Outdoor scene WIP [finished]

[abstauber]

Dear critics lounge,

thanks again for the feedback on the last two background I've posted. This time I'm a little smarter and present this background before it's too late change a thing So this is going to be a work in progress .

I've followed your advices on perspective and build the house in Sketchup (which was a real pain btw) and drew some sourroundings.

This night scene is going to be a side scroller with light coming from the right side (which leads to the caravan scene I've already posted here some time ago) The moonlight is intended to be behind the viewers right shoulder.

Does the composition work for you? Do you have some better ideas for the house and the garden?

As always, thanks a bunch!

--edit: all stages so far:









And here's the final! Thanks again for all your help on this, guys!

[loominous]

Looks like a nice little scene, though a bit dull atm.

The major thing I'd try would be to try varying the landscape. Right now a very large part (if you take depth into account) of it is just flat grass, stretching to the horizon (which is too low btw, according to the house perspective).

Instead of trying to fill a vast landscape with individual (though bundled) trees like you have, you can try to see them as large masses. The forest to the left can be reduced to a hill like shape, with some jiggly lines to indicate that they're actually trees.

Something like this:



It's not pretty, but it does the job of a sketch - to visualize your ideas.

So I'd stay away from time consuming sketching methods, as you'll just run out of steam long before you've had time to try out different of solutions. As long as your scribbles are intelligible to yourself, they're fine.

Another benefit from rough early sketches is that you'll get a feel for the larger masses in the image. These large shapes is our main impression of the pic, but are easily missed when you start fiddling with details.

I gotta say that using 3d to make up for a poor understanding of perspective seems like a very bad idea. Perspective is a simple set of rules, and the sooner you start using them, the sooner you'll be able to sketch roughly in perspective by freehand.

Having to rely on references is really like working with shackles on - it's just constraining and cumbersome.

Anyway, good to see some WIP pics, and hope you'll keep us updated!

[abstauber]

Thanks for your help, too bad I missed the background blitz workshop  Except from needing an orphanage, it would have been my thing.

Contructing in 3D really gave me hard time, and I doubt I'll ever do it again It took a me whole day to understand Google Sketchup and to build a simple house.
You're of course right on the horizont, I've set it lower than it came from Sketchup because I wanted just a little piece of sky left. I guess I can't bend that rule either

So thanks for the input, let's see what comes next!

[abstauber]

Allright, I've outlined the house and did some very basic coloring just to check which walls are going to lighter or darker. I've also adjusted the sketch to Loominous' suggestions like more trees, higher horizont etc.

Now I'm running in a little problem: light
In theory, light hits a surface and the reflection is resulting the color. For moonlight it should be that the sun shines on the moon and the moon reflects it to earth. So far so good. Now why does it appear blue?
Are better: why is it alway drawn in blue? If I take a picture with my camera and mess up with the white balance - yes, then it's blue. I'm also aware of the "blue hour" short before dusk. And sometimes in cheap movies, they just put a blue filter on the camera, simulating "night".

But what I should I do? Color it with daylight colors and put a blue filter on it? (I assume, this whould look really cheesy) Experiment with different shades of blue and on places with a stronger light source I use the object's real color?
Does anyone know how I can predict the colors I'm looking for?

[miguel]

Hi abstauber, here are two palletes I found on the net that Van Gogh used for some of his works at night.
They are simple versions but may help you:

[abstauber]

Cool, thanks!
Paintings can be good referenced too, right?

By the way - does night look blue because of the sky? Or because in the darkness our eyes can see blue better than e.g. red ?? Can't get this out of my head  :
Right now, it's just dark outside - no blue at all.

[Snarky]

Yeah, I would imagine it's mainly due to the sky being the main source of illumination. In weather or locations where other sources of light dominate, you generally get a more reddish hue.

I don't think it has anything to do with human visual sensitivity to blue, because blue is actually the primary color we are least sensitive to. According to this webpage, luminance (Y) can be calculated as:

Y = 0.3R + 0.6G + 0.1B

Which means that something with only a little bit of blue light will still appear very dark to us, while with the same amount of green light it will appear six times as bright. (The RGB space is scaled to be roughly the same across each component, so that nR+nG+nB should always appear as a neutral gray--though it may sometimes be a little bit off.)

[miguel]

Well, during the daytime, the white light coming from the sun refracts on our atmosphere into the full spectrum of colors we know. Our eyes compact everything into blue and thats how we see the blue sky.
I guess that, and forgive me my ignorance, when an artist has to do night paintings he chooses a dark blue instead of just plain black or grey shades.
If the reason is not artistic I too would like to know why the night is represented in blue.

[Ryan Timothy B]

I think blue is used in night scenes because: Blue is cold and dark.  I believe it's pretty much as simple as that.

As an example, which background from my game looks colder. 

This one without the blue?
Or
This one with the blue?

Definitely the blue one looks colder.

[TerranRich]

miguel, sorry to say, that's not why the sky is blue during the daytime.

Also, the sky is still blue at night. It's just that the amount of light scattering in the sky is so minute that we don't notice it and see only black.

