Concept Art Thread

Thanks I'll get to work

Also, make sure to do concept work on different cells and organelles. These tasks require a little research, but will be very useful for modellers who need to know how to make the cells and organelles look like.

I think the first sprites that we need are those. Those needs to be 2D drawing(from my understanding) :

- Organelle to be able to add them in the Microbe editor that will be done early in the project
- Proto-cells that our cell will be eating to gain new organelle
- Ressources that we'll be getting on the ground, when other microbes get killed(i.e Sugar...)

For the player's microbe, I don't think we need a lot of art apart from the organelles and some texture. Most of it will be procedurally generated in the Microbe editor from my understanding.

I don't know yet about the others microbes. Should they be procedurally generated like the player's microbe or should they be premade sprites ? I think procedurally generated microbes the second would fit in the Thrive idea and would allow more flexibility in the other microbes appearance. It would also means player's microbe behavior/design would be similar to AI's microbe. It would be more complicated than simple sprite thought.

A list of what sprite are needed should be made and all asset made by member should be stored somewhere for easy access for the devloppers. We'll need at least Organelles and Proto-Cell pretty soon and it should be priorized. Someone willing to work on arts assets while taking some responsibility could easily take this job and give us a great help. Anyone is willing to help structure the arts asset creation ?

edit :

I had overlooked Nimbal post above. I totally agree with him. I'm personally pretty bad at designing nice GUI and I would like artist to give input/design it. It will then be easier to implement it while having a straightforward idea of what we want.

And as Nimbal said, go nuts in this. We want cool and innovative concept. We'll figure afterward how/if implementation will be done.

Thanks for reminding me Rod. Now that I'm off vacation I can revive the thread I used to manage the art assets. I have links to most of the art already done on the OP of this thread.

However, I need a list of organelles and other stuff to add to the OP. I would like someone to run down on what needs models and what doesn't, and lastly I will take some time right now to clear up the Mediafire download link I posted. It is missing some assets and has some defunct ones.

Any artists reading this, go check out the thread I linked and start contributing if you can. I'll make sure to mark down your name on our list of artists if you do.

Yeah, the idea is for all of the microbes to be generated procedurally. We'll have to talk about how to do that at length somewhere.
Things we should model:
flagellum
lamellipodes
Predatory Pilus
Conjugal Nuclei
Mitochondria
Chloroplasts
Thermoplasts
Slime Gland

Things we should use sprites/textures for:
cilia
bacteria on the film layer
free-living bacteria

When I google shearched Thermoplasts in the pictures section it just came up a lot of pictures of plastic tools and other plastic objects

Thriving Cheese wrote:

When I google shearched Thermoplasts in the pictures section it just came up a lot of pictures of plastic tools and other plastic objects

Have you noticed google to google says:,,Showing results for Thermoplastics''
Under it, it show: Show results for Thremoplasts.Strangely, when i opened it, it shoved me some machinery.

WilliamstheJohn wrote:

Thriving Cheese wrote:

When I google shearched Thermoplasts in the pictures section it just came up a lot of pictures of plastic tools and other plastic objects

Have you noticed google to google says:,,Showing results for Thermoplastics''
Under it, it show: Show results for Thremoplasts.Strangely, when i opened it, it shoved me some machinery.

And something tells me that Sciocont didn't meen that our microbes were gonna be able to have machinery in them...

BTW, Should you be able to see the inside of the Chloroplasts?

EDIT: how many polygons should they be?

For informational sake, Thermoplastic are plastic that are formed using temperature, you heat it and put it on a mold. Then you apply a pressure to mold it. It's one of the cheapest way to obtain the shape you want and is used in everyday object.

On topic :
A good reflex is to search with more details, Thermoplast organelle, thermoplast bactery, thermoplast microbe....

However, it doesn't show that much more information(thermoplast organelle give some image but I think it comes from organelle more than thermoplast).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think thermoplast doesn't exist in real-life but is derived from Chloroplast for our game purposes. It would mean that you could have an organism pulling energy from heat instead of sun. Only thing I find when searching thermoplast organelle is Thrive forum in first, and some information about thermoplastic in bacteria.

