Dixie's AE art stuff

[Dixie]

New today! Royal Navy early war battleships.

King George V (Prince of Wales)
Queen Elizabeth (Warspite)
Revenge (Ramillies)
Repulse

Available as individual downloads from my website, or all four in one zip file here:

Royal Navy Battleships 1941

[Akos Gergely]

Thanks, great job as always! What's next on the agenda... ?

[TOMLABEL]

OOOOH! Great stuff, Dixie!!! Love the KG camo!

[Don Bowen]

Camo No! See Si!

[Dixie]

ORIGINAL: csatahajos

Thanks, great job as always! What's next on the agenda... ?

Next (in slow time) is the carriers, followed by the destroyers, corvettes and other little ships. Maybe a few misc types here and there as well.

[Dixie]

ORIGINAL: Don Bowen


Camo No! See Si!

[:D]

Non-camo would be a bit pointless really, seeing as the AE team already made good ship art in plain grey [:D]

[SuluSea]

Looking Super , Dixie!!! [&o]

[JWE]

ORIGINAL: Dixie
Non-camo would be a bit pointless really, seeing as the AE team already made good ship art in plain grey [:D]

Well, that’s not really true. Ships start the war in grey, but then they get painted blue, and then get painted that Measure that has a blue hull and light grey topsides. And the Brits have a more noticeably greenish grey, and the French have a much lighter grey with a tinge of yellow. There’s even some dazzle in the box.

Something I found, that you may wish to try, is making the dazzle on the hull the full color intensity, but backing seriously off on, color contrast, at the main deck level. You still get the visual impression of the sweep of the paint job, but the superstructure detail remains visible.

[edit] Damn, I hate jpg, it makes everything look the same, but you get the idea.

[Dixie]

ORIGINAL: JWE

ORIGINAL: Dixie
Non-camo would be a bit pointless really, seeing as the AE team already made good ship art in plain grey [:D]

Well, that’s not really true. Ships start the war in grey, but then they get painted blue, and then get painted that Measure that has a blue hull and light grey topsides. And the Brits have a more noticeably greenish grey, and the French have a much lighter grey with a tinge of yellow. There’s even some dazzle in the box.

Technicalities will get you nowhere [:-][:'(]

Something I found, that you may wish to try, is making the dazzle on the hull the full color intensity, but backing seriously off on, color contrast, at the main deck level. You still get the visual impression of the sweep of the paint job, but the superstructure detail remains visible.

[edit] Damn, I hate jpg, it makes everything look the same, but you get the idea.

I think I understand your point, something along the lines of the 2nd view below?

We've got the Revenge class BB:
Plain Grey
All over camo
Just the hull camo'd
A more transparent version of the camo overlay

[JWE]

ORIGINAL: Dixie
I think I understand your point, something along the lines of the 2nd view below?

We've got the Revenge class BB:
Plain Grey
All over camo
Just the hull camo'd
A more transparent version of the camo overlay

A combination of the last two. The hull with full-on camo, all the colors and stuff, the superstructure above main deck with a more transparent camo overlay. Paint.net has a cool blend thing that blends the boundaries and makes them almost invisible. That way, you can really get an appreciation of the camo color scheme, while minimizing the negative impact of stark contrast variations on superstructure details.

Some real quick thoughts.

No, it ain't technically correct, but these are teensy weensey little things when they are displayed, so you art guys have to put a little bit of visual presentation in front of the quest for strict historical accuracy. As Don Bowen says, camo is designed to disguise ships. So who wants to see a bunch of indeterminate blobs on the combat screen? Camo can, and should, be colorful, but it shouldn't obscure the details. There are ways to do that.

Last thing is 'color'. Color is so very important, so very, very, important. Color takes the place of contrast, at this scale. Please don't make the mistake of thinking that early war ships are grey. I had to use 24-bit color to save those puppies because they are so varied in appearance. Just fyi.

