Photographic Backgrounds

[MoodyBlues]

In Forces of Nature, I want to have realistic backgrounds, but I'm not very good at digital painting.  I've tried using photographs, but they don't really mesh with my characters.

Here's a screenshot:


Should I do a paintover, blur the picture, or just start from scratch?

[Babar]

What a remarkeable suitable background image
I don't think you'd be able to find images that exactly suit your need for every BG in the game, so I would dissuade you from using photographs. Also, the 'business' of the trees and leaves seems to be interfering with your characters. Blurring is definitely not the way to go. Some people have posted images here that they photoshopped to make look more 'gamey', but I don't think that would fit with your style of characters. I'd suggest using the photograph as a base, to paint only those parts that you need (as in, no need to pixel in each and every detail). No need to go all out, when you reach a level that you are comfortable with, (and can recreate again and again consistently), stop, and start on the next BG.

[Chicky]

Heh, that background seems to fit perfectly. All thought you will find it hard to get images that suit your characters houses etc.

I'm not sure what you should do really.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

One method which I've seen done with varying degrees of success is to reduce the photo color count and then add a slight mosaic filter and some color tweaks to adjust the palette to something that matches with your characters.  This was something I did really quickly in photoshop:

1.  Reduced colors to 140.  This achieved a good balance of color and reduced blending.

2.  Added a slight mosaic filter (2%).  This pixellized the image somewhat to make it look less like a photo and more like something mouse-drawn.

3.  Used Color balance to bring highlights closer to orange-red, midtones green-blue, and shadows dark green-blue.

4.  Applied a warm photo filter (85) to build up some of the rich highlights.

5.  Altered contrast just a bit to bring out the difference between shadows and highlights.



Depending on what program you use there are various ways to accomplish what I did here.  You'll also have to judge for yourself if this is the sort of look you want or not, since I'm only guessing what you're after.  The result here might look a bit dark, but you can fix that by adjusting brightness and color balance.

[Flippy_D]

I would say increasing the gamma on the background would be a good idea.

[radiowaves]

BG is fine, a bit too dark maybe, so I can't quite see everything thats going on. You should reduce contrast. But All you really need is a full photograph of yourself in 8 directions. Rotoscoping is fun.

[cat]

I think the foto and the character fit very well. The hardest part will be to make the character fit ALL backgrounds in your game.

[radiowaves]

Yes, indeed. The first bg in this thread works very well imho, I would use that one instead.
The thing with the fitting character is that it has shadow in this photograph and tonal value is similar to the value of the picture. So it gives the effect that the character is actually IN the picture, not floating on it.
So I hope you don't mind, I took a screenshot from one of your threads and modified it a bit.
Before:


After:

And


What I simply did was that I added some darker areas to the foreground to keep the composition balanced with the darker area further away, so that the viewers point is focused more to the center. I also added some shadows to the sprites.

So, instead of adding contrast and apllying filters, just take a basic brush, pick a darker colour FROM THE PICTURE and start painting with opacity. Use smooth eraser afterwards to clean the edges. Automatic functions will never do any good, manual works the best

Note that the updates still aren't perfect, its mainly due because I think the characters sizes are not aligned to perspective and so they seem a bit big. You may also want to play around with the values more, just don't overwork it. Artists main skill is the ability to stop at the right time, you know. But you simply overdid the picture in this thread with the contrast, first one looked fine

[hedgefield]

I love the first screen, I think the scene fits very well. It is possible to pull off photo backgrounds, I use a fair share of them also in my game, but I trace all the outlines and add some colors/textures here and there. The problem is that with nature that's a lot harder to do.

There's some good advice here already, and I don't know if you have Photoshop, but I think it would benefit from a shadow/highlight filter also. And Radiowaves makes a good point about shadows. Outside, they are more important than anywhere else. I think with AGS's alpha channels you could pull off a blurred shadow sprite like he demonstrated.

And don't forget to use regions to adjust the characters' light level. That does a lot for blending. I'm still trying to figure out a way to do lighting like in Broken Sword 2, where rather than change the character's brightness, they had some sort of shadow overlays, which allowed for partial shading. It looked fantastic.