Great work on that grappler one!
Any chance of putting them all together at some point? I dont mean collating all your images, i mean place them on a mockup game screenshot - like an upwards scrolling shooter or something? Id like to see how they look when theyre the ‘proper’ size.
xoor - awesome man! I love it 
the texture looks a tad dull/blurry, if you play with the contrast slider just a bit you’ll keep your 16 colors but hopefully make it pop just a bit more.
Andy - thanks! When I am all finished I intend to 
Because of schedule reasons and the fact that I’ve been doing these for a month already I will probably one do one more week of them before stopping. Plus I am eager to do some scenes!
xno - thanks, I’m glad you like it! somebody requested alpha planes a little while ago so I had to oblige them
Thanks again guys, the last ship in the alien fleet will go up tonight!
Yippee! That’s it for alien week. Inspiration here is probably TOO obviously Samus’s ship from Metroid Regardless, I am not sure what I am going to make next week, I think it will be planets/locations though, so I have some backdrops for the renders whenever I get around to them. Thanks!
EDIT - I think for the mockup renders I will do one at DS resolution and one at PSP resolution, with fairly restrictive lighting, etc. Then probably a “collector” style wallpaper of all the ships rendered plainly in a nice grid, and then hopefully nice big wallpapers of the 2 mockup scenes at higher res.
Nice! I suggest for the planets that you make a few moons as well for some of them. I’d like to see a mechanized/city planet or moon!
Phil - here you go
It didn’t turn out quite like I was hoping, but I think it still basically works. I was having a hard time expressing an entire city block with a single pixel, I’m not sure there’s a good way to do it…
EDIT - This is Tuesday’s “mini ship,” I have to work on paid stuff tomorrow! Mini-ships will be back on Wednesday night!
Well, what can i say that hasn’t been said yet? These are just awesome! I keep coming back to this thread and each time I do I am surprised, delighted, and know why cgtalk is the place to be. With talent and fun all mixed together how can you lose?
These are simply great. You have inspired me to try my hand and super duper plasma pooper low-poly modeling (that means really low like you have been doing…)
Keep up the good work! These are fantastic!! =)
-Bair
Woot! Nice job with the city planet:)
I’ll have to give this very low-poly stuff a try at some point, that way I can actually finish something and work my way from up there!
men maybe i shoold try to… its look complicated…is it hard…??ho well il find out!..
i really sincerely hope you don’t mind me posting one i did here. if it bugs you tell me and i will pull it out. no worries.
first let me say its pretty tough working with such a small texture page and such a low poly limit. the fact that you do it so well is a testament to your skill and abilities. so here it is. my tech tank… shrugs
doesn’t bug me in the least! I would try working with the “pencil” tool in photoshop next time, it should help you get a cleaner, crisper final map! Also, on low poly forms, for some reason things like more “round” if they are not axis-aligned; e.g. if your tank barrel was a diamond-shape along the cross-section, rather than a square. Keep at it!
If you didn’t notice, Daily Mini Ships has kind of ground to a halt, so I think it is time to be done with them. This has been really fun to work on, and I am happy that this little project was able to inspire some of you too! The last few things I wanted to do was a couple of mockup screenshots for games these ships might be in. I think the Sony PSP is VERY well-suited to classic side-scrolling shooters because of its 16:9 screen ratio. So here is a 480x272 OpenGL + particles render of some of my models:
In all likelihood it would actually look better than that on PSP, as these models were made with the DS in mind. I will post a DS mockup soon! Thanks for all the encouragement and posts throughout this project, it made it really fun.
Looks great - that planet looks a bit iffy in my opinion though. I think it would be a lot higher poly, or perhaps an image plane. When i first saw it, i thought it was really low poly, but i assumed it would be seen far away in the background.
Now hows about making another pic, but in an ikaruga style vertical shooter? You can try and cram hundreds of ships on the screen!
Franklyn - Later rather than sooner I’m afraid I have some plans for a multi-directional shooter on my homebrewed game engine, but it will be a few years yet!
Arman - I have to finish up my obligations to Halogen, then I will be slowing down my side work a little for a while, so I can have a life and all that I’m not sure what sort of real project I will tackle next, but in a couple months I think something with dinosaurs would be really fun…
Andy - yeah, I actually have some ideas for how to do some better low poly planets using billboarded sprites (Mario 64 used these for all the bomb-omb style characters to great effect), but Wings doesn’t do billboarding so I opted for a plain old sphere. If I had some actual hardware to mess with there are 3 or 4 different approaches I would really like to play with to get a true planetary kind of effect - a translucent cloud layer, a little atmospheric corona, etc…When I originally designed them, I was thinking they might be part of like a Starfox style menu screen, or part of the game world but once you got so close they started to look bad it would just assume you were landing on that planet, etc.
Maybe for the DS screens I will use the 2 screens together to create one tall window for some hot vertical action…
EDIT - Just finished the 2nd of the 3 final images, this is just a simple collection of all the models and textures, it is a big pic though so I’m just putting the thumb up here, click to see the full image!
