'Qar and Takodana; and the presumably terror-inducing yet deplorably under-utilised Supremacy command ship, to name but a few. Even Canto Bight looked like it could at least fit within the PT. But they all remain overshadowed by the sheer level of dreck.
Conversely, the work done on Rogue One -and for the most part, Solo- has been epic, creative, shown incredible attention to detail and to getting the "feel" of the GFFA nailed while believably building upon it, and so the love for both their craft and of the OT by the production teams is evident. We know that Gareth Edwards likewise loves the OT, and gets it; even if his issues with directing and editing led to other hands getting involved in the final product.
TL;DR: I don't think we can ignore how much the visual flaws of the ST are being caused by a directorial lack of vision, rather than an absence of talent within the design team.
Back on topic, I'd love to see Fractalsponge try his hand at some Rebellion/New Republic/Resistance fighters...
Design wise, the sequels have great people working on them. But I don't really like the general direction with the ships and vehicles for TLJ. Some winners: Supremacy design, and Raddus. But I HATE the dreadnought and the gorilla walker.
TFA was pretty good with vehicles. R1 was excellent. Solo didn't have very much new vehicle work as the focus of the thing, but I actually really liked that movie.
New ship, Acclamator warship version prequel/sequel design:
Design wise, the sequels have great people working on them. But I don't really like the general direction with the ships and vehicles for TLJ. Some winners: Supremacy design, and Raddus. But I HATE the dreadnought and the gorilla walker.
TFA was pretty good with vehicles. R1 was excellent. Solo didn't have very much new vehicle work as the focus of the thing, but I actually really liked that movie.
New ship, Acclamator warship version prequel/sequel design:
This is what I very affectionately call the WTF-Wing. I took the Nebulon Ranger concept from the old Jedi comics and concepted it out a LOT. The original had this super cool asymmetry but didn't make any sense with regard to how the engines were set up only on one side away from all the mass (it should just spin in circles). Plus the scale was a bit ambiguous - is it a starfighter? freighter sized? So I took the general vibe of the design, swapped the wing side because why not, and scaled it at transport scale - it's about the overall structural volume of an Assault Transport, but obviously hideously inefficiently distributed. I then adjusted the massing forms to make it look like it had thrust balance, and spent a lot of time figuring out how it would land in a cool way. Fly asymmetrical, land symmetrical.
I figured it could be military or civilian, but either way it would be a fast scout/courier/prospector/survey ship - modifiable and probably often heavily modified, but that circular dish seemed like a sensor so I went with that and added more sensors to fit. The "head" is the crew compartment, and there's an engineering deck above and to starboard under the sensor elements, and the bottom bay is a cargo and maybe light vehicle storage area. If it were an RPG ship, room for a party of 6 very comfortably (I have a whole backstory for the interior layout now). It'll spend a lot of time in space, so needs an airlock - there's an extendable one aft to interface with ships and stations without landing. For scale the front-most center windows are about standing human height and the whole thing is ~33m long.
Power density could potentially be high (it'll use >50% volume for power and propulsion on Assault Transport volume, which already had starfighter performance while probably using 25-30% volume for power systems). OK shields but nowhere near the same firepower - it's not a ship designed to fight. Ultralight turbolasers - good against starfighters and transports, totally useless against capital ships. The design allows for some reasonably good firing arcs though. Compare against an ATR, which has 4 light turbolasers, 4 comparable ion, and a heavy warhead load.
Long and thin to minimize profile and a rotary heavy warhead system. I've taken that concept and developed it a bit, with the main missile battery in a fixed and separate annular compartment away from the hull. Power should end up being ~2-3 ISD, so barely a cruiser, which is fitting given the very thin hull (I expect the reactor to be fully buried). Fast, well shielded, but not a slugger.
Wow. That's an interesting design. Looking forward to seeing her progress! Assuming the unusual angle of the circular launching system is to give it the widest field of fire? And that the bridge model is ~ the same side as an ISD? She certainly looks small and fast, if that scale is correct.
