Artist's commentary
Caldari Scorpion Battleship
In 2010 I had the privilege of redesigning one of the most iconic ships in EVE Online - The Caldari Scorpion Battleship.
The texture quality of the old ship asset was showing its age, along with some geometry errors that proved impossible to fix without major rework, so we decided to rebuild the ship from scratch. As per your custom today, we went with a more symmetrical design, one of the reasons being it granted us more texture space to really improve the detail of the ship. The images featured here show the new redesign, and the old version from the Trinity Expansion.
During that same time period I did an in-depth evaluation of the texture packing system used by the EVE online client, based on theories I had during the work on the Trinity expansion. The conclusions of the research and the resulting improvements made can be seen here in a development blog I wrote on the subject: http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/art-blog-improvement-of-textures-and-a-new-scorpion-model/?_ga=1.202037461.595586280.1391034377