Bike Silhouettes (Patreon)

As part of the world building for Nightride, I wanted to design a few custom motorcycles. Mostly because it's fun and it's something I've always wanted to do more of, but also because I didn't want to have real bikes and bike brands in the fantasy universe.

When designing things, I try to focus on silhouettes first. Doing thumbnails like this is a great way to get a bunch of ideas and shapes down quickly, which can then be iterated on later. I just created a wheel template and drew shapes over top of them. Obviously in real life motorcycles have different wheelbases, while these are all the same. But it's a useful starting point.

It can also lead to a few surprises. For instance, I think the most 'futuristic' of these designs is the bright green one. I wasn't expecting that. But I think the reason for it is because of how the wheel rims are filled in. This is probably due to Akira's influence, where Kanada's bike has the same visual detail. It really set the tone for any kind of motorcycle/cyberpunk based visuals.

It's also kind of interesting to think how a bike might steer with a 90 degree rake angle. The rake angle is the angle of the front forks relative to the vertical. So straight up would be 0 degrees. 90 degrees is straight to the side. It gives a streamlined, quasi-futuristic appearance, but I think this is due to it being almost completely unknown on real bikes. There are one or two real ones that used forkless front suspensions, giving either no rake angle, or a 90 degree rake angle, depending on how you count it. But for the most part, you never really see that, because mechanically it's not really a thing.

Anyway, that's your daily dose of more about motorcycles than you ever cared to know!