Whew! Here we are at the double digits! Oh, by the way, I draw all of the space scenes in Adobe Illustrator. All credit for tracing images from the game where it's due, and all that.
I've always been curious about Adobe Illustrator. What's the advantage over making images in Photoshop or scanning your own drawings?
It's all vector-based, so you have a lot of different sorts of control over the image than you do with a raster-based system like Photoshop. Basically Illustrator is software designed for
drawing, while Photoshop is design for photo editing. Obviously they are both very powerful and versatile, and can be made to do lots of things, but the fundamental difference is that of vector versus raster images. You can scale things any way you like without any image degradation. You can easily change the line weight AFTER you've drawn something. You can adjust line placement, curves, etc. to your heart's content.
I wanted a very clean line quality for the spaceships. My theory was that razor-sharp lines would help to establish a sense of scale. I suppose that something similar could be achieved with an set of rapidographs, but that would be expensive.
