Hi there,
I've been working on a background of a castle at the sea lately. Actually I tried to emphasize the height of the castle by simultaneously letting the viewer see the water behind but I can't seem to get it right. This sketch shows how far I got:
(http://longtrip.de/out/castle-sketch.jpg)
Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Kc
It's a nice start. To emphasize the height, lower the horizon even further.
Use tall, narrow features:
(http://img223.imageshack.us/img223/2632/redrawkidtl4.png)
You can also put something in front of the castle, like a tent or a stand. Draw it small, this will make the castle appear even taller.
Ok, I had another try at it. I had some problems with the perspective distortion at the right, but the longer i stare at it, the stranger it looks to me :P Better? Worse?
(http://longtrip.de/out/castle-sketch2.jpg)
A lot better. I like it.
That extremely skewed angle actually does get the point across much better. I think the stylization is great, and it definitely smacks of gargantuanity (Which really should be a real word). Kind of a gates of Minas Tirith kind of feel to it, which I totally dig. 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.
But continuity nitpicks aside, I think that if you want to make the castle look even larger, it'd be nice to see some small props about - even plants would help to establish scale.
Now that's massive! It's amazing what a little adjusting of perspective can do. It's lovely, now make a background out of it! :)
Hmmm. But the skewed perspective won't work with moving game characters.
I beg to differ on that point. Assuming that the walkable area is limited to a very narrow horizontal path - ideally right along the edge of the water, so that the character will be in line with the main gate when they get to it, instead of having to walk toward it diagonally, I'd say it would work just fine. Now, if KidCrazy attempts to give the player a lot of y-axis movement, it would lead to some very large issues and necessitate extreme scaling, but if some simple rules are followed, and with a slight bit of lenience on the player's side, it should provide no problem.
Just put together a little visualization aid
(http://i192.photobucket.com/albums/z69/space_boy_album/castle.jpg)
There are two main problems with that bg:
1. The perspective is extreme. It reminds me of very early 3D engines.
It is impossible for the human eye to see something like that. The field of view of an eye is a cone, and with the POV being relatively close to the castle wall, we wouldn't see the ground, the whole height of the wall and the sky. Far less of it, actually.
2. A character's "head-feet line" would have to run through the VP to be consistent with the bg. As you can see in space boy's mock-up, the straight characters make the castle look tilted to the back.
As has been said, use props to establish the castle's scale.
I can't actually view the image. There are no links any more, and none of them worked before anyway. I'm confused, and intrigued to see the bg.
(http://i192.photobucket.com/albums/z69/space_boy_album/castle2.jpg)
it depends what you want to use this castle for. If it's for a cutscene then go ahead with the Xtreme! perspective, if characters need to walk around in there but not all the way up to the castle, still, go ahead. If you're afraid of the character making the castle look bad because when the character gets up next to it [like spaceboy's first example] then you might have to rethink it [spaceboy's second example]
However, in my opinion:
Quote
It is impossible for the human eye to see something like that.
is never a reason to ditch a composition.
Well, imo, accepting that all perspective has gone to hell, is.
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.
Conveying that the castle is huge can be done without ignoring basic perspective laws.
I don't see any angles less than 90 degrees in any of the 90-degree corners. I'm pretty picky about perspective, but this looks relatively sound to me (barring some inconsistent perspective-distortion bending).
It's OK that the picture shows a scene that the human eye couldn't perceive in one glance, because it need not represent just a single snapshot, but the complete impression formed by surveying the scene (turning the eyes up, down, left and right).
It's right there:
(http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/4155/explkceo4.png)
This is no scrolling room, so combining multiple views into one doesn't seem appropriate here.
But since you all like it so much, I'll back out of this now. :=
Khrismuc, I think you're mixing up things here; the angle you point at is almost 170 degrees, which is much more than 90. The rule you refer to applies when corners are too far out in the perspective system, and take extreme shapes. A thumbrule is to never draw angles outside a circle that touches both perspective points. This is not the case here.
However, I too think that the perspective has gone hay wire. I don't think it does what it's intended to do; convey a majestic, overwhelming impression - I think the perspective makes the whole castle look extremely askew, or falling back.
I agree with andail on the technical part. But I do like the new perspective. It's not realistic FOV-wise, but it all depends on the style you're after. The perspective is correct, if not real. The fact that the vanishing point is out of the image means that this is only a part of the image that you would see in real life (if in this case the FOV was altered).
I've really thought about this long an hard now, and I still stand by my statement that the pic is technically wrong. The bottom corner is much closer to the POV pane than the one at the top of the castle, so neither of the three angles can be less than 90°. While the bottom one is indeed almost 170°, the left and the right ones are less than 90°. This is not possible with a corner pointing towards the eye.
Take a random cuboid laying around on your desk, like a box of matches, and see for yourself.
Which do you mean exactly, "left and right"? Can you draw exactly what you refer to, along with an example of how you think it should look?
Again, I don't think the castle is drawn in a very functional perspective (I think it's quite horrible, frankly), but I still believe the 90 degree rule you speak of is some sort of misunderstanding.
I've checked in MaxonC4D and you're right guys. The extremely low third vanishing point was confusing me.
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.
Quote from: SpacePirateCaine
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.
Quote from: KhrisMUC on Mon 18/06/2007 21:51:55
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.
(http://longtrip.de/out/explkceo42.png)
Anyhow, I may be false in this case.
Quote from: KhrisMUC on Mon 18/06/2007 21:51:55
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 ;)
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.
(http://www.andail.com/gfx/perspandy.gif)
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).
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:
(http://img164.imageshack.us/img164/986/explkc2ft7.png)
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:
(http://img409.imageshack.us/img409/8238/explkc3bz1.png)
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.
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.
Yeah, sorry, here's something constructive for a change ;)
(http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/7232/redrawkczj2.png)
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.
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.