What style of characters would fit this?

[GarageGothic]

I made this as a submission for the last Background Blitz and am looking for any kind of critique (composition, perspective, color, whatever). It's my first go at coloring on the computer, and I'm pretty happy with it. I suppose that I could clean it up a bit more, but I like this kinda rough look. I didn't know which style I wanted (or could make) for my game before I did this, but I think it more or less established my style.



What I really want to know however is what style of characters you think would work with this sort of background. I was going to do the characters in Poser (going for a The Longest Journey sort of look), because it is so much easier to do the animation once and then rotate the camera for each view angle. But now I'm not so sure. I figure that I could use Poser's sketch style render and then color each frame in photoshop. But I'm not sure it would be worth the trouble.

[Hollister Man]

This is kinda complicated, but it shouls give you nice results.  I use Paint Shop Pro and Animation shop, but I suppose you can get a similar effect using Photoshop.

The way I use poser is to tweak the sketch renderer until you like the color in poser, which is possible, since I do good illustrations straight out of Poser.  Then you set your animation settings to render in sketch mode, in AVI.  Import it into Animation shop and resize as you like, and export as a picture tube.  Open it in Paint Shop and save it as a PCX, and import as a tiled sprite.

[Archangel (aka SoupDragon)]

Hmm... that's actually a very difficult background to draw characters, since it's way too good! You'd have a really hard time getting the shading and perspective to alter correctly.

Then again, if you really want to use it, I'd suggest a similar 'dirty' approach, with a character which changes messily as he moves along... like in animation where each frame doesn't look like it's been drawn on top of itself, giving the impression... well, you know what I mean. If you could do an idle animation using the same effect, and pull it off, then it would be stunning and original.

[Neole]

A disney type cartoon character (as in LSL7, KQ7, CMI, Full Throttle) might fit in pretty well. If you see old disney movies they had the cartoon characters over painted scene all the time.

[Hollister Man]

I kinda see what Arch is saying, kinda like an MTV show I used to see.  Even when standing still, the edges would kinda wiggle. I think the Cartoon Network has a show that does it.  

[Trapezoid]

That would be Home Movies, from the creators of Dr. Katz. Newer episodes don't have the squigglyness anymore, though.

[Hollister Man]

Yep, Dr. Katz was the one I remembered.  Never did watch it all the way through, but I knew that I'd seen it somewhere.  Thanx

[Scummbuddy]

I see a dark, realistic(opposed to cartoony) hero walking on to that scene.  I would see a fine black, sketchy type outline around the character.  A thin character too

[Coolioii]

I think Ed Edd and Eddy has those wiggly lines, though im not sure if its on Cartoon Network...
Im not even sure i its on where you live...
In fact, im not sure of anything...
Oh well... Im sure that the wiggly line thing would look right, just dont use minimal colours, try using as many colours as you can...

[GarageGothic]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm not familiar with the cartoons you mention, but I'll check out MTV and Cartoon Network and see if they are still running.

I agree that the look would need to be dirty, probably even with visible pencil lines. Has anyone experimented with rendering characters in Poser, printing them out, tracing them roughly onto another paper and scanning them back into the computer and coloring them? It sounds like a lot of trouble, but maybe it could work. I'm a bit hesitant though, because I have 20+ characters in my game. And a lot, probably most of them will need walking and other animation frames.

That's why I thought about using the sketch renderer in Poser. But my problem is that it can't do solid blocks of color, only colored squiggles. I'd prefer a style where the blacks were loosely sketched lines and the other colors were solids (maybe gradients as in the background, but still solid blocks of color).

Also, I don't want it to look too cartoony. The characters will be stylized, but not as much as some of the Full Throttle ones - nor the latter-day Sierra games. I was thinking about Gabriel Knight 1, only in a higher resolution, which DOES make it a whole lot more difficult. Maybe I'm not making much sense, but to me there is very much a difference between GK1 and the brightly colored cartoony drawings of Broken Sword 2 - I really love style of the former while I for some reason dislike the latter.

If anyone has read the Sandman comics, especially the Kindly Ones album and the Death comic The Time of Your Life, you should have some idea of what I mean by "stylized but not cartoony".

I'll see if I can work out something to post this week, and you can tell me what you think. Maybe I'll also be able to post another background which is less Tim Burton'esque.

[Eggie]

Jack Orlando had backgrounds a little bit like that...except they were more realistic and less sketchy...
Go for exagerrated realistic style with dark colours.

[PearlJam]

I think this style char would fit in pretty cool:

http://www31.brinkster.com/machinescrew1/gif.htm

[jannar85]

Ooooooh.... This is GOOD, quite GOOD!
It feels like a horror picture, the atmosphere that is.

I love it. You should've helped me with coloring
Or maybe you could do a tutorial or something....?

As for characters, horror characters would suit a lot.

[cpage]

when I saw you bg it reminded me of this picture by my GF    http://cjpthatsme.topcities.com/brandi4.gif   (copy and paste)

[Scummbuddy]

Besides it being reversed...   thats kinda what I meant earlier.

[GarageGothic]

cpage, I really like your girlfriend's drawing. I think that style would fit really well - only with some muted colors added. Stylized but not caricatured - and thin, as you said Scumbuddy

jannar85: the coloring is REALLY simple, although it took a while. I just use the polygonal lasso in PhotShop to select the surfaces, and then filled them with gradients (sometimes between very similar colors, but still gradients to add a softer, organic feel). The pencil sketch was the top layer with, I believe, the "darken" setting. It all depends on that layer really. Without it, the background looks almost like a first person shooter scene with the textures missing - just flat polygonal-like surfaces. You couldn't really use this coloring technique without some sort of outline, either black or pencil. The final touch was to play around with the saturation to mute the colors (going for a monochromish film-noir feel, but didn't want pure black and white) and the curves to sharpen the contrast.

[remixor]

First let me say GG that your background and coloring job is fantastic.  Very unique and awesome style.  

So you say the original scanned sketch itself was darkened over the colored version?  That's a really cool idea.  I like the effect quite a bit.

[OneThinkingGal and ._.]

Whoah how did I miss this thread.

I think characters like those in Mean streets, subdued and with little saturation, would work really well with this.

[GarageGothic]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know most of you guys hate Poser art - and I do too, at least when it has that Poser look. However, producing an animation heavy game all by my self, it's the only option, and I think I've managed to get rid of most of that standardized look that just screams Poser.

So I've messed around with the sketch render settings in Poser for a week or so, without getting results I was happy about. The colored areas just aren't solid enough. So I decided for a new approach, closer to the technique used for the background: Combining a monochrome sketch render with a seperate color layer.
This is what I came up with, and I think it fits pretty well with the background style. I can't believe that I spent so long on creating textures and finding the right clothing props and hair, and you can't make out a single detail in the final artwork. But at least I didn't get around to drawing reflection maps for the boots

I do need to clean it up a bit (I hate the nose line), but for now, this is the look of my characters. Tell me what you think.



And composited with the background (I see now that the character should be quite a bit darker):



By the way, does she look tall and skinny to you? She's supposed to be, and compared to normal adventure game characters (Indy and Guybrush), she is. But should I try to exaggerate that further? Of course, it depends on the other characters in the game, but I'm going for a realistic, slightly stylized look.

[remixor]

Awesome!  
That looks really good.  The only thing is that her head seems a bit to tilted to me.  It looks good, but I imagine that if it was like that the whole game it would be a bit odd.  Overall, fantastic!  :o

As far as the tall and thin, I definitely get that impression, but since your style is slighty...stylized anyway I think you may as well go all out and exaggerate it a bit more.