Shipbucket

eine kleine karnickel...

I think my outmost purpose would be of getting rules that gives everyone room to work with. I do not intend to impose things that would alter or demand our key artists to suddendly change they way of drawing things.

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Shipbucket mainsite, aka "The Archive"
New AU project "Aravala"

I'm with Golly on this. Most of the ships I've drawn have structures that fall on the ragged edge of what's do-able with the style rules. I'll reiterate something I've said in the past: I'm for "the rules" but there needs to be adjustments to allow for ships from other time periods, weird shapes, and such. Working with the rules it it clear that they have evolved (wonderfully, I'll add) for modern vessels.

Color:
Regulating color is fine up to a point if one has no idea of hull color. It would be a good idea to have color tables incorporated into "the rules". I've seen in old posts various attempts to create just that for various gray tones, etc. Something like that could be done for different navies (20th Century and maybe late 1800's).

I've a deep background regarding period color, interpretation, etc. outside of SB, regulating color really bothers be...but I can live with rules up to a point. Besides, most of what I draw falls outside of modern painting standards.

Shading:
The 45 degree shading concept is a slick and handy tool. It very works well with modern hull forms.

It needs expansion for sailing ships. 2 tone shading doesn't illustrate adequately sail driven hulls. The hull shape looks too blocky, not smooth and flowing.

My solutions have been to:
1) NOT illustrate under hull shading
2) use 5 tones of closely related color (deep shadow to highlight).
3) I've also used the highlighting stripe method for cylinders.

The series of FD Subs I've been doing lately also use 5 tones of color. Fewer than that and my eye interprets a flat slab sided shape.

I'd like to propose a modification to the 3 pixel walkable platform rule.
Why: Sometimes platforms and other structures appear overly thick and out of scale.

Try black lower line and exposed end, center line whatever color is appropriate to the structure, top line to be a gray shade or dark structure shade related to the center line. It is a compromise both outlines and reduces the apparent weight of the platform.

Masting Proposal:
Masts and sails should be treated like antenna, rails and similar structures. Black outlines work for lower masts and heavy spars. Topgallant masts (and above) and upper spars become out of scale with black outlines.

A workable solution is to make the back edge of masts black, the leading edge a dark mast color. (Note: this also avoids the double black rule). Yards and spars: Lower line black, upper line a dark yard/spar color). The net result is a reduction of the apparent visual weight. Ditto for mast platforms, ditto for extreme ends of spars/yards.

Sails:
We have 3-4 methods of doing sails. They should all be allowed. They each take 3-6 colors. They should be exempt from the black outline rule as they are of effectively translucent materials. In general treat them like rigging, antenna, rails, etc.

Windows/glass:
We need several acceptable colors. The basic blue becomes invisible on some hull colors. As portholes vary in size: small ports should/can be the smallest visible on the hull in question. Please don't force a standard and possibly over sized port.

FD SCALE:
I've been doing FD lately. The scale allows for amazing possibilities in detail. Don't constrain this scale as tightly as is needed with SB Scale!
See:http://www.shipbucket.com/forums/viewto ... p&start=10
The above thread has my USS Wasp in 2 versions: Semi constrained by SB Rules and SB Compliant (with both graded shading and a 3 tone lower hull).

Very busy week but I'll try to squeeze in some thoughts on FD Rules.

CraigH

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In active progress
More Ships with Sails
Early Torpedo Boats in SB and FD Scales
Some railroad stuff
More random stuff that strikes me!

Hello, I am new to shipbucket.com, so if I don't understand something, please forgive. I having be working some ships in just last six months, mostly harrier carriers type. Why was the scale 2 pixels = 1 foot get set as a standard? I find the carrier drawings I have downloaded from shipbucket.com to study have "scale drift" in them. Even the metric scale used on every ship has drift (pixel ratio of 10 meters and pixel ration of 100 meters, not the same).

With current scale of 2 pixels = 1' that means 1 meter = 6.562 pixels. I remember from school (perhaps incorrectly) that Metrics is based on units of 10. Can shipbucket.com standards support a second scale ratio, that of 1 meter = 10 pixels? I believe that using such a scale ratio would reduce the scale drifting I have seen and increase the accuracy of the art posted on shipbucket.com. What do others think?

Hi WW1er,

I think that the SB scale is set as 2 px = 1 ft because older drawings will generally be available in Imperial rather than metric measurements. To operate from a metric base would introduce those very same conversion errors that you are worried about.

