Flyer Vehicle Designs

[Littleteapot]

Hello everyone, i'd like to get some critique and tips on these designs. How to improve them and my own technique.

[Amit Dutta]

Are these finished? The main thing that stands out for me is the sketchiness of your designs. You are depicting hard edged surfaces but you rarely use straight lines or nice clean curves as needed. The lineart from your original sketches needs to come out or be integrated into the final render unless you are going for a cel shaded look.
I recommend Scott Robertson's vids on youtube and maybe his Gnomon dvd's to get a really good understanding of the approach to hard surface rendering in a more methodical and controlled way, because that is the nature of the beast unfortunately. I think you also need to work on understanding how light affects form and refining your use of value control to show off form. Again Scott Robertson is awesome for this, and the "bible" Colour and Light by Gurney outlines most of the lighting variables and conditions you would ever need.
As a general case, I find almost white backgrounds really hurt my eyes with the contrast so maybe dial it down a notch.

You can also search out car or industrial design concept sketch vids on youtube, which often have some useful tips and techniques you can learn from. For the most part, get really comfortable with using selections, masks and the lasso tool.

[Littleteapot]

Thanks for the info Monkey, much appreciated, here's another one i did, i think that the bright background was the thing i took into consideration the most, the way you present a subject is more important then the subject itself, this one was popular with a few of my friends altho i didn't like it as much as the other designs.

[Amit Dutta]

Yeah I like that one better for two reasons...It's a bit more finished, but also it is recognisable in function and design. Out of your last designs, I prefer the middle one only because it is the most obvious what it is..I like the lines in the others but they are basically just random floating things at the moment. I don't really know if they are ships or futuristic vacuum cleaners or what.
Design is supposed to be functional as well as visually appealing, so I guess make it clearer what the thing you are designing is or at least give more indications.

About presentation being more important than the concept, I actually think the opposite is true. The concept and the design is way more important, you just have to make sure you don't shortchange your concept with poor presentation, that's all. Pretty much any monkey can eventually learn to render well given enough time, but not everyone can come up with great ideas. Combining the two is where the magic happnes :D.

With that last one, the values are nice overall, just a quick crit, that it seems like you are hovering a little between a very graphical stylised treatment such as in the legs and a slightly more realistic finish for the body. I'd say you'd need to apply similar styles across the board or it may look a tiny bit disjoint and even unfinished. It's not a hugely noticeable thing but just something to keep in mind maybe. It's also looking very clean, so you could think about adding some weathering in places, just to ground it in reality a bit. Depends what you want really, but Scott Robertson (again) has an awesome technique for weathering you should check it out if you haven't seen them before.

[Littleteapot]

here's another one, the design is a bit more playful but the technique is more solid.