Tank Concept Crits Thread

Now I've left school I've found my way round to sketching out some concepts, albeit for a long dead mod.
Wondered if anyone could give me any advice on perspective, colouring etc, as at the moment I'm just playing it by ear (or eye).
These have been pencilled, watercoloured for shade and then inked and then scanned and cropped.

Three tanks each for three diffrent factions:

Scorpion Walking Battle Tank
The legs are designed for improved maneuverability at the cost of speed in heavily damaged urban areas. They are also modular, making them easy to replace if damaged by anti-tank fire or mines, and invariably such a hit results in reduced damage to the tank because of the distance between leg and hull. The legs can also be entirely removed and the tank buried as a defensive weapon. The tank carries an anti-tank cannon as its primary weapon, two auto-tracking ball gun turrets in the main turret and a turret top manual machine gun. It carries a crew of three.

Planning to add legs on the sides at right angles to the current ones in order to improve stability and steering, also to add the ability for the legs to move left and right as well as forward and backwards. The tank body was intended to be articulated for steering but that idea just seems increasingly impractical. Also plan to change turret to a side on viewpoint.

Typhoon Hover Battle Tank
The Typhoon uses an air hover drive system to power itself across a range of terrain. This is supplemented by an anti-gravity drive system powered by a low yield nuclear reactor in the rear of the body and can be accessed by lifting the entire upper body and turret sections off the tank. The reactor requires regular maintenance which limits the independence of the Typhoon somewhat, but its speed in comparison to other tanks allows it to counter this problem to some extent. It is armed with a combined munition cannon as its primary weapon, anti-personnel energy launchers on either side of the turret and a turret top energy suppressive fire weapon.

Not really sure how to develop this further

Bulldog Main Battle Tank
The bulldog is a heavily modified version of a much older tank, which has seen action across an extended period. Hence the tank has the look of a heap of heavily armed scrap metal, and is adorned with the ?art? of the numerous crews that have served in the tank. It is otherwise fairly conventional using a tracked drive system. It is armed with dual multi-purpose cannons, a forward firing machine gun next to the driver?s compartment and a turret top machine gun. It carries a crew of three.

Unsure of how to develop this. Probably just make it more battle worn and patched as I?m happy with the general shape.

so yeah any advice, criticisms etc

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ACHTUNG SCHWINEHUND!

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great drawings as usal dr zais
i miss u

the drawing ar real great and i just love the Buldog drawing it is so sweet.

haha actually Urgel I did model the turret losely on an Abrahms, and the faction the tank is meant to be for is modelled losely on present day America, religious zealots intent on the destruction of all life on earth (alright maybe thats a little unfair)

Still I'm glad people are liking the look of things, I've just begun redrawing the scorpion in its new form.

any artistic suggestions/opinions?

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ACHTUNG SCHWINEHUND!

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I think you did a good job as far as the concepts, you might want to create vanishing points to make your concepts look a little more 3d the comments are funny a nice personal touch

although I do have some technical crits (these are based on this univers's laws of physics you can ignore this )

about what time frame is this, I would say where's the skirt on the hover ship, but I'm interested on how you designed the "hover" ability, the turbines on the frount sugest its an old fashioned hovercraft but without a skirt it technicly cant hover and thrusters like that wouldnt be powerfull enough to hold the tank up, much less retain recoil... unfortunately the concepts dont offer enough logic why they should function or be practical

the guys in Halo atleast backed their hover vehicles up on recoil factors with anti gravity fields that could couneract the force of the enviroment just enough to hover... these anti gravity generators supposedly had enough power to keep the tank from touching back down, they even managed to passivly hover by reflecting gravitational fields

wile its breif and simple, no tech diagrams ect.. it atleast has a logic path. (the walker tanks have an impracticality the legs look like they could bucle or slide rather easily durring recoil with tank treds you atleast have more of the vehicle in contact with the ground to provide traction.

I could go into the illogical idea of giant robotic suits (ala gundam) but I'll spair you

I'm not saying you have to heed my information, just a bit to think about, hell you can have an alternate universe with entirely different physics laws and thats fine I'm not going to tell you its wrong because its a game

Bulldog looks fugging awesome. Now I want to see some 3D versions of these things.

Cheers produkt you've give me alot to think about. I think the I was originally feeling that the air hover aspect of the Typhoon would be used for steering and to some extent propulsion whereas the anti-gravity aspect would be used to keep the hull above the ground. Besides that a skirt would look crap on it hence I left it off. While I like to try and do something thats concievably buildable I'm neither especially scientifically minded, nor willing to sacrifice the look of the thing too much in the name of realism

Sebbeman could you point me in the direction of any good photoshop tutorials on editing hand drawn images? my knowledge of its limited to editing photos. I should say that personally I like the rough look of them, but I think your right in that if I was going to do anything with them (ie in terms of modding) a cleanup and possibly a colour would be a good idea.

Well ShortCutMan if you can find anyone willing to waste a few hours of their lives on modelling these, I cant say it wouldnt be nice to see them in 3D. My max skills are far below the task however

Yeah I see what you mean spacecowboy, but I felt like making them too heavy would just render the tank immobile, I was going for a more nimble look and since the legs are intended to be easily replaceable survivability would not be a major factor. But I'll play around with some diffrent leg designs on the redraw, and possibly reduce the hull and turret slightly to fit with what leg design I settle on.

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ACHTUNG SCHWINEHUND!

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I like the creativity behind the designs. As mentioned above, drawing some perspective lines may help you make them look a bit more realistic and help you clean up some of the symmetry lines, but it's a bit late to do that now for these sketches. For mechanical drawings, unless you're going for a really organic look, it's very useful to draw perspective lines and use straight edges for the basic sketch so you end up with nice clean proportions. Otherwise the drawings look great!

Don't use a blue ink pen, a regular blue pencil (might've been unclear on that) will do just fine.

Looks like something pulled out of a comic now

In other words, looking good.

Those are fugging cool, especially the first one. I'd love to see those 3d and ingame someday.

In fact, if you ever want to go forwards with them, find a 3d artist to whip 'em up and give me a shout. I'd love to do code/mapping for something like that on a simple RTS engine (note; time constraints prevent anything other than a default RTS engine - no hard code )

haha thanks, how've you been chris?

I started a design doc for an RTS mod actually Ambershee, although based on quite diffrent concepts from this. It was going to be a homeworld 2 total conversion changing it to an air war RTS but it never really got much beyond a few rough sketches and outlines of two sides.

I've never really thought about a more conventional RTS, what engine were you thinking of?

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ACHTUNG SCHWINEHUND!

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well I guess the Generals engine would be the obvious choice, unless they have something else in the development pipeline worth waiting for.

Although to be honest I dont have the time to dedicate to modding full time what with work, travelling etc its more just a casual sketch here and there thing to improve my drawing generally, even just joining a team as a concept artist would probably require too much commitment and more time than I have.

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