I suck at trees, and I suck at outdoors, so here's my attempt at both!

[Dualnames]

Best paintover ever.

Seconded. Also WTF theo!!

[Technocrat]

well. lol. I just realized you've already finished this picture. Oh well, don't hate me now but I just totally tore your old image apart.  :



I started making a paint-over with some simple points I wanted you to have a look at but somewhere in the process I forgot I was working on someone else's image and just kept on experimenting, thus I'm afraid I may have strayed faaaaar from your original concept. Also, sorry for the smudginess, I painted it on your lowres canvas and doubled its scale now for showing purposes.

A quick rundown of what major points I have addressed:

* There was no depth, I added fog.
* Lighting was not coherent, I repainted it, all the time thinking about my main and ambient light sources.
* Ground was boring, I added city lights to get scale into the scene as well as a secondary light source.
* The windows reflected a color that by no means seemed to exist in your sky. I repainted them to reflect the sky.
* Compositionally your bent building and tree were both causing a mess, I repainted them to get better flow.
* The whole composition felt awkwardly flat. I skewed everything into perspective to make it more dynamic.

Again, I realize this was taken a bit too far here, but perhaps some of the points and how I have addressed them will teach you or someone around here something. Thanks for making me sit down and paint for a couple of hours. I needed that.  

Very much looking forward to part two of technobabylon. Best of luck!

Hell's teeth, that's impressive! Now I feel inadequate, haha!

Very helpful points though, I'll make sure to include them in my drawing process for episode 3!

[Snarky]

Yeah, that's a great paintover. I think it's particularly useful because it's still rough enough that you can notice the tricks and figure out how they're achieved. I'm particularly thinking of the use of highlights in giving form to shapes like the tree, and adding so greatly to the "drama" of the scene.

[Ilyich]

+1. Absolutely splendid paintover. And what's also great about it, is that it's completely useless regarding this particular background, but very helpful for general knowledge. So thanks for doing a paintover for all of us to learn from, and not just for Technocrat.  

This also makes me think of some sort of contest for best modification of the existing background.

[Matti]

This also makes me think of some sort of contest for best modification of the existing background.

Nice idea!

And yeah, that's a pretty great paintover. I especially like the glass front of the building, it looks superb.

[theo]

hhe I know, I got a bit carried away. I'm glad you guys found it interesting though. 

I do these kind of paintovers in my head all the time when I play ags games. There are so many games out there that could look so much better with a couple simple fixes... I really wish people took the time. But that's easy for me to say, I should take the time making sure my code works and to proofread things, but I prefer just pretending it's all good heh. Spending time on the part you love to work on sure is easier than the opposite.

[loominous]

That's a neat paintover for sure.

Regarding painting trees, I had this old mini tutorial lying around that might be of some help:



Should make one regarding simplified leaves n grass, though I'm not very good at either.

[markbilly]

Hey, theo? Fancy taking a look at the backgrounds in my game?

It was a pretty nice background anyway, but wow!

One thing I do think is important is the shape of the main building. The curve-ness (in the vertical direction) does make the composition rather funky.