Intro screen images.

[ThreeOhFour]

Hey.

I'm working on a new game, and what I wanted to do was to tell the introduction through panel like screens - eg. the story is about a dragon so a dragon shows up etc. I had a go at creating some images for this - using paint and PSP4, however I'm not sure that they're entirely up to scratch.

After being very impressed with the help being given throughout this section, I was hoping whether somebody could give me an idea of how to improve these images, whether it be proportions, perspective or colouring. Unfortunately I do not possess photoshop, but I do have an early version of the Gimp which works quite well. Here are the images:









Of course, once I'm happy with the shape and colouring, I'll go back and remove the little black edges, but I was hoping someone could give me a bit of direction as to improving these images.

Thanks,

Ben

[Ghost]

The sword looks very good, the dragon... not so much.

The sword reminds me of a picture in a stained glass window, though... maybe that's a style you'd like to try in all panels... make the outlines thicker and the single "glass shards" in brilliant colours... I think that'd also support the mood of a fantasy story.

[Krysis]

I like the sword but the dragon is bad. Here is why:
1. Looks like he has no body. Its more like a snake or something.
2. The head is not at a right angle with the neck. Try an S curve, couse the neck looks like a tree.
3. Wings suck. You need huge wings for a dragon like this, something that filles the whole screen. Wings dont start from the side of the neck they start at the back and have muscles.

[Gilbert]

But but but Trogdor has very small wings!

[esper]

I was about to say, it sounded like Krysis was giving the Trogdor instructions...

"You start out with an S, and then another S, and then add a triangle. Then give him fangiddies, and scales, and wings, if he's a wingaling dragon. Then give him one of those beefy arms sticking out his back..."

The sword is awesome, and I agree totally with the whole stained glass approach. The dragon looks like a sock puppet.

[Krysis]

Never heard of Trogdor but I just did a Google search. 

[ThreeOhFour]

Thanks for the comments guys, I can totally see where I went wrong with the dragon now you've pointed it out. About the stained glass idea, well I never thought of that but now I can totally see it. I'll have a go at fixing the images and hopefully get back to you.

[ThreeOhFour]

Ok, I had a go at improving the dragon, and also a shot at implementing the stained glass idea. Tell me what you think.





The stained glass attempt for some reason is quite large is Kbytes, even though it be a .png.

[Elliott Hird]

that stained glass one is TOO overboard... I love the first one.

[2ma2]

I disagree, the stained glass looks nice, but it's  very meshy. Perhaps you could do it by hand or adjust the filter.

The reason it makes PNG's so big is due to PNG compression rates emulating the GIF LZW compression. This is lots of letter there, but basically, PNG are only useful if you have vast areas of the EXAKT same color. You have a gradiant fill throughout the picture and that makes JPG's unbeaten.

[Ghost]

I think the stained glass version's very good, and the dragon itself is much better too. Looks like your classic heroic fantasy beast now. Good work!

[ThreeOhFour]

...you can get filters that make stuff stained glass now? That took me quite a while to do, because I did it all by hand. Then just made it nice and bright and contrasted so it looked like light was coming through. Thanks for the assistance guys.

[Ghost]

many progs (like photoshop) have such a filter but it would be useless anyway because these filters break the whole image into shards. the way you did it (manually) is best, and the result justifies the effort.

[Akumayo]

The wings are still far too small, that is, if it is [italics]supposed[/italics] to fly.  If it is flightless, they are obviously a little large.  If it is going to fly though, and be near realistic, the wings need to be about double the size they are now.  I don't mean to be critical, just realistic.  I do like the wings look very much, they remind me of bat wings, have you consider converting them so that they are semi-transparent membranes?  (ya know, with veins running through them and stuff)

Overall, I really like the dragon, what program did you render it in?

[ThreeOhFour]

Render... Ok, I'm not sure that this could be called "rendering", but this is the process I used:

-Drew basic outline in MSpaint, using the line tool on a single line.
-Went into Paint Shop Pro 4 and filled in various areas with what I deemed the appropriate colour, giving it a slight colour gradient for the sake of quality.

Then, to get the stained glass effect:

-Got the basic outline in MSpaint and first put through all the base coulours (The red bits, the yellow bits, the blue bits etc. This meant that when it was all lines I would be able to tell each area apart.)
-Drew LOTS of lines, doing my best to avoid cluttered areas and still trying to make pieces small enough to capture the detail of the dragon.
-Went into Paint Shop Pro 4 and put the gradient fill tool onto "sunburst" (circular) mode then filled in various areas with different areas of the gradient (Moved the centre point of the gradient around so that the shard of glass all appeared to be disconnected and seperate.
-Adjusted brightness by 10% and the contrast by 31% to make it seem like light is coming through.
-Selected pure white as the main colour, then used the "hot wax coating" effect to thicken up the lines and even out the colour gradient.
-Selected the "median" special filter to clear up any rough spots and to give a feeling of depth. If you look closely (Very closely!) at the lines, you will see that it has given them a 3d appearance.

Hope this explains the process fully.

[Akumayo]

Thanks, that does clear it up quite a bit. 

[m0ds]

The stained glass version confuses me a little, as do a lot of stained glass pictures people make with photoshop packages. It doesn't look uniformed, yet most stain glass windows have a uniformed pattern.

Also, normally, there aren't pieces of glass put into seperate parts to make up for example the sky. The sky would be a piece of stained glass itself. Take for example this;



The sky is pretty much one piece, the dolphin is about 8 - but those pieces are cut using the lines that would make up the dolphin, rather than the dolphin being made of lots of random pieces of glass joined together. Does this make sense? I would envisage the dragon as having different pieces of glass/lines to define each part, for example, its wing, its jaw bone etc - but not as just lots of random pieces of glass. That's not really how stained glass with an image in it works.

[Paper Carnival]

I second what m0ds said...

About the gradient on the background, I don't recommend it. You'll need 32-bit mode for them to look good. And, unless you need anti-aliasing, 32-bit is not a good idea, because it's much slower than 16-bit.