big castle

[Khris]

I've checked in MaxonC4D and you're right guys. The extremely low third vanishing point was confusing me.

[KidCrazy]

Thanks for the many comments on my sketch. There seems to be quite conflicting opinions about if this perspective might be usable for what it is intended for, so I should give you some details about that first:

It's no background for a cutscene. The character has to walk in from the left and may leave through the gate at a later time. Walking on the right side of the gate is not mandatory. I thought making the screen scrollable, i.e. I would add some more "beach" to the left of what this sketch shows.

The one issue I have with it is that your portcullis, though looking great, would serve little to no purpose on keeping anything smaller than an elephant out of the castle unless there were either smaller grates within the larger ones, or it was actually iron slabs interspersed with large girders, and not a grated portcullis at all.

Yeah, you're right. But since this is intended to be an entirely overdimensional sandcastle, inhabited and guarded by a 6 year old preschooler with a bad megalomania, it's ok for me if parts of the scene appear somewhat unrealistic aside from that, I tried bringing the grates closer together, but they just kept looking awful and were drawing the eye too much into that direction.

The bg itself breaks an important rule; the 2D-depiction of a 90°-corner pointing to the viewer can't contain an angle below 90 degrees, I'm too lazy to look it up now, but it's in one of Loomis' works.

I'm not too familiar with that 90 degree rule you're speaking of, but if my thoughts are right this rule may only be applied if the corner points to the viewer or, in this example, if the viewpoint is anywhere in the room that is covered by area A moving along vector N, which is standing at a right angle to both of the corner vectors.



Anyhow, I may be false in this case.

Conveying that the castle is huge can be done without ignoring basic perspective laws.

My primary goal is to cause the viewer a feeling of beeing really tiny in regards to the castle. It should somehow feel like the building is heavily narrowing the space around you, even though it's an outdoor scene.
I thought about skewing perspective so that it seems like some towers were bending over you, but I failed drawing a sketch that i liked and still gave some place for the character to move around the screen. I'd like to see how you would solve this one

As some of you mentioned, the skewed perspective makes it hard to use this as a walkable background, but since the game it is used for should be pretty... uh... unrealistic with perhaps a touch of surrealism, I wouldn't mind for some obscure perspectives if it all looks good in the end.

More c&c appreciated

[Andail]

I sketched this up to illustrate the 90 degrees rule. A 2 point perspective system is limited in the way that lines and angles drawn too far from the view points will be deceptive.



a) is within the circle, and is thus reliable. b) is outside, and is thus incorrect.

You can accordingly never draw for instance the corner of a building in an angle shown in (b).

[Khris]

Thanks Andail, that's very helpful.

It's funny, but I believe that you've just given me the last hint I needed to finally prove I was indeed right all the time

Check this pic:


Perspective doesn't care where the actual geographical horizon is, so I've simply applied the rule to the left and top vp. And bam, the corner is outside the visible range.

Edit: Moving the top vp upwards a great deal will finally put the corner inside the circle, making the pic look natural; that's incidentally exactly the improvement I'd suggest for this bg.

As your pic illustrates nicely, the rectangle-shaped border of the bg should ideally be completely inside the circle to avoid corners like (b).

The same is true for 3-point-perspective.

To avoid an unnatural look, the vps have to be a good deal outside the actual visible area, as illustrated here:

The red cube looks a bit weird, being partly outside the circle, while the green one looks fine and natural.
The farther outside the circle, the more screwed up things will look.

[Andail]

Khris, I think you're still attacking the wrong aspect of this picture. It has some real faults, but the very angle you're highlighting seems to be the only somewhat natural angle to me.
The main issues with the perspective of this image is that:
* The top viewpoint is situated too low, warping the image into a very unnatural shape; a shape only possible viewed through a fish eye lense.
* The image does not "bend" around the pivot (the point where the north view point bisects the horizon), but continues to increase in relative size to the right of it. This might be because the artist assumed that the right part of the image is situated nearer to the viewer than the rest. A more correct perspective would be established by simply copying the left half of the image, flip it and paste it to the right of the central point.

[Khris]

Yeah, sorry, here's something constructive for a change



Edit: I didn't want to hi-jack this thread and/or offend anyone. Something about the perspective bugged me, we've discussed the rule dealing with it, and the matter is sorted out now, as far as I'm concerned.
I believe it's possible to achieve the desired effect without using an extreme perspective, so that's what I try to do.

[space boy]

The main point is to make the castle look huge, not realistic. KidCrazy said himself that it's ok if the castle is a bit surreal. Well, it's huge and surreal. It is just what it's supposed to be. Getting the feeling across is more important than technical accuracy.