If you take a camera, point it up at the night sky, and leave the shutter open long enough, you will see bright blue, like it was daytime. See: http://www.burnblue.com/blog/2007/11/d300-long-exposure-night-test.html

[Uhfgood]

I believe it has something to do with color temperature.  With yellow light things look a bit warmer (ie pushed towards reds, oranges and yellows)... with the absence of it things start to look a bit colder.  (like blues and greens and such).

[miguel]

Ryan: I like the first one. The second example does not look natural, it has to much blue.

TerranRich, you are right, I didn't explain it well.
We get to see blue during daytime because light coming from the sun is scattered when bumping into our atmosphere molecules, and warm colors like red and yellow get absorbed, while the blue color can reach us.
It has to do with light frequency and wavelenght.

[paolo]

OK, quick science lesson (skip to the "Why do things look blue at night?" bit if you're not interested):

Anyone who spends time with little children will have heard the question "Why is the sky is blue?" Unfortunately, the answer requires a little bit of physics, so will be beyond the average toddler/pre-schooler.

Visible light from the Sun is made up of radiation of various wavelengths. Of these, red has the longest wavelength, and bluey-purple has the highest. (Other types of radiation exist outside this range: for example, radio waves have longer wavelengths than red light, and X-rays have much shorter wavelengths, but that is by the by...). The other traditional colours of the rainbow (orange, yellow, etc) come in between, with progressively shorter wavelengths as you go through the spectrum.

Radiation with long wavelengths (that is, red, orange and yellow light) is more easily scattered by particles (dust, water vapour, pollution, etc) in the Earth's atmosphere than radiation with shorter wavelengths (green, blue, purple), which means that the light that manages to reach our eyes looks blue.

If the sky is overcast, light of all frequencies is scattered, so the cloud cover looks grey.

(Oops, I didn't read miguel's later reply - sorry for the duplicated info.)

====

Why do things look blue at night? Because film-makers put a blue filter over their lenses (or do the equivalent in post-production) to make things look cold and dark, as Ryan Timothy has already mentioned, so we have become accustomed to thinking that blue = night time. If you go outside at night, or look around a darkened room in the middle of the night, you'll see that things don't really look blue, they are just dark.* If anything, things look yellow at night in the city and indoors, as the spectrum of light from street lights and standard light bulbs does not have much blue in it and so is yellow.

* Correct me if I'm wrong and somehow blue light manages to leak around the illuminated part of the Earth and illuminate the dark part, or the Moon reflects only the blue light from the Sun (it doesn't, or else the Moon would look blue), but darkness means no light or reduced light of all colours!

[abstauber]

Wow, like I would have posted on Slashdot 

Maybe some artists also wants to mimic this effect, which indeed is quite beautiful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_hour

Anyway, I might now try to find some colors for this background.

[markbilly]

No one has given a fully correct answer to the "Why is the sky blue?" question yet. So this may be a good read: here. It explains it fully.

This is wildly off topic.

On the subject of using a filter, it is probably not a good idea. You need to be able to colour it completely separately. Night scenes generally need far less colours (which a filter won't do, it will just create lots of shades), and exaggerated contrast. Me thinks, anyway!

[Snarky]

Why do things look blue at night? Because film-makers put a blue filter over their lenses (or do the equivalent in post-production) to make things look cold and dark, as Ryan Timothy has already mentioned, so we have become accustomed to thinking that blue = night time. If you go outside at night, or look around a darkened room in the middle of the night, you'll see that things don't really look blue, they are just dark.* If anything, things look yellow at night in the city and indoors, as the spectrum of light from street lights and standard light bulbs does not have much blue in it and so is yellow.

* Correct me if I'm wrong and somehow blue light manages to leak around the illuminated part of the Earth and illuminate the dark part, or the Moon reflects only the blue light from the Sun (it doesn't, or else the Moon would look blue), but darkness means no light or reduced light of all colours!

No, things genuinely look blue at night (unless you're somewhere with strong artificial illumination, of course). I've just been outside, and it's true. You can also see this in photos and in old paintings from long before Hollywood went to color.

I think the reason is pretty simple: things take on the hue of the dominant light source. In the day, that's the sun, which is more or less white. At night, it is the sky, which is blue (even when it's dark). Essentially, it's just like during the blue hour, except darker.

There's probably also a psychological effect: if everything is too dark to tell its colors, except for the sky, that's going to be the dominant (i.e. only) color.

[TerranRich]

Yup. Just look at the long-exposure photos I posted above. With enough exposure, the sky looks like it does during the daytime.

[abstauber]

Well, after this extensive night color debate, I think I might come up with the next steps.

When I chose the colors, I had a clear sky with a bright moon in mind. So there's still enough light for a blueish complexion.
But first i had to the outlines (and felt like a trained monkey doing this )



I had a hard time, doing something with that much grass. Applying photoshop effects looked cheesy and just a green filled area empty and unfinished. So I scribbelt some lines in a pale color. There's also shadow for the trees.



Then I've doubled the layer, blurred it and put it behind the original layer to get a deeper look. After that I've added some highlights and searched for a better matching color. What you now see is green + little amount blue = cyan



The grass still looks like water to me and I'm not sure if I've done the shadow on the fence right.
Also, do you get a feeling for the depth or do I