3D Icon Renderings

Development of artwork, requests, suggestions, samples, or if you have artwork to offer. Primarily for the artists.
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Josh
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3D Icon Renderings

#1 Post by Josh »

Okay, so here's my current fusion plants icon. Curiously, it looks like a fission power plant.

Image
Fusion (Fission?) Plants

I thought about it, and I came up with a new (better) Idea for the fusion plants icon; The Tokamak reactor.
http://www.cns-snc.ca/branches/Toronto/ ... okamak.gif

I thought that, because it's more of a building than a theory, it would be appropriate to render this over-sized donut in the spirit of Freeorion's Industrial Centres or Habitation Domes.

Image
Image

My problem is I have no idea how they achieved that effect, so is there somebody who knows the steps the artists took to create those particular icons?

P.S.: I have a simple model already rendered in wings3D, but I can't seem to get the screenshot or render into a jpeg or png format.

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Flatline
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Re: 3D Icon Renderings

#2 Post by Flatline »

Josh wrote:I thought about it, and I came up with a new (better) Idea for the fusion plants icon; The Tokamak reactor.
http://www.cns-snc.ca/branches/Toronto/ ... okamak.gif
It's hard to come out with a symbol for a Tokamak... anyway if it could help here are some files from JET (my workplace ^^).
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pd
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Re: 3D Icon Renderings

#3 Post by pd »

Those are probably not straight renders, but overlays ontop of screenshots or renderings. Could also be a toon shader of some kind.

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Josh
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Really?

#4 Post by Josh »

Aw crap. I guess I better get tracing then...

But to elaborate, the beauty of this concept is that nobody has to really make up an icon for a tokamak reactor, the tokamak reactor toroid is iconic all by itself, kind of the same way industrial centres uses factories and habitat domes take a hint from real life bio-domes.
The problem is making it fit with the other icons and finding a suitably simple picture that reads well at small sizes. I was thinking maybe some donut on donut action would work here.

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The Silent One
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Re: 3D Icon Renderings

#5 Post by The Silent One »

pd wrote:Those are probably not straight renders, but overlays ontop of screenshots or renderings.
That's what they are; I did them at 512x512 with a pen size of 8 and scaled them down to 128x128.
If I provided any images, code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0.

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Josh
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Really?

#6 Post by Josh »

That's interesting. I didn't do any of those things, I just used the magic wand. Needless to say, I still love your technique.

Image
Fusion_Plants

This is what Fusion plants should look like. It makes much more sense than coolant towers under an atomic sun, thereby thoroughly rocking the balls off my previous attempt.

edit:
I've tweaked the Fusion Plants a bit to read better as an icon. The levels are darker, the lines are bolder, it's been outlined and the shapes have been simplified. Maybe all the building icons should be done in this style as well. They are easily recognizable and I don't see why we couldn't cut our workload in half by using the same icon the techs use for the buildings as well, unless something animated is desired for the buildings.

All the other tech icons that unlock buildings would have to be revised, however.



It occurs to me that people might not be seeing the revised version if they saw the original first. Hit the reload button on your browser if that is the case.

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