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.

[GarageGothic]

Well, the tilted head was just to make her seem less stiff for this shot. Just think of it as a single frame from an idle animation.

Also, I'd like to ask this: I was thinking about giving her a bag (carriedover her shoulder), to avoid the magic pockets phenomenon. But I worry that it will cause trouble when animating (such as having her put it down at times while doing something else and such) has anyone had these same considerations? The only bag (visible, not as the briefcase in PQ1) that I remember from any adventure game was Indy's shoulder bag, but that was quite small compared to what I intend. The other solution would be a big coat but the game takes place in L.A. and I suppose that would be a bit too hot at daytime (she DOES wear a coat at night though).

[Ali]

It looks stylised and a little expressionistic (Caligari), you could make LA dark and rainy (a la Blade Runner) to justify a long coat, and I don't think it'd bother anyone. If anyone asks why it's chilly in the famously sunny LA just blame it on global warming.

[Eero]

Great picture...

[DinghyDog]

I must agree. Your art style is amazingly precise.

And yet...I hate to wonder how big your game is going to be size-wise if every one of your backgrounds is that detailed and with that many colors...

-DD

[GarageGothic]

Thank you for all the kind words

Ali: Thanks for noticing the expressionist influence, although the Caligari sign perhaps made it a little too obvious. German expressionist film is an important part of the plot of the game, so I figured a small homage was in order.
As for making L.A. dark and rainy, I really wanted to stay away from the Blade Runner cliché, but thanks for the suggestion - I have considered it for a long time myself. I think it's much more of a challenge to make Los Angeles seem mysterious and weird in bright sunlight (think David Lynch's last two films, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive), and I like the contrast of sunny days and dark nights. Sunshine and noir. In fact, the working title for the game used to be "Sunset by Night".

DinghyDog: I have wondered the same thing. 30-40 backgrounds at 640x400 and 16bit color, that's quite a lot. Add to that the sprites and sound effects.... now that's a scary thought.
And it really worries me that AGS precaches all the sprite data (or so I've heard, can anyone verify this?). There doesn't to seem to be any limits on sprites except the maximum number. But surely it can't all fit in memory if you use large hi-res hi-color sprites?

[scotch]

The precaching and stuff won't be a problem, but to keep filesize down and speed up you could consider using 256 colour.. I think your art suits it.
look at http://www.agagames.com/scotch/noir2-woh.jpg
that's your BG turned down to 190 colours with no low colour editing to improve it at all.
Also 640x480 is better than 640x400, just because of the square aspect ratio, the streched graphics always annoy me in the non square modes so I always run in letterbox mode.

Anyway, yeah 256 would work gerat for your game and it'd be a lot smaller in size.

[GarageGothic]

I agree that the art would certainly work in 256 colors. It's just that a preset palette (even if it's just for certain sprites) seems rather limiting you know. I would hate to add a new character, and discover that they can't use certain colors because it isn't in the pallette. Also, it seems that certain of the effects in AGS (current as well as planned) only work with 16bit color. I'll look into it though. I just don't want any silly technical limitations turning up during the making.

As for the resolution, I DO intend to use 640x480 as screen res, but only 640x400 for the image itself. You see, I want to have the image letterboxed, but the GUI should be in the black letterbox area. (like in Gabriel Knight and, I think, PQ4). I hope you understand what I mean.

[Neole]

Its looking fantastic. The character is a lil sharper and more contrasted than the background, so you might have to change the contrast (and sharpness maybe) on either of those.

[Neole]

Forgot to mention, I had thought it was a male at first. Still looks like one.

[GarageGothic]

Neole: She is supposed to look androgynous in an early 90's k.d. lang sort-of way (not suggesting that all lesbians look like k.d. lang, but she was part of the visual inspiration for the character). But I wouldn't want her to be mistaken for a male. Maybe adding a few more details would help? At least the speech close-up will look more feminine.

[Igor]

Must say it looks great! Certainly the best piece of work coming from Poser i saw so far. As a matter of fact it looks completely 2d. I'm really interested to see this in motion.

[Neole]

It looks really good and matches the look you are trying to achieve perfectly, but I do think most people would mistake her for a male at first. I suppose a side view might correct that. Im not sure what to change without changing the KD Lang look to make her look clearly female.. maybe the others have some idea.

[ratracer]

It has been said before, but I'll have to say it again: great work, great style... the character fits perfect with the bg... your game will show a hell of a ambiance!
also, great use of Poser, very dramatic stuff!