So take the Chloroplast, and try to give it more a look of "heat-energy-generator" instead of "light-energy-generator". I know know an accurate answer, but give it a try and be creative!

edit for the edit above my post :

I think they shouldn't be modeled in 3D but should be sprite instead. This should be decided as I've seen this discussion many times. As a number of polygon if we go 3D, I think that 100 would already be a big number considering it will be pretty small on the screen and doesn't need much details. You can have decent 3D human under 500 poly.

Correct, thermoplasts don't exist outside of our game concept- I imagine them to be black, maybe fuzzy, fibrous organelles.

~sciocont wrote:

Correct, thermoplasts don't exist outside of our game concept- I imagine them to be black, maybe fuzzy, fibrous organelles.

I'd imagined them red/orange and a little brown, with something similiar to a heater...

I'm open to see whatever comes up.

I think Chloroplasts should be the same color as the opposite of the sunlight,

On earth chloroplasts are green, this is because at green they get the most energy(absorb the most light in there situation)
however if our sun was red, I think chloroplasts would be black because that way they get the most energy because red is at the end of the spectrum. So they need all the energy they can get.

untrustedlife wrote:

I think Chloroplasts should be the same color as the opposite of the sunlight,

On earth chloroplasts are green, this is because at green they get the most energy(absorb the most light in there situation)
however if our sun was red, I think chloroplasts would be black because that way they get the most energy because red is at the end of the spectrum. So they need all the energy they can get.

Can we do like in minecraft then, where the grasses texture is actually greyscale, and then can get many different colours depending in the biome.
That we uses greyscale texture for it, wich we then can add colour to depending on the sun, in game?

Thriving Cheese wrote:

untrustedlife wrote:

I think Chloroplasts should be the same color as the opposite of the sunlight,

On earth chloroplasts are green, this is because at green they get the most energy(absorb the most light in there situa
tion)
however if our sun was red, I think chloroplasts would be black because that way they get the most energy because red is at the end of the spectrum. So they need all the energy they can get.

Can we do like in minecraft then, where the grasses texture is actually greyscale, and then can get many different colours depending in the biome.
That we uses greyscale texture for it, wich we then can add colour to depending on the sun, in game?

Hmmmm... I think so.

What's you gonna see on your gui? (ATP,nutrients,main menu button, chat window,map etc.)

Thriving Cheese wrote:

untrustedlife wrote:

I think Chloroplasts should be the same color as the opposite of the sunlight,

On earth chloroplasts are green, this is because at green they get the most energy(absorb the most light in there situation)
however if our sun was red, I think chloroplasts would be black because that way they get the most energy because red is at the end of the spectrum. So they need all the energy they can get.

Can we do like in minecraft then, where the grasses texture is actually greyscale, and then can get many different colours depending in the biome.
That we uses greyscale texture for it, wich we then can add colour to depending on the sun, in game?

Good idea- we already have info on the different colors we should use depending on light.

Quote :

Anyhow, this can be used as a chlorophyll guide because the Transmitted light (i believe you mean reflected light) is the leaf's visible color, and the Absorbed Light is the wavelengths that it wants to absorb. If leaves are maximized to the dominant color being put out of their star, or something pretty close, we have chlorophyll sorted with this handy chart.
Notice that multiple pigmentations are possible - on earth, plum-colored (purple, according to my chem book) leaves are not as common as green leaves, but we definitely have a range of yellow green through blue green leaves, which match up well with a star primarily putting out yellow light. They're enough out of phase to prevent overheating.

