perspective cheating

[Monsieur OUXX]

I'm impressed by how this crappy* perspective manages to fool the eye :

(look at the floor: the distance between the lines never changes, neither does the distance of the lines on the walls)



* I know it's on purpose.

[CaptainD]

Reminds me of those 2-point perspective drawings we had to do in school.  Works pretty well though!

[Anian]

What is that, like 5-6 pixels at most? With keeping the details as they are, it would look very messy at the back of the room. I'm far from an expert, but it is impressing how it's actually a trick of the eye...then again what is perspective but just that. 

[Stupot]

How about this for an optical illusion then?  At first glance the borders of the wall panels appear not to meet behind the bookcase... something seems off, almost as if the back wall has been brought forward...

but... they actually do join, if you trace them carefully everything is hunky-dory... it's just that some trick of the eye makes it look wrong.

[Bulbapuck]

If you look at the floor only, it looks like it's bending upwards. My head can't comprehend if the floor is bent or not.

[Khris]

But it *does* look off.
The furniture and windows kinda force the perspective here, but try to look only at the floor and wall paneling and it appears rather flat.

[evenwolf]

Hey, that's an AGS game!   Leave poor Carl-Johan Hagberg alone!   


The world needs MORE indy games, not less. 

[Chicky]

I like your effort to bring some fresh posts to AGS but this really could have gone in your previous perspective post.

...and i love that background.

[GarageGothic]

While the background is by no means perfect (too much fiddly detail and texturing for my taste, though its doing a good job at emulating an established art style), I agree it totally gets its job done. But you make it sound like there's some sort of trickery involved. To me it just proves my general impression that linear perspective is extremely overrated. Yeah, it's a key part of the much-sought "realism", but not the answer to life, the universe and everything it's often made out to be in the critic's lounge. Artists did fine without it for centuries, millennia even, so why do we (myself included) insist on tracing horizon lines and vanishing points on every single background we see - often even those where the artist aren't asking for perspective help?

The only "wrong" perspectives as far as I'm concerned are those  cases where someone tries to emulate linear perspective without fully understanding the theory behind it and only get it 90% right - which makes the remaining 10% come off looking very odd. Seeing this background, I'm not thinking "wait a minute, the perspective is off" but rather "awesome, it's a classroom... but hey, where are the chairs for the students?".

[MrColossal]

This is something I've wanted to communicate for a while, GarageGothic. I have never traced a perspective line in my backgrounds or really any of my drawings since I had to in college. I don't mean to say this like I am super awesome and don't need perspective lines just that I feel my drawings get the point across.

I'm more concerned about if the background is doing it's job well than if it is being drawn well. This background does the job it was tasked with doing.

[Khris]

Artists have used correct perspective for centuries. Just because somebody depicts nude people on a bench surrounded by trees doesn't mean he doesn't follow perspective rules.

When I correct the perspective in the CL, I usually do it only if the artist tried to follow one or two point perspective and failed. Exceptions would be if establishing a perspective simply greatly helps drawing stuff at the right size or position.
There's also cases where stuff doesn't look as intended by the artist and explaining about perspective helps them to correct their mistake themselves.

I don't feel like every perspective piece has to be picked apart; however, IMO understanding about perspective is a big help for creating pretty much every piece of art.

[GarageGothic]

Artists have used correct perspective for centuries. Just because somebody depicts nude people on a bench surrounded by trees doesn't mean he doesn't follow perspective rules.

Well, in terms of art history, even centuries isn't a very long time, which was kinda my point. Also, big difference between perspective "rules" - the simplest one being that objects further away appear smaller than those nearby - and geometrically constructed perspective, which didn't really hit big until the renaissance and in painting pretty much went out of fashion with the invention of photography.

Obviously understanding theory of perspective is a great starting point for any piece of art that isn't purely abstract, but it's odd that we make such a big deal out of it compared to, say, color theory or classical rules of composition. Personally I find Loominous' posts on tonal range and color value way more enlightening (no pun intended) than the multitude of CL threads teaching perspective perfection.

