Office BG - WIP

[Dr. Scary]

So I have been trying to emulate the style of InCreator and several others with this bg, and I was kind of curious of how well I am doing. I find it very hard to judge myself.

It's a bit bare right now but details will be added once I am sure I am working from a solid foundation.




Old version
Not as old version

EDIT: Oh, perhaps I should give some background (pun intended) information on the BG... It's supposed to be a detective's office (police detective, not a PI) from about the early 70's.

Version 2:
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- Changed the colors around a bit.
- Added some extra stuff.
- That's about it really...

Version 3:
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- Enlarged chair
- Added more stuff
- Added lightsources
- The plant grew too
- Added tiles to the ceiling.

[InCreator]

Looking good!

But you're using too much DARK green in your palettes, it feels a bit too aggressive. I'd go with more blue and yellow tones. And brighter colors.

According to my style...

* Softened some edges by brighter lines
* Removed green from desk and ceiling (try to get ceiling a better color)
* Brightened a bit and increased contrast on rightmost drawers

But there's enough to do yet. Like applying carefully noise to most of plain areas to fake some detail...

And add lots and lots of tiny well-detailed thingies, like phone, pencil box, portraits on wall, lamps, door handle, papers around everywhere...

[DoorKnobHandle]

It's great, but I don't like the composition. A desk in the middle of the room? That may be realistical but it doesn't look optimal in an adventure game. The cabinets on the right aren't placed well either, the space they create behind them and in front of them needs to be either filled out with objects (plants, more cabinets or whatever) or should be eliminated.

So, overall, your drawing style looks very professional and satifies, but you should probably spend a little more time on thinking about where to place the objects in the room. Additionally, (something I said before when I wrote a quick tutorial as a reply to another C&C thread) the outline of your room is very, very basic. It's just a room with no edges or nothing (there's a back wall, a left one, a right one, the ground and the ceiling). It makes a room a ton more interesting if you add stuff to this outline before even starting to draw really. For example you could've added an edge to one of the corners or a higher level to one side of the  floor etc.

[ildu]

I think the palette is spot-on. Without reading any descriptions I got a big military operations office -vibe from it. The only thing that threw it off was the red door, which should really have less contrast and a doorknob. So I say, keep the palette. About the composition, like dkh, I noticed that the desk is awkwardly in the middle of the room. So pull it back a lot. Shouldn't be too much trouble to redo the perspective. Also, it looks quite empty. And the plain gray ceiling is a bit too obtrusive. Good job so far.

[Dr. Scary]

InCreator:
I never would have dared to give the detective a purple-ish desk myself, I guess I'm too much of a realist. But I can see that it looks good, so I guess I just have to be more bold with my colour choices. 

dkh: The desk has to be some distance from the lower edge to be able to fit a chair and a person there, but I agree that it is perhaps a bit too far out there. The room will be filled out with more details as I go along, so hopefully the empty spaces will fill up.

ildu: As I said to InCreator I will play some more with the colours.

Thank you all so far. I hope to come back with another update later today.

[Dr. Scary]

OK. New version up. See top post.

[ildu]

Now it looks great. Just some pointers:

- The ceiling still looks quite obtrusive. I would lower the contrast and add some kind of simple paneling.
- The desk looks just a tad to small.
- The plant doesn't really fit in its place, since it looks small. So I would make it larger and shift it more towards the right wall.
- The chair is way too small.
- There's no lightsource.
- The cabinets should make a shadow.
- The shelf looks like it's not close enough to the wall.
- Just nitpicking here, but the front left looks just a bit empty.

[Dr. Scary]

All good points ildu.

New version up top. Hopefully it nears completion?

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

You have every right to be proud of this background.  The only thing I would say is to fix the perspective of the lights.  The right light seems more toward the middle of the room than it should be.  Excellent work.

[ildu]

Now it's quite neato. Just some more pointers:

- The cabinet side still looks pretty big, so I would disquise the space by making the plant bigger.
- The shadow of the plant should go off to the right.
- You could try moving the clock closer to the viewer, since there's a lot of empty space there.
- The desk with the chair is still too small or the the door is too big. These two objects are really your only object to scale. A table, a coathanger, a filing cabinet can all be as big as you want, since you see various sizes of them in the real world. However doors and desks tend to be relatively the same size. The height of your desk is now one thirds the height of the door:



So either make the door smaller or the desk larger. A character as reference would be a good standard.

