FreeOrion

I've just committed these.

very cool man, thx...

i made another attempt today. this time with the electromagnetic damper... i have two versions... one with big and one with small arrows... the third one would be an "upgrade" of the electromagnetic damper. I could also imagine an even more sphisticated 3rd update... I also included the *.blend file with all the icons of yesterday and the new ones from today as was requested (but sadly I am not able to upload it to the forum due to a file size restriction of 256K)... fell free to criticize


on dark backround:

with alpha channel:


the *.blend file with all the icons (Its a bit "chaotic", I am sorry for that):
http://www.2shared.com/file/3148803/767 ... icons.html

greetings, tom

That looks quite abstract and inconsistent with the other icons. It doesn't work so good IMO. Could you please check your PM?

pd, aren't those committed icons supposed to have a transparent background? or does it not matter since they're ship parts? The ones in the game have tranparency, unless you're thinking about changing that.

and to ssalamass: I checked out your blend file to see how you did some of those icons. It was nice to look at; it showed simple and effective use of blender. The one thing that impressed me was the body. I assume you didn't make it for the icon, but did you in fact make that body? Or did you use it from someone else? Also, I looked at a few of the things in the icons, and you could do a couple things easier after rendering them and postworking them in paint.net (or your graphics program of choice). I was surprised when I went into blender and found that the actual nuclear symbol was a mesh. I assumed it was painted into the icon after you rendered it. Of course, if you're more comfortable with the way you do it now, by all means. Nice work by the way.

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Photobucket account for FreeOrion and List of Techs and Icons

[[[===LEAN, MEAN, PURPLE AND GREEN MACHINE===]]]

The comited icons are on a transparent background. See the wiki page, that shows the actual icons from SVN. For presentational reasons I like to show icons on a dark background in the forums, because they can look quite different on a bright blue/grey and it's hard to judge them in this case.

yepp after looking over it again, i guess you're right


nope i didn't make it by myself... I used a human mesh generator from this site: http://www.dedalo-3d.com/ its under open source license, so don't worry about the licenses (we didn't use the icon anyway, i forgot ).


yeah i think you are right. My intention was, to make the icons as "reproducable" as possible, because I initially assumed, that the project would be in need of the source-files (in this case blender)


yepp... such things are actually quiet easy in blender, since you can import *.svg files. So i downloaded an official *.svg file from some UN-server and imported it into blender.

and thx

Ok, I really like those damper thingies, recently done by Redcap. Infact I propose to add some more damper parts, just to make use of those icons. I've tweaked them a bit and tried to put them in an order that makes somewhat sense and suggests some improvement.

committed

For Active Radar I'd like to use this one(a merge of two Redcap's icons).

commited

I've also tweaked his drop pods(adding some glow). Might get used for a future ship part:

Laser


*cough*

I'm not happy with how it (doesn't) work at a small resolution.

it looks a bit like a fancy version of good old war galleon cannons or a half-truck meant literally..

where's the laser coming out in that picture? Those greens dots? I think they should be much more in center with everything else aligned right along it.

It's supposed to be a side view, the left side being the front.

Like so:


Similar proportions to "war galleon cannons" were not intended, but now that you've said it - it would actually make sense to take advantage of this.

It might look better from a different angle... Rather than making the part look like it actually fits into the side view that the ship itself is shown, perhaps try making it angled up and right (screen space), and viewed from behind / above / the side (object space, like the mark1.png in SVN).

The main problem is, what I've feared from the beginning - doing actual representations of machinery at such a small scale. If symbolism isn't used, this is what you get. A laser that could be effectively anything. A perspective view won't change this, but I'll give it a try nonetheless. At such a scale, perspective usually hides more, than it shows.

The basic shape right now is that of a triangle if you look closely at it and that's what's keeping it from looking like a laser in my opinion.

If you would reshape the whole small circle area where the green dots are and erase it by 80 percent, the laser should look more like a handrifle gun than an artillery gun if that's what you want. Of course it will look just like a random gun on that scale, could be a futuristic sniper gun too then but if you want to have it look like a laser, you should probably get rid off all the ornaments and do a rather basic laser much similar to the ones we currently use in university research labs for example..

Could you try making less busy / machiney images? A cylinder with a box on the side, tapered a bit, perhaps with a ridge along it, with a fairly simple colour scheme that's distinct from other parts (or at least other weapons) could be easily distinguishable and work better at smaller sizes. Right now you've got a whole bunch of rims and ridges and glow strips and spikey bits in a variety of colours... It's just not very iconic, which (I suspect) is making it unsuitable for use as an icon.