Ever hand drawn 1200 dots…I mean stars?

I have now, apparently. The Time Pilot 84 control panel artwork has a pretty tremendous star field, and each star itself takes very little time to draw, in fact, I think it takes less time to trace all of the stars than to isolate and build a complete raster star layer. However, some of the stars will be raster and here’s why.

Time Pilot artwork – Interesting detail in the star bursts

The particular panel has a unique detail that I haven’t seen before, and find a little bit strange seeing as the rest of the artwork isn’t – how shall we say – nearly as amazing as an Atari cabinet. Some of the major burst fade out with an outer-lying crosshatch pattern. Check out a little bit of that detail here;

Time Pilot 84 Detail

Here is a detail of how the Time Pilot 84 CPO artwork looks now without those major bursts;

Time Pilot 84 CPO Progress

I have picked out 20 of the largest stars that show this crosshatching and will be using Photoshop to touch up and isolate those selections to then go back and lay them in as a separate white raster layer. You can see the first one I took here, from the dirty dingy scan above with the grid line through it to this;

Time Pilot 84 Crosshatch Channel

No other crosshatched artwork came to mind when I wrote this post, but if you know of another arcade cabinet that has a similar style, comment on a name. It would be cool to reference back, maybe something else that Konami made around the same time.

Here are some similar arcade posts

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Comments
User Gravatar

This is a really interesting detail. I worked in printing for about 10 years and I could swear I see dots in the fringes. So, it wouldn’t surprise me if this were done with offset or screen printing. I’d have to see it really close.

User Gravatar

Ouch Jeff!!

Worse than the Mad Planets Bezel??

User Gravatar

Tell me about it. Looks like the Mad Planets bezel starfield was only 235 objects, so a mere sixth….

Which reminds me, I should do another backup 😉

User Gravatar

Hey .. have you ever used this method?
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=21915.0
I tested it when I originally first tackled the Mad Planets Bezel years ago .. b4 I lost the file in the hardware crash if you remember … on the blue speckled color separation on the space ship. I was quite surprised at the results… although not perfect… but better than I expected

Obviously only good in a few circumstances .. but may help your 1000-odd star job 🙂

User Gravatar

I know about work paths, but this idea had not crossed my mind. Thanks much for this link Sprig.

Now, just my luck, I’ll never do anything with a star field ever again, *virtual knock on wood*.

Leave a comment

Your email address is never displayed and cannot be spammed. If your comments are excessively self-promotional you will be banned from commenting. Read our comment privacy policy.

(required)

(required)