cave / castle background

[Honza]

tamatic: Come on, let's be honest here... that image communicates an almost complete artistic lack . But then, how long did it take to create? 15 minutes? An hour? And how much thought, planning and attention to detail was invested in it?

Why so many people think they can't draw is that they assume it shouldn't require any effort. Especially no mental effort. "I don't know how to draw a tree right away, thus I'm no good at drawing". While all it takes is to type "a tree" into google, study how a tree looks like and slowly learn to copy what you see.

What really makes an artist, in my opinion, is vision. Once you can see in your head what the result should be, there are various ways to achieve it. Talent is just one of them.

[Honza]

By the way, this is an earlier version of the castle/cave background:



While the current version isn't great, I think you'll agree there has been some progress .

[tamatic]

tamatic: Come on, let's be honest here... that image communicates an almost complete artistic lack . But then, how long did it take to create? 15 minutes? An hour? And how much thought, planning and attention to detail was invested in it?

Well, I am not kidding. And believe to sense the effort put into it rather well.
If you want to discuss such matters maybe make another thread named idiosyncratic aesthetics?
Hehehe.

By the way, this is an earlier version of the castle/cave background:
(...)
While the current version isn't great, I think you'll agree there has been some progress .

Yup, I especially love that piece of collapsed, eroded ground you added.

[xrg]

I made a perspective stair guide for a friend awhile back. It assumes some perspective knowledge, and I spelled auxiliary wrong multiple times, but hopefully it is easy enough to follow along for anyone having trouble with them.

Btw, this is my first post, hi everybody!

[Honza]

xrg: Hello and thanks! I'm afraid I still can't grasp the basic concepts of perspective. Let me show you the picture my spatially challenged imagination paints for me . Let's say I draw a simple cube using two-point perspective, like this:



As I imagine it, from a bird's perspective it would look like this:



Now I can move the cube around using auxiliary lines from the vanishing points, but as I see it, the cube is still facing the same, convenient direction. Like this:



.
.
.

My question is, what do I do if I want to rotate the cube into a less standard angle?



Applied to your tutorial and my background, I understand how to draw stairs facing the same angle as numbers 1 and 2 in the picture below. But what if my staircase looks like 3? How do I work with auxiliary lines then?




I assume there is something very fundamental I'm not getting, but I can't figure out what.

[Honza]

pharlap, tamatic: I've just noticed the sentence "The above represents a great de3al of work" in pharlap's post. I missed that before, and I'm sorry for judging it as a quick job.

This often happens to me (as can be seen in this thread ) - instead of trying to learn something from others, I resort to endless trial and error with little progress. It takes far more time than if I actually tried to learn something, but it's much, much easier mentally - I don't have to struggle to wrap my head around how others do what I can't do, I just enjoy the "freedom of creating". If this is your case, my advice would be to use other images as examples and watch tutorials. I've spent countless hours doing things the hard way, only to find some obscure video on youtube showing that they take a few minutes if you take the right approach and use the correct tools.

[tamatic]

xrg: Hello and thanks! I'm afraid I still can't grasp the basic concepts of perspective. Let me show you the picture my spatially challenged imagination paints for me . Let's say I draw a simple cube using two-point perspective, like this:

Now I can move the cube around using auxiliary lines from the vanishing points, but as I see it, the cube is still facing the same, convenient direction. Like this:

My question is, what do I do if I want to rotate the cube into a less standard angle?

Applied to your tutorial and my background, I understand how to draw stairs facing the same angle as numbers 1 and 2 in the picture below. But what if my staircase looks like 3? How do I work with auxiliary lines then?

I assume there is something very fundamental I'm not getting, but I can't figure out what.

Unless you are making very technical drawings, the perspective grid/lines are used mainly to make everything more easy to read. Get a feel for a consistent space. Guidelines for aligning things, get a feel their relative size/distance and spot unfitting parts more easy. (Sometimes with photos also to correct the lens bending.)
You could also use it to plot out those unaligned and complex shapes. For that its handy to be aware that, in this kind of 2 point perspective, the vertical lines always remain vertical no matter where.  Then you can to go into denser resolution (just add more and more refrence lines till it makes sense)
But depending on the nature of the work, and to save time, I would stick to only plotting the main lines,- create the main feel of the space and go from there.

In your top view example shape 3 would be behind the horizon.

[Snarky]

You know, people keep arguing about perspective, but in my opinion the original isn't that bad. Remember that this is a cave, so we shouldn't expect everything to be right angles and perfectly flat horizontal surfaces. A staircase where the steps seem to slant down? No problem!

[tamatic]

You know, people keep arguing about perspective, but in my opinion the original isn't that bad. Remember that this is a cave, so we shouldn't expect everything to be right angles and perfectly flat horizontal surfaces. A staircase where the steps seem to slant down? No problem!

Hehe, it's indeed not recommended to get very technical about rock formations and their projections into idealized 3d space. Well you can but then you might have to become a mathematical genius.
Like I said.. the lines are simply a guide, not to replace your own gut feelings on how things can/should look.

[Honza]

Judging from all the comments saying the perspective is irreparably wrong in my background, gut feeling didn't work out for me . So I need to understand where exactly I went wrong. People are trying to help by demonstrating the theory, for which I'm grateful, but I'm still not able to apply it to the specifics of my image. I see some details that seem a bit wrong, but it doesn't look off to me as a whole.

Just to be sure, this is how I imagine the room in a top view (not that I planned it this way, but it's what I see in the picture as it came out):

[tamatic]

Yeah, I think you could just take that liberty with that room. Unless you want too animate someone walking/rolling down those stairs. You could cut to the next scene when they only do the first few steps.
It's a cartoon-like world.. why should all the perspective and proportions make sense in the first place?
But if you are worried about it... Then think about the size of that door in the back.. and the size of the character when it would be standing there... that would be about just as big when he reached the top of those stairs according to your top view.


And I might add I think your earlier version is great. Reminds me of the work of Marten Toonder.

[Honza]

I just can't get over the childishness of the first version... I may try to pass it as a style, but it just looks inept to me compared to the newer version. Then again, the second one took about ten times as much time.

Well, since I'm at it, I might as well post two other early versions of backgrounds, both to be redone completely.

[dactylopus]

I really like what your showing here.  Good development.

I particularly like that shot with the character.  Lots of interesting things going on there.

[GlaDOSik]

Sometimes, you really want to have right perspective. But on these pictures... I like the wacky stairs. It's part of your style. From these two, I like the first one. If you spend more time on that, it could look really good.

[Khris]

As I imagine it, from a bird's perspective it would look like this:

The black line is the horizon; in the 3D view, the points on that line are at infinite distance from the viewer (where parallel lines meet).
Thus in the top view, you don't see it.

To draw angled cubes, you simply move the vanishing points. Or, if you have already established a two-point perspective, you can construct the position of each corner individually.

Shape 3 is tricky to do; you'd have to approximate the curves.

Starting from your sketch, I constructed a 3D view:


Stuff outside the circle isn't actually visible.

It's really tedious to do this for complex scenes, especially staircases are annoying to draw that way, let alone curving ones. I'd go the Sketchup route.

[Honza]

Khris: Thanks for taking the time to do this! It seems my instincts weren't as wrong as I thought they were. Did you really draw the 3D version using the lines shown, or did you use some transform tool?

Anyway, Sketchup it is

[Khris]

I didn't use a tool, no. The curved lines are guesstimates, btw.