Putting some more thought into artwork

This afternoon I've just been casually messing with what to do with artwork. The biggest decision/milestone is perspective. 

Top-down (as in: top and front sides visible) pixel art is the goal, but so far I've been using an aerial view for simplicity. This has to change before getting more serious about the visuals. 

To start with, what I've been doing is rendering out a perspective guide in Blender. For locomotives in particular, rotation is a big issue: keeping up the perspective requirements through hundreds of frames of rotation is not something I think I (or anyone else) should be doing entirely by hand. And I think having a template with the 'hard edges' of the perspective already correct is extremely useful.

This way I can also use the template as a placeholder to verify the perspective and animations work in-game, without doing any pixel art.

Fixing an appropriate camera perspective was the first part, and here you can see I'm using Stardew as a reference (even though the result is not an identical angle, but similar). Stardew's art style and perspective is a huge influence on this game, and I would say the elevator pitch is almost "Stardew with trains".

Once I had the perspective locked down, I made rotation keyframes for a train carriage stand-in (a.k.a a cuboid) and rendered them out to get the carriage at all angles:

Notice that when the carriage is at 0' or a multiple of 90', the front and top surfaces are visible, but the sides are not (which is the intention of this perspective). 

Next up I need to assemble a spritesheet and get this in-game. Which is going to be quite a bit more work: With an aerial perspective, object rotations are actual sprite rotations. Whereas here, I need to re-work rotations to map to a sprite sheet index. So it may be a little while before I have something going. 

This is a nice change of pace though from the system re-working I've been doing for other parts of the game

Addendum:
I spent 30 minutes to wire this up into the game and was rewarded with:

The draw order is incorrect on a number of occasions based on travel direction, but this is a really great first confirmation of this perspective making some sense on top of the tile set rails etc.

You can also see how the sprites are slightly blurry: this is because the game is still rendering sprites larger than their source (which works with pixel art but not so well with anything else)