I begrudge it its traditional "Frigate" rating - after all it's not even 2/3 the volume of a Vigil. But anyway. I tried to keep the traditional design cues, but tweaked the profile line to make it look less like a sex toy. The gun positions are provisional, but there are supposed to be 20 of them (only could ever find 18 on the old schematics, so improvised the last two). Mix of quadruple close-in defense lasers and paired light turbolaser/long-barrel laser cannon - make it more a useful small warship than just an antifighter platform.
Posts
Some new heavy tank concept WIP:
http://fractalsponge.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/hvytank1-1024x768.jpg
http://fractalsponge.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/hvytank2-1024x768.jpg
http://fractalsponge.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/hvytank3-1024x768.jpg
http://fractalsponge.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/hvytank4-1024x768.jpg
http://fractalsponge.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/hvytank5-1024x768.jpg
Naming it HAVr A10 Scythe
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XAJVy
I do have to ask though, did you combine your older Scimitar's cockpit with the newer Mauler, or is this a completely new one? I ask because the placement of the two upper blasters looks extremely similar to the Mauler, but the cockpit 'bulb' itself looks like the Scimitar's, if however far more rounded off.
that is VERY insulting to all the great people who have been working on Star Wars. Maybe the stories from the Disney era don't appeal to you, and that is fine, but the designers, modellers, set builders, creature effects people, are all the VERY best people working in their fields.
They cut several staff that worked on Rebels, along with some of those that started initial work on Resistance who had originally moved over prior to Rebels finishing it's last season (while still working on it too). You can outright see a downgrade of quality in the Resistance promos compared to even the original pre-1st season Rebel work. Its rather insulting to the artists who started on the new series only to get the boot, only to see a lower quality work than what they considered 'acceptable'. Now to be fair, we are only seeing the promos for Resistance and not the final work, so I can't honestly give a viable opinion.
However, a friend's husband worked on Rebels seasons 2-3.
Just before the final season he moved onto a new project that at the time he couldn't talk about but dropped enough hints to be Resistance or something very similar to it - you only can hear someone say 'Quote the Raven, 'Nevermore'' so many timesand not get a hint about Poe/the Resistance, coming from a shading artist. Then got dropped out of the blue in the middle of work being done on Solo long before it released in theaters/was still in production. To be clear, no, he wasn't working on Solo, he was quite clear on that fact. Whatever exactly it was he was working on, he was scathing when talking about quality control dropping. So it made several family & friends rather salty about the whole thing.
Even with Eps.VIII, the dreadnought was....questionable at best, compared to the Finalizer from Eps. VII, which was gorgeous, along with the work done on Jakku. Eps. VII pulled out all the stops and it shows. Same also goes for Rogue One which, personally, I think had the finest CGI & matte work of any of the new movies, bar none. But with VIII? There's a lot of work in it that looks rather slapdash if not outright rushed. Again, to be fair, I'm hearing this second hand from a former artist who worked for them (and he worked 60+ hour work-weeks or more at times during some stretches) talking about quality slippage either in his own department or hearing other artists griping about slippage in their projects, during meet-ups.
I haven't, yet, seen Solo, so I can't comment on it, and won't comment on it til I've seen it. If things improved, good, great. But there was at least one period where rather questionable decisions were being done in several of the departments, and THAT is what I'm referring to when I made my previous comment.
EDIT:
Now, having said my peace, lets get back to admiring Ansel's artwork. Its far more important.
The FO Dreadnaught (in particular the scaling issue) was an exercise in laziness, the gorilla caricature AT-MXs with their scowl-shaped viewports look cartoonish, as does Starkiller base; the made-to-look-like-toys-because-Disney-doesn't-want-to-encourage-gun-violence blasters of the era look about as intimidating as supersoakers, and other more briefly-seen elements such as Han's freighter and the shuttle in TLJ were very obviously rushed. The Resistance cruisers were little better - though they'd be vastly improved without the silly bits of armor plate tacked on with spindly struts. But, many of these elements were insisted upon and signed off by the directors. it's clear from much of the concept work that the teams were driven towards what we had to put up with seeing oncreen.
