Shipbucket

Hello

I am newbie on this forum, so that of course I have not know how to drawing these types of pixelated illustrations.
But I have long time enthusias in drawing jet fighter cockpits' layouts (using ... Excel) that I would like to share it here, like this:


Originally, the motivation of mine is create an Ace Combat liked game, so:
- Help 3D modeling or stencil programing more productivity
+ Share the same model as most as possible
+ Reuse modularized instruments as most as possible
- Help player to interchange between aircrafts easier (easy to learn new aircrat)
+ Shrink the gap between Western style and Eastern style cockpits
+ Shrink the gap between same configuration/role aircrafts
+ Gradually change the level from old generations to new generation cockpits
+ Enlarge necessity instrument and ignore(or hide) unnecessaty things.
- Help game/scale model developer to write manual documents
- Help player to experience both analogue and digital instruments, somewhat in comic/cartoom style
+ Based on cockpit layout drawings of flight manuals so that it is easy to understand.

Of course, I will find a way to draw these cockpits in shipbucket style drawing, and find buddies to create them with me.
Sorry for my bad English .

In excel you say? Absolute madness. I am not sure how something so tangential ties up to the production of a videogame but obviously you put a lot of effort in this and now understand the different layouts of cockpits and how they work. If you're going to do this in a raster pixelart format I suggest weaponbucket scale (250px=1m) or spergscale (1cm=1px). Good luck : )

_________________
w o r k l i s t :
Hatsuyuki-class Escort Ships . . . <3

Hello and welcome to the Shipbucket!
It's an impressive work, especially considering it was done with Excel.
Visually it reminds me the computer games of the 1980s (and to me it's certainly not a bad thing, as I love the old games) and I'm looking forward to see more of Your works, especially translated into Shipbucket style.

Thank you all for your advices and encouragement.

But it did not really cost much effort as you think.
The cockpits are somewhat grid-like so that I have choosed Excel for that purpose.
The cell borders are used to draw, not take much time more than pixel manipulation, I think.
The drawing does not related directly to creating game, it used to design player view/UI, and provide simplified but reasonable coordinates for modeling.
Very glad to meet friends with same old-game favourites.

I will learn pixelart ASAP .

My first works ^^. It is a fiction cockpit, in a scale about 250pxl/m.
This is a hybrid between Su-27M and Su-30M prototypes' cockpits.



Please give me some evaluation.

Hi!
At a glance it looks a really good work, but for some more-in-depth evaluation it would be preferable to have it saved as .png, instead of .jpg (as the jpg compression creates lots of ugly artifacts that complicate any such considerations)

Sorry, I have fixed it. Cannot imagine that I could have a such mistake.

Much better now.
I really like Your work, but I have few thoughts. (and of course it's up to You if you consider them to be of any value to your project )
1) One is that perhaps there could be too far-ranging scale of shades on some elements, like throttle, cover over the instrument panel (forgot the technical term) and perhaps the stick. I don't necessarily mean they should be fewer of them (now it seems to be 5-6 of them), but that now they go almost from white to black, which is IMHO excessive (of course that's something that IRL would depend on shading conditions, but I suppose that having even 6 shades but only within 50-70% of the scale there is now, could suffice).
2) Perhaps it would be more practical to have digits on the instruments in just one shade only, and the hands/needles on the instruments in another, so they would be always more easily distinguishable.
3) Maybe it wouldn't be bad to try have a legspace not entirely black, but to attempt to make at least some vague representation of "things that are there".
4) Pilot's legs - I have to admit that I'm not totally sold on their shading - both because of the strong contrast between shades (see point 1), but also that this "topographic map" IMHO doesn't necessarily represent the way shades spread on such places. Also, perhaps You might be interested (or not, of course) to experiment with shading things that have less-solidly-formed shapes (such as flying suit - but only these, not necessarily on the rest of the cockpit) in a manner that does not create so sharp borders between shades? On the picture below, on the right, I've added some examples (from my older works - sorry for such shameless self-promotion ) where I tried to create something that would resemble smooth transition between shades without resorting to gradients.

Ah, and one general thought - maybe You could consider "making black less black" - in the sense, that IRL actually not that many things genuinely described as black (including black paint) are truly jet-black, and often are really just very, very dark grey.



In any case, I really like what You did, and hope to see more Your works soon! Thumbs up!

Thank you very much for encouraging me and appreciate your advice.

For (1) and (4), I really don’t like to have many details about the stick or throttle, so I am trying to hide them using the pilot hands. One more reason is that they are different between aircrafts so that hiding them can reduce much of effort. I really want to use the dithering effect you've said, but I have not yet been good in pixel editor so that simply reduce the color range (somewhat similar to manga/comic drawing).

For (2), I have digits in one shade already, the single white dot on each digit is just the short line (marker) on the gauge. There is not enough space so that the digits are overlapped by those markers.

For (3), Yes, I have added some pedals' color, but for other unnecessary details (for example, the radio device), I decided to use radio communication balloons to hide them ^_^.

So that, the result becomes something like this (F-15C cockpit) :



I will improve the quality while drawing new cockpit, and brush up the old one when having time.

For me, what are called necessary (important) in basic-game-style cockpits are:
- Flight control instruments (ADI, HSI, barometric altimeter, radio altimeter, airspeed indicator (with Mach number), vertical velocity, G-meter, angle of attack indicator)
- Weapon control instruments (selected master arm weapon, remaining ammunition number of each weapon)
- Fuel quantity indicator
- Engine control instruments (tachometer, engine temperature)
- Radarscope (maybe integrated with map), target view camera
- Radar Warning Receiver
- Configuration control: Landing gear, flaps, arrested hook (optional), swing wings' angle (optional), thrust-vectoring nozzle angle (optional)
- Damaged status lamps
- Throttle and stick
- Radio chatter contents
- Flight clock
- Mission information, mission briefing.

Hi!
As for the Su-27/-30 cockpit - 2) I'm not sure if that extra dot as gauge marker really serves any meaningful purpose at this scale - on the other hand, I think it would be more practical to make the hands/needles of these gauges mre distinguishable color-wise (regardless of accuracy).

As for the F-15 - I have a feeling that it looks just too dark now.