[Dr. Scary]

ProgZmax: Thank you! Yeah the light is a bit off.

ildu: Actually the desk should be fine when you take scaling into concideration. (reaching the character almost to the hip) The chair however might still be a bit smallish.
EDIT: You actually hit the vanishing point spot on! I take that as a compliment.

Any of you guys have a tip for a character style that would go well with the bg? Kind of have to learn to draw characters too before I can make a game...

EDIT: I guess the scale of the character matches the size of Mr. Colossal's template guy, about 80-85px.
I am going for a semi-realistic style here, so if any of you have any ideas for character style it would help out a lot.

[InCreator]

I never would have dared to give the detective a purple-ish desk myself

You're not getting the point!
See, going for realism is one thing. Drawing a pleasant BG is way another.

With 2D art, realism is somewhat pointless to chase - It would still look 100% more real with photo composition or 3D.
All you can do is try to keep overall style realistic. But because it's simply not enough, you have to seduce the viewer (player, in this case), but leading his attention to more detailed and better-turned-out things. I mean - think more about someone looking at the bg and not the amount of realism or saturation! Make people like the bg.

This means that you - in most cases - must try to draw attention to well-detailed parts and away from large plain areas.

And this - can be done most easily by playing with colors and contrast. Try to add things to room that SHOULD have different colors apart from those you already have. For a mostly bluish or reddish room, a green plant is a welcome relief... You get the idea.

That's why I use lot's of very differently colored and very carefully crafted tiny details - people look at them and like them. And no one would say stuff like that

the outline of your room is very, very basic.

anymore.

it just takes 10% of creativity, 20% of psychology and 70% of work!

But well, you already hit the nail. Now just brighten up rightmost box, separate pot color from plant and get over from fearing contrasty (saturated) tones. A little bright book cover, piece of cloth or a bright blue pencil on the table won't spoil your overall low-saturated bg. It will just lighten some places up. Well, as long as the thing's small enough.

[Dr. Scary]

Very helpful advice indeed!

I tried my hand at some more saturated colours, switching the whole palette around.




The forum background makes it look a bit dark, but in fullscreen that shouldn't be a problem.

The change of colours make a great change in mood.

[Khris]

It's a great background, but as ildu already mentioned, the proportions are a bit screwed up.

I've "drawn" a "char" next to the door, then resized it to 175%, using the left wall as reference.



I've just noticed that my own desk is about one third as tall as my door
But still, the chair is too small.

[Dr. Scary]

Yeah. The chair is too small, and strickly speaking there should be at least one more chair in the room, but I figured I'd leave it as it is until I have mastered the art of drawing characters to sit in the darn things.

[ildu]

Woah, that color scheme to me is just w-w-way to much. A really good thing to remember and use is to apply more saturation to objects that you need the player to focus on. Right now, my eyes aren't directed on the objects on the table (as was with the earlier color scheme), but rather on the unusually colored carpet and walls. Also, as you changed from light to dark, the room suddenly got a lot smaller and more stuffy. I think it's just way too much.

And as for the desk, I still think it looks too small. The desk in my room is maybe 2/5 the height of the door, and I find my desk to be really small. So small, in fact that I usually need to crouch a bit to be comfortable with it. Being 185cm+ tall, it's not nice to sit on a kids' desk with limited legspace. So, I think a desk in an office is usually larger than one that you might have at home.

[Dr. Scary]

Yeah the colour of the floor is a bit extreme perhaps. I still have the original version saved on my harddrive, and that's the one I will use in a game. (with some changes) The new version is more of a thought experiment. I want the in game office seem more like a drab official type of office. The new colour scheme makes it seem more like a private investigators office or the office of a higher executive.

I'm 185cm myself and my desk is about exactly like the desk on the bg. I have plenty of legspace. The desk stays like that for now.

[Afflict]

Just broaden the chair...

[rharpe]

HEY! I liked the old sterile-white-wall-office-look. The green makes it look too much like a room in someones house. The first one looked like a true office!

Btw, great background, it's progressing well!