Beside the glaring issues with story, characterisation, dialogue and overall cohesion, this lack of care and attention to the design of the ST by TPTB has become increasingly offputting - thus at times feeling to me even less like the GFFA than the Prequels. Certainly TLJ didn't help, with Johnson's inappropriate use of what he passes off as "humour".
All that said, there have been IMHO plenty of visual elements to applaud: The Ralph McQuarrie X-Wings, the beefed up TIE Fighters (ignoring the lazily reversed colors), the old Jedi Island with its Force Tree library, the scenery on Jakku, D'Qar and Takodana; and the presumably terror-inducing yet deplorably under-utilised Supremacy command ship, to name but a few. Even Canto Bight looked like it could at least fit within the PT. But they all remain overshadowed by the sheer level of dreck.
Conversely, the work done on Rogue One -and for the most part, Solo- has been epic, creative, shown incredible attention to detail and to getting the "feel" of the GFFA nailed while believably building upon it, and so the love for both their craft and of the OT by the production teams is evident. We know that Gareth Edwards likewise loves the OT, and gets it; even if his issues with directing and editing led to other hands getting involved in the final product.
TL;DR: I don't think we can ignore how much the visual flaws of the ST are being caused by a directorial lack of vision, rather than an absence of talent within the design team.
Back on topic, I'd love to see Fractalsponge try his hand at some Rebellion/New Republic/Resistance fighters...
TFA was pretty good with vehicles. R1 was excellent. Solo didn't have very much new vehicle work as the focus of the thing, but I actually really liked that movie.
New ship, Acclamator warship version prequel/sequel design:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/JoGXm
Agreed!
I love that Acclamator, it's based on an old comics design if I'm not mistaken? So happy to see it brought to life!
What is it's dimensions and what craft and how many does it carry,troop compliment?
I figured it could be military or civilian, but either way it would be a fast scout/courier/prospector/survey ship - modifiable and probably often heavily modified, but that circular dish seemed like a sensor so I went with that and added more sensors to fit. The "head" is the crew compartment, and there's an engineering deck above and to starboard under the sensor elements, and the bottom bay is a cargo and maybe light vehicle storage area. If it were an RPG ship, room for a party of 6 very comfortably (I have a whole backstory for the interior layout now). It'll spend a lot of time in space, so needs an airlock - there's an extendable one aft to interface with ships and stations without landing. For scale the front-most center windows are about standing human height and the whole thing is ~33m long.
Power density could potentially be high (it'll use >50% volume for power and propulsion on Assault Transport volume, which already had starfighter performance while probably using 25-30% volume for power systems). OK shields but nowhere near the same firepower - it's not a ship designed to fight. Ultralight turbolasers - good against starfighters and transports, totally useless against capital ships. The design allows for some reasonably good firing arcs though. Compare against an ATR, which has 4 light turbolasers, 4 comparable ion, and a heavy warhead load.
Long and thin to minimize profile and a rotary heavy warhead system. I've taken that concept and developed it a bit, with the main missile battery in a fixed and separate annular compartment away from the hull. Power should end up being ~2-3 ISD, so barely a cruiser, which is fitting given the very thin hull (I expect the reactor to be fully buried). Fast, well shielded, but not a slugger.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3odoXE
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qA9R3a
And building a scout in the vein of the old Nebulon Ranger:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/015VG
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Gbn04
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lV111O
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/YaaYEb
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qAQ9GR
Calling it Lightskimmer
I begrudge it its traditional "Frigate" rating - after all it's not even 2/3 the volume of a Vigil. But anyway. I tried to keep the traditional design cues, but tweaked the profile line to make it look less like a sex toy. The gun positions are provisional, but there are supposed to be 20 of them (only could ever find 18 on the old schematics, so improvised the last two). Mix of quadruple close-in defense lasers and paired light turbolaser/long-barrel laser cannon - make it more a useful small warship than just an antifighter platform.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ybDZxR
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rRzOaa
A commissioned design for a Mandalorian cruiser. 400m, OT/PT era aesthetics
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Ya8Q13
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Vd89gX