No bashing of perspective, I would be a hypocrite if that was the case, just saying maybe it's not that big a deal.

[Quintaros]

Obviously understanding theory of perspective is a great starting point for any piece of art that isn't purely abstract, but it's odd that we make such a big deal out of it compared to, say, color theory or classical rules of composition. Personally I find Loominous' posts on tonal range and color value way more enlightening (no pun intended) than the multitude of CL threads teaching perspective perfection.

For adventure game backgrounds, I’d suggest that some degree of perspective cheating is almost a necessity.  A great illustration with a really dynamic sense of depth will make a poor adventure game background because it will only serve to accentuate the fact that the characters themselves are not moving in proper perspective.  So it’s always a kind of balancing act between form and function to “get the job done”.  Understanding the rules behind proper perspective is important for knowing how to cheat the perspective in order to make it all work.

Most of the CL threads teaching perspective theory never get beyond the most basic element of a vanishing point.  Lately, I’ve been reading Andrew Loomis’ books on drawing technique and am astonished at what I didn’t know that I didn’t know about perspective.  I have a newfound appreciation for the science behind drafting and lament that no art teacher ever properly instilled it upon me earlier in life.

[GarageGothic]

Agreed, technically correct perspective can be quite dull if your camera is locked at a specific height to accommodate the characters. Even most 2.5D games that don't have this restriction suffer from incredibly boring compositions - probably in part due to tradition, but most likely also because pre-rendered 3D models don't allow the small cheats you can pull off in hand-painted art. (Edit: Actually, I'd love to see a 2.5D game with some really whacked out focal length settings, like extreme fish-eye effects - unless their game engine is total crap it should be a simple matter to apply the same camera settings to the character rendering).

While I'm not a fan of the Runaway games, one thing they definitely did well was forced perspective. The characters are pre-rendered, so they have to limit their walkable areas to keep them in a somewhat straight-on view. Nevertheless there's  several of the rooms in Runaway 3 where I could have sworn it shouldn't have worked, but it did.



If I'm not mistaken this room even scrolls to the right, but it could be that I misremember and it in fact switches rooms when you get to the gate.

[TerranRich]

Wait a minute... they released Runaway 3?

I love those games. And I agree that they made it work wonderfully. Runaway is one of the inspirations in my own game development.

[GarageGothic]

Not intending to bring the thread off-topic, but yeah it was released a while back - earlier this year I think. If you liked the first two games, I think you will love the third. Personally I don't feel much fondness for either of them, but the third one was by far the best of the bunch (especially after the random plotting and annoying characters of the second game). It has some quite clever narrative techniques, still wouldn't call the puzzles well designed though.

But to return to the topic, I am quite sure the screen I posted is in fact a scrolling room - I now recall the lamps moving in parallax.

[Monsieur OUXX]

I am quite sure the screen I posted is in fact a scrolling room - I now recall the lamps moving in parallax.

Additionally to that, do they use some sort of distortion on the character so that it's not "vertical" when it reaches the sides of the screen in a perspective such as the one you posted? (some sort of fake fish-eye effect).

Just asking. That'd be a clever workaround when it becomes too obvious that the character is 2D in a 3D room.

[Wyz]

Look at the perspective of stalls in this background:


When I made this background I came across a problem with the aspect. It uses an one-point perspective, but it scrolls. Where ever it had the vanishing point, it would looked distorted. I came up with a dirty work around: If you draw vanishing points at both ends (when you are scrolled all the way left, and all the way right, at the centre of the screen) and then draw a line between the two point, you can sort of interpolate vanishing points for each object. If you've drawn the front, you'll find a vanishing point on this line directly above the centre of the object. Well, it is a dirty trick but it sort of works for scrolling backgrounds.

I also found this tutorial which indicates why this could work I think.