New game- QFG style: Menus and background critique

[Babar]

Your character's model is obviously not perfect (I think he has hair coming out of his hat! ), but it does have a certain charm. Even your backgrounds! While I agree with Khris that everything looks waxy, I wouldn't necessarily count that as a bad thing.
As long as everything looks consistent, even if it is not the most perfect art in the universe, it should still look fine. I agree with ddq, you don't need super-realistic art (and you probably can't get it just yet), but a get to one "stylised" style, and stick to it. For some reason, people seem to have higher expectations of 3D than 2D art.

One thing you should try fixing is the outline, or halo of pixels around your characters. I haven't used blender in a while, but is there a way to export the renders as a PNG with a transparent background? If not, you should edit it in photoshop or GIMP or something afterwards to aggressively remove that. It is better to cut into a pixel or two of your sprite rather than have a pixel or two of that grey outline halo.

As for your interface, it does sorta aesthetically clash with the other art. Maybe you can make a 3Dish boxy border around the GUIs (all of them, including the icon bar, and the status bar when you don't move the mouse up) to make them fit in better? Something like what you have with the character portrait and message box (although I'd suggest making it more frame-like and boxy, perhaps adding some depth). And you should probably reduce the size of the Stats and Spells menu. They don't really need to take up that much space.

PS: I also don't know what the 2nd Special action is. Somersault? And the 3rd one? Kick him headless?

[zabnat]

Alright, first of all: I have tried using the typical 2D paint and art programs, and I have no talent in that area. Trust me, for that type of painting, you do need some artistic talent to start out with.

You are wrong. And right. Talent = determination. If you don't have determination, you can't learn to draw or paint. Everyone can learn to draw decently with practise. All it takes is time. If you draw for one hour each day, in five years you can do some decent drawings.

I would also suggest that you should try doing some stylized stuff first, before you go for the photo-realistic style, which I think this attempts to be. That way you can learn modelling, materials and lighting. And because people don't usually expect it to really look photo-realistic, you can get away with more mistakes. Then you can try again with realistic style.

For the icons, why not use the same kind of border on icon you have on speechview and the speechbox? At least it would be consistent.

On the room where there's the guy with the cloak, it seems you have used some kind of radiosity setting on the door. Why haven't you used the same thing on the room? This would probably improve the lighting of the room significantly.

Easiest way to make the lighting for the cave is probably just putting some omni lights where the torches are, put some radiosity settings to place and render. Then tweak the color and decay of the omnis.

[mode7]

Going for a stylized comic style might be a good option. The character arts have very little contrast - use these render settings for the environments use simple but consistent geometry and let the textures do all the work. Kind of like this
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ironically going to the cartoon style actually means more 2d painting - because they all heavily rely in textures - which you cant take from a database cause they have to be unique.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

A quick visit to youtube and typing in blender modelling tutorial gave me this list of links:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+modelling+tutorial&aq=1


There's a pretty extensive amount of tutorials available on youtube for 3d modelling that might help you in a number of ways, from teaching you how to get the most out of the program to building your first model and rigging it. 

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+architecture+tutorial&aq=6

This is a list of tutorials about designing backgrounds (houses, trees, etc).

There's enough variety for you to pick and choose based on where you feel you are at skill wise.  Since I haven't really worked in 3D in a few years I can't do much better than this, so I hope it helps.

[skitt2501]

Now, how come I had never heard of this site before- http://www.cgtextures.com/ ??!?!

I made this in about a half hour with a texture from there-



Obviously not perfect- I need to touch up some of the angles, improve the lighting a bit, and I don't know if that's the right type of texture for a cave, but.... better??

[Ryan Timothy B]

Obviously not perfect- I need to touch up some of the angles, improve the lighting a bit, and I don't know if that's the right type of texture for a cave, but.... better??

Umm. No. Not at all. It's all very 2d and flat looking. It actually looks like you've split a rock in half and took a picture of all the mineral lines and such in it. I don't see a cave in this at all if it weren't for the black silhouettes of the stalagmites and stalactites.

I don't know blender at all, but you definitely need some dynamic lighting in this.


Oh, and Mode7, that Zelda screenshot looks fabulous. I would love to play a game with graphics like that.

[skitt2501]

Is this what you mean by dynamic lighting?



I think that definitely helps give it some depth.

Oh, and you should definitely play Wind Waker, if you haven't before. Absolutely beautiful game.

[mode7]

@skitt2501
You're definitely getting much better here. The lightning could use some more color though.
Could you send me the model? I could show you how much better it could be with porper lightning and render setup.

[Anian]

Have you ever been to a "tourist" cave (you know, a big one that's really set up for lots of tourists to visit and such)?
Here's an example: http://www.postojnska-jama.si/eng/ - also there's a castle near the cave, and the castle is bascially more than half made of rock tunnels and chambers, which is cool.

They have cool setups with lights in them usually, now of course, it'd be weird to have electric lights in a fantasy game, but what you could do  is put some kind of glowing color crystals (self illuminated stuff) and some could be behind those stalagmites and such, it'd give you a cool effect - you'd get depth, cool shadows and lights and you might want to get rid of that "window" light (unless this part of the cave is near the surface. Just maybe keep to one or two colors though, to keep the theme clear, maybe blue and purple or green and yellow.
Also with those crystals add some flora in there, like udnerground plants and stuff (I know it's not realisitc, but with the glowing crystals, they might support some plants). Some variation in texture also might help, but I'd first try the crystals thing.

Added bouns might be cool labyrinth where the colors of crystals might be the hint where to go - like there is a big crystal, when you touch it, it goes like Simon says and gives out 6-7 different colors and then you go through the maze, and go through the doors that match the color sequence.

If you just keep the light - that light is a bit soft, what you'd get in a cave is a very strong ray of light through the crack and the whole cave would be slightly lit around that ray

[Khris]

Oh, and Mode7, that Zelda screenshot looks fabulous. I would love to play a game with graphics like that.

That's Wind Waker on the Gamecube. You can play it just fine with Dolphin and a fast PC

[skitt2501]

I've added some color and some objects (and a crystal that was originally supposed to be glowing moss but it wants to be a crystal instead), but this looks like the type of thing that would cause issues in AGS.



With all the different light sources and shadows, and only 5 possibly backgrounds to be able to animate with, I don't see how I can make a character walk through this room without it looking very unnatural. This is why I have been more or less shying away from lighting effects so far.

Or, I could be wrong, and maybe it looks fine. I'll try it out later.

[Ali]

The volumetric effect is going to cause you problems, as nice as it looks. However you can light this scene well without relying on it. What you've hit upon here is lighting from within a scene, so objects in the foreground become darker than those in the background. Take that principal further, and experiment with light position and the contrast between warm/cool (orange/blue) light sources.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

You're definitely making some improvement there, just keep experimenting with light temperature and placement as Ali suggests as well as deciding on what the 'focus' of the scene is going to be (is it the crystal or the exit?).  Remember, the key to a good scene is designing it around a purpose and a point of focus.

[mode7]

I really like the new version a lot. Keept it!
I did a render of the mesh as you sent it to me but in terms functionality your's is much better. Have a look anyway


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You could do the volumetric effect in photoshop and export it with an alpha channel. Put it insode an object in AGS to draw it in front of the player and it will look very convincing.
Concerning making the player walk around: Most 3d programs can render a so called z-map which is a grey scale image storing the z-channel. With photoshop and some adjustments you can extract very nice and accurate walk behind masks