Shipbucket

Hi all!
I'm a long time lurker of these fantastic forums and I can say that I really love this community, and that brought me to find this the best place to ask you a question related to copyright.

The background is that in my free time I'm developing a videogame. This would be a military wargame that involve military aircraft and, being basically an indie developer, I decided to go for the safest route in terms of licensing, so I'm creating a modern "alternate" universe where I can sports aircrafts similar to real one but with different names and manufacturers.

I'm puzzled to understand how other companies manage to get through this... I suppose many opt for "I'll use F-15 Eagle as name and I will resemble the shape, if Boeing sues me let's see" since basically everything is covered by trademark.
But I get to the point, I decided to create fictional airplanes based on actual shapes of existing ones, like the tail from an F-18, the wings from F-15, the cockpit from an A-6 (a monster in this example) and so on. Not being an artist, I relied on images published here on SB, and with photoshop, basically redraw them "melting" airplanes together, trying to do them as close as possible to SB author submissions.

The below case is an example where I created a fictional aircraft from Darth Panda and Erin&LittleBird:



My question is, given that:
- My airplane is fictional per se, so no sues from airplane companies
- The colors and shapes are basically my terrible tentative to mimick DP and E&LB great work
- If you check, the tail and the wings are shaped like the M 346, the cockpit and exhaust like AMX, the nosecone by the P96F

Can I use the image I created in my commercial game?

It's paramount to me to have your opinion on that because the last thing that I want is to damage this incredible and awesome place, also I'm not even sure that I could give credits to the author (I really would like but being commercial I don't think it's feasible, if I'm wrong I will be the first to credit).

Thank you very much!

Hello and welcome, first off. Thanks for at least asking our opinion before using the art.

Unfortunately our art is not suitable for use in games due to our strict crediting requirements. If you were to draw aircraft from scratch without using any elements of our content, it would of course be free for you to use, but once you start taking content we have created it becomes a no-no.

We have received this question a few times, thanks for your respectful approach.

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USN components, camouflage colors, & reference links (World War II only)

Thank you for your reply Colosseum!
It was my priority, I created the image in these days (the only one so far) and immediately checked here. So you really don't have to thank me, on the contrary I have to thank you all for your fantastic drawing.
It makes totally sense, I was thinking that somehow a derivative could have been employed, but probably the process should have been:

Aircraft (photo or illustration) -> Drawing
And not
SB Drawing -> Drawing

So thank you again for your reply and for clearing out the issue for me!

Just for sharing, following your advices Colosseum, I started from scratch, using image reference so I redone the "mix" without using SB content, I kept however some SB visual styles that I like (the cockpit colors for example) and I can say that I'm very happy with the outcome. Moreover, I could have started with bigger resolution that will gave me more visualization options:

Here the result:

BTW, compared to SB standards it's terrible but considering that I will use 1/4 of the above size I believe it will be more than ok for my purpose