[Akos Gergely]

You know Dixie that I love your artwork but this last, more transparent version of R class looks cool. In the ship model world we call this the scale effect. That's why matching the paintjob to the original is really difficult as with the scale getting smaller tones and shades are getting darker and it seems it works just as well in computer graphics.

Ohh btw JWE, is there a reason why the horizon is fixed in the ship info display? Probably it's just me but the ship arts that have their waterline below the horizon (like here in Dixie's example) appear in the ship info window with their below horizon part overlapped by water. So it looks like the ship is sitting much lower in the water...am I missing something?

[JWE]

ORIGINAL: csatahajos
Ohh btw JWE, is there a reason why the horizon is fixed in the ship info display?

Yes. It's in the code.

Probably it's just me but the ship arts that have their waterline below the horizon (like here in Dixie's example) appear in the ship info window with their below horizon part overlapped by water. So it looks like the ship is sitting much lower in the water...am I missing something?

No, because Dixie's stuff is 1 pixel lower than what the 'fetch and show' stuff is looking for. Dixie's last bottom row is cut off.

[Dixie]

The new stuff (battleships so far) uploaded on the website should all be shifted one row up and all future stuff will be.  A new cruiser file will be put on tomorrow with modified pics.  The R Class BB on the previous page is a 'leftover' from before AE's release when I was working on using 'blank' (grey) ship sides and adding the camo as layers in paint.NET.

[Dixie]

Something for the future today [:D] HMS Exeter in her Dec 1941 config and paint, and a hypothetical scheme for her 1943 refit (if she survives that long) based on a pattern worn by some RN cruisers in 1943.

[Akos Gergely]

Gimme more!

[SuluSea]

Dixie, any ETA on your RN carriers? If you've done anything on them can we have a look? Thanks.

[Dixie]

ORIGINAL: SuluSea

Dixie, any ETA on your RN carriers? If you've done anything on them can we have a look? Thanks.

ETA is next week, same for the preview. I'm stuck away from home at the moment.

[JWE]

ORIGINAL: csatahajos
<snippy snippy>
Ohh btw JWE, is there a reason why the horizon is fixed in the ship info display?
<more snippy snippy>

Ok, finally got some time, so ...

There's nothing that "technically" prevents moving the horizon (and the ship, too) up or down. But some things get overlayed depending on where the placement routine thinks the horizon is and where it thinks the center of a ship is. So those cute little bow waves are positioned "x" number of pixels "up", because that's where the horizon line (waterline) is. Same with those cute little flames and smoke columns. That's pretty much the reason the horizon is "fixed"; it really isn't, but it would look pretty silly if the bow wave was at A turret. [;)]

Ciao. John

[Dixie]

ORIGINAL: JWE

ORIGINAL: csatahajos
<snippy snippy>
Ohh btw JWE, is there a reason why the horizon is fixed in the ship info display?
<more snippy snippy>

Ok, finally got some time, so ...

There's nothing that "technically" prevents moving the horizon (and the ship, too) up or down. But some things get overlayed depending on where the placement routine thinks the horizon is and where it thinks the center of a ship is. So those cute little bow waves are positioned "x" number of pixels "up", because that's where the horizon line (waterline) is. Same with those cute little flames and smoke columns. That's pretty much the reason the horizon is "fixed"; it really isn't, but it would look pretty silly if the bow wave was at A turret. [;)]

Ciao. John

It seems to be that it's one pixel higher than the original WitP, or it might be that the blank shil file I got from somewhere was set up one pixel low for the ship location.

[JWE]

Well, there ain’t no rule, but the ‘rule’ is 15 pixels. For a side, that includes one pixel of frame at the bottom and 14 pixels of ocean. For a shill, I put a little stripe at pixel 16 and drop in my ship blanks so the bottom hull row just covers it. So all the blank ship hulls start at y = 16 and that seems to work ok.

Anyway, just fyi.