Drawing a Simple Space Ship 2



Tutorial 1 (Drawing with Flash) --- Tutorial 2 (What to Draw - Simple) --- Tutorial 3 (What to Draw - Complex) --- Tutorial 4 (What to Draw - Decorations)



Hi, I'm Ace the Super Villain. My goal here is to teach you to draw good looking space ships and star fighters, so that I don't have to look at crappy geometric shapes while I'm in the mood to shoot stuff.

This segment isn't going to be on how to draw, but what to draw. Most space fighter games tend to go better if you have lots of playable ships, diverse enemies, etc, and to get those, you need to have a lot of ideas ready to go. What I'm going to do is show you some tried and true standard ship design configurations that I have seen and liked many times before.

For this lesson, we will go over simple hull configurations. These are a bit low-end, but easy to make and they can still look great if you work hard on them.

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Let's start with the triangle. Quite a few games have just used this shape as-is without any extra baggage. This can actually remain a very good design will minimal added content.

A step up from that is the tapered triangle, which has a small section missing from the back. This is the variation that I most recognize from Asteroid and Space War clones.

Bend it the other way, and you get an elongated triangle. This has also seen action in a lot of simple games, but also in such ships as the world famous Imperial Star Destroyer.

Next is the compount delta variation. This is also quite popular and is a bit more realistic looking since many real aerospace planes, like the space shuttle, use compound delta wing designs.

Last of the simple triangle variations is the jet shaped triangles. This just has a few sections of the original triangle lopped off to give the impression of intakes and separated wings and fuselage. Later we'll see the true jet shape category which will go even farther.

Similar to the normal triangle is the wide triangle. It is basically just another triangle but wider. The wider wings give the plane a more bomber-like appearance, and it looks very much like the modern F-117 and B-2 stealth planes. You can make this look a bit more interesting and a bit more bomber like by adding pods and alerons or shaping the wings a bit more.

And of course there are multi-triangle ships. These are made by adding or carving out triangles until you're down-right sick of them. Earlier versions of Critical Mass used these designs extensively, and modern versions allow you to build your own ships by, guess what, adding lots of triangles together. (Note as well that any polygon can be broken down into a series of triangles.) As you can see, these are starting to get much more advanced.

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Next up is the saucer. I think this is generally considered to be the most lazy, disappointing and ugly spaceship type, but it is a classic. Saucers are supposedly based on actual UFO sightings and are supposed to be perfectly round, but I am going to include in this category ships that are predominantly made with the elipse tool.
We also have the tree-ball and round-shield variations, which just have extra little disks on the top.

Here we have a more ovular shape more like the ships in Independance day. The front section is a carved out circle. (Actually this one might look better going bacwards)

And a sleeker shape that looks more like the Planet Express or something out of Flash Gordon. It's still an ellipse, but not really what I'd call a saucer anymore. In UFO circles, I believe ships of this construction are knows as "flying cigars", in contrast to "flying saucers".

And this of course is the Millenium Falcon. This is a very specific ship rather than a generic class, but proves that it is possible to make a fairly decent looking ship out of ellipses.

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Since I've gone over triangles and elipses, it's only fair that I cover quadrillaterals as well. Unlike the other basic shapes, these rarely get used as a stand alone shape. Instead, you are much more likely to see ships made up of numerous compound quadrillaterals. You are also not likely to see them used for zippy starfighter type ships, but they often make good freighters, capitol ships and tanks.

The quadrillateral based ships I remember most are the ARMDs and Macross from the Macross series. ARMDs are the closest things to a straight rectangle that come to mind, and the Macross itself is just a large collection of rectangular segments.

Tanks are also very square. You can either go for the classic body and turret configuration, or some kind of futuristic space tanks with guns and thrusters and such in various positions. Usually you want your tanks to look big and blocky rather than small and sleek, and rectangles do a good job of that.

Another way to use quadrillaterals is with the slanted square. Add a few rectangular guns and thrusters to it, and you've got yourself a ship.



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Next we have crescent ships. These ships are distinctive for being based on a crescent shape, occasionally with some sort of central body or cockpit section as well. These can have either the convex or concave end facing forward, for what I call axe and sickle style crescent ships.

Zeera's grandmother owns a collection of very dramatic sickle type pirate ships. It also has a scorpion tail laser which gives it a kind of double crescent shape when viewed from the side.

While most crescent ships tend to look very alien or even bio-ship like, you can still make some fairly "humanoid" looking ones like this. The crescent tips of sickle ships make good weapon mounts.

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