The length scale that you're talking about is, I think, intended for display purposes only rather than accurate measurement (though I think that the differences you've noted will be due to the feet-to-metres distances rounding off somewhere), if SB were to support a different standard (not saying that it would, I'm not in a position to make that sort of decision) how would you indicate the difference? Two slightly-incompatible standards that are difficult to distinguish would seem to be of less utility that a single standard even if there are some things about the standard that are not precisely as you'd like them.

Regards,
Adam

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Public Service Announcement: This is the preferred SB / FD font.

NSWE: viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5695

I have to agree with Adam on this. At this scale the rounding errors happen and are unavoidable. +/- 1 pixel for 96dpi drawings happens and at the end of the day really don't matter.

Enjoying the process of creating a well executed drawing in a huge common database is fun, educational, and a fun way to burn some time. It outweighs a handfull of scale centimeters any day.

It's more fun to poke at some of the other drawing standards. (Draw well, be flexible and have thick skin if you do).

CraigH

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In active progress
More Ships with Sails
Early Torpedo Boats in SB and FD Scales
Some railroad stuff
More random stuff that strikes me!

A significant number of the early drawings (those that predate the first forum, which came online in mid 2008) do suffer from 'drift' as you call it. a large part of this is simple misunderstanding of known measurements of various ships (these errors were on the US CVNs on the order of several percent). As the style has developed, and the community has grown, these errors have become smaller (but still show up on occasion). The scale bar is its own problem - one that should just be ignored (that's what I do!).
One thing to keep in mind is that while many of the members of the community come from places where the metric system is the standard (and those that don't have at least a passing familiarity with metric and/or SI), "Shipbucket" is defined as being in the style, at the scale given. Anything else would not be 'Shipbucket'. While the board does support at least three other scales: Carbucket, Gunbucket, and that insanity (on par with the Metric Slug) that is FD scale*; I don't see any other scales being made standard any time soon.

*The work is great, but the choice of scale isn't.

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In the end, every scale we would choose would be arbitary for some users. The SB scale really wasen't chosen by "us" it was just a scale someone had used to make rather crude drawings, and then bunch of online artists (of wich few remains today) begun redoing these drawings in same wane and as the popularity rose, the "bucket" as a community grew also and became what we are now. Everyone is naturally free to draw things in their own scale as well, but it would not consist as SB art, and we wont upload it in the mainsite nor support it. In the bottom of this forum list is the "non-shipbucket" drawing section where everyone can express themselves in any scale they want

As for the scaling itself, its just simple mathematichs. As an engineer myself, I kinda don't understand how it can constantly cause proplems to people. In fact most of the proplems we have had in scaling don't come frome the scaling itself, but from wrongly interptions of where the dimensions should be calculated, or bad references. Those proplems would exist still in every other scale as well.

_________________
Shipbucket mainsite, aka "The Archive"
New AU project "Aravala"

Hi all,

For what it's worth, and further to Golly's (and Timothy's) point, every drawing I've ever put on SB has been done as a metric drawing, just converted back to 6in-scale for referencing the appropriate points like the deck heights, etc, etc. Oh, and when I said "older drawings" I was actually referring to the ship blueprints rather than any older SB works. Particularly for older ships, I'd guessed that such blueprints and deck plans are going to be available in Imperial only - some of the source material used will pre-date adoption of the metric system in the country concerned.

Regards,
Adam

_________________
Public Service Announcement: This is the preferred SB / FD font.

NSWE: viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5695

As I am a relative newcomer to Shipbucket (only a year), I'm going to keep most of my opinions to myself for the moment. That said, two things I'd like to put out there:

1) As was noted previously up-thread, sailing ships don't really work too well at SB scale which was, after all, intended to illustrated frigates circa WWII. I request that the rules give the option of 2xSB (4 px per foot) for any vessels, sailing or otherwise, less than, say 50m LOA, to pick a figure.

2) I dislike the notion that someone can 'claim' a ship to draw. As has already been observed, some do that, then proceed to vanish, possibly for good. Second, so far as I can discover, there is no listing of who has claimed what ships. More fundamentally, why should there be only one interpretation of a ship? Personally, I would very much like to see multiple takes on the same thing. I think, as long as the drawing is of sufficiently high quality as to be uploaded, multiple versions are a good thing.

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Done: PCT-55 Orca

In progress: ASL-20 HMCS Cormorant

May try next: HMCS Oriole, STV Goldcrest, Bluenose II