Assets Fundamental Starships

So this is a project I've been ruminating on for about a month. I made some 3d printable models for some starships for Twilight Imperium 3 and I loved the designs so I thought I'd put them to use in Unity with PBR textures and a little bit of animation.

The goal for this project is to have substance controls that are usable in Unity. Right now that means edge wear level and the colours are changeable.

So as you can see here, the colours are completely editable. The first thing ANYONE does when they get there hands on this seems to be to set all the tones as garish as possible.

With the designs I am kinda aware of how many spaceships are on the asset store so i've been looking at slightly older designs (Ralph Mcquirrie etc.) to make the ships have a slightly retro-future feel. I don't have the bravery or skill to do a full 50s style retro-future asset yet, but it is a pack I want to do at some point. I also read this guy for some more design tips https://androidarts.com/spaceships/spaceship_design.htm and really tried to push those primary forms to give them unique silhouettes for RTS or RPG games.

Anyway, hopefully I will keep updating this with new stuff as I go it and let me know if there is anything you would like in a substance controllable pack like this.

 

So I spent today working on the colour picker some more so i thought I'd give an insight on how that works.

I use Substance Painter for all my texturing, although to make the colours an editable feature in Unity, I need a way to mask areas on the texture that I want the user to edit. Certain parts I want to leave uneditable (such as the thrusters) so I paint the various parts of the mesh with RGB values.

I could export a different mask for each colour (which I did initially) but this meant I had 3 2k textures whereas this is only 1, which significantly reduces memory requirements. I then use an RGB picker in Designer to pick out the colours from the texture and convert them to greyscale masks. Hopefully this will significantly reduce the memory issues my 4k of RAM was having with Unity!

 

Been working on the colour picker and wear level last week.

 

Been off for a few days working on this badboy: The Dreadnought. The ring spins and the cannons have a rig that matches up really well with the free turret script on Unity.


Making the city on the inside of the ring was fun for the first 20 or so city blocks...

 

Looks good! But I don't believe your approach of focusing on retro-sci-fi art is a good idea. Before I read your first post, my impression was that the design was not juiced up or modern (e.g. Halo style), and also wasn't exactly realistic (simulation style) either, and those two camps are probably 90% of the customer base for spaceships on the asset store. More unique styles of course might be needed for some customers, but I'm not sure if they would make up a significant amount of that market. You might want to try to gauge the interest somehow, such as analyzing what's selling (or not selling) on the store, if you haven't already.

Anyway good luck with it all!

 

Yeah, it's a hard market to find a niche in, that's for sure! I'm hoping the Substance controls will give the ships something that stands out from the crowd. Thanks for the feedback, though, I will definitely do my research.

 

Added a controller to the ships with (simple) particle effects which allow the user to fly the ship around. Also uploaded a quick little demo scene to Itch.io. Definitely still need some work to make the scene work (some asteroids as points of reference would be nice.) But I think it gives a nice sense of the ships

https://the-environmentalist.itch.io/fundamental-starships-frigate