Star Color: Red Leaf Absorbtions: Blue Violet, violet, purple Leaf Color Orange, Yellow orange, yellow
Star Color: Orange Leaf Absorbtions: Violet, purple, red Leaf Color: yellow orange, yellow, yellow green
Star Color: Yellow Orange Leaf Absorbtions: Purple, red, Orange Leaf Color: yellow, yellow-green, green
Star Color: Yellow, leaf Absorbtions: Red, orange- yellow orange, purple leaf coloryellow green, green, blue green
Star Color: Yellow Green, (doesn't exist)Leaf Absorbtions: Red, Orange, Yellow, Leaf color: green, blue green, blue
Star Color: Green, (doesn't exist) Leaf Absorbtions: Orange, Yellow, Yellow Green, Leaf color: Blue green, blue, blue violet
Star Color: Green blue, (doesn't exist) Leaf Absorbtions: Yellow, Yellow Green, Green Leaf Color: Blue, blue violet, Purple
Star Color: Blue, Leaf Absorbtions: Yellow Green, Green, Blue Green, Leaf Color: Blue Violet, Violet, Purple, maybe some red
Star Color: blue Violet Leaf Absorbtions: Green, Blue Green, Blue Leaf Color: Violet, Purple, Red

Actually, i believe that plants on earth are mostly green because chlorophil (which is green) has other few properties that makes it way better than any other known substance.You can see a nice video about why are leafs green on
youtube. It is titled "why are leafs green", by minuteearth.

Anyway, no matter the type of sun, the best colour to soak up energy is always black. On every situation. But i agree that plants of diferent colour would be nice.

((Disclaimer, it's been a couple years since I've had a discussion on this. Feel free to correct me if I'm talking out of my rear end here))

There is a thing as too much energy, though. Black chlorophyll retains heat as well, and there's a good chance that such a plant (under our sun) would absorb too much heat, potentially throwing off all number of chemical processes. The reason that plants on Earth are green is that they actually have two types of chlorophyll, one better suited to absorbing high-energy, blue light, and the other absorbing light towards the red end of the spectrum, which has less energy, but is more abundant in our star's spectrum. Over the course of evolution, they met roughly in the middle at reflecting green light, at which point the gathered energy was pretty much sufficient for whatever the plant is doing, and thus there was little selective pressure to produce much more of one or the other.

(Incidentally, this is why leaves turn red in the fall: the red-absorbing chlorophyll, (which if I remember correctly, decays faster) is no longer produced by the plant, leaving the blue-absorbing chlorophyll behind, which in turn reflects shades of yellow and red.)

What this means is we also have to take the energy output of the star into account. Dimmer stars (particularly red ones, which emit lower-energy radiation,) would prompt darker chlorophyll, whereas brighter ones (in particular blue ones) may even need to have plants evolve reflectivity at certain spectrum lengths to prevent too much energy being gathered/being affected by the increased level of ionizing radiation (I'm mostly thinking some sort of natural sunblock here against UV.) Then again, I'm uncertain whether we're simulating ionizing radiation, so that last part could be a non-issue.

If we were to generate stars using presets (to fall in line with observed patterns) we could simply add preferred chlorophyll colors to the preset. See here for more on that.

(Sorry for all the parentheses)

Extrasolar pretty much sums it up.

Here's some concept art I drew some time ago for a fungi based humanoid:

Spoiler:

Good info Extrasolar, so its definite, we will have different colored chlorophyll.

untrustedlife wrote:

Good info Extrasolar, so its definite, we will have different colored chlorophyll.

Possibly. Every aerobic photosynthesizer on Earth uses a type of chlorophyll called Chlorophyll a, which absorbs mostly reddish light, but some blue, reflecting back mainly green. The wide variation in color of photosynthesizers that we see on Earth comes from the use of other, accessory pigments that absorb other wavelengths. These can modify the base color greatly, but they are doing just that, modifying it.

The question is if this universality is just because of the sun's spectrum, or would it also be widespread on other planets with other stellar spectrums?

(Ultimately, the only difference we'll see is whether bright blue, violet, or red plants are possible, particularly red.)

Well, I need to know I will be implementing it in my prototype. ( I will simply randomize the star and have pigments maybe evolve.)

untrustedlife wrote:

Well, I need to know I will be implementing it in my prototype. ( I will simply randomize the star and have pigments maybe evolve.)

I feel it's not my say, but I suggest we shouldn't worry too much about the exact pigments we're using, since it really won't make that much difference past cellular. I say go with the previous suggestion of having the assets for chloroplasts, etc. be greyscale, so a variable color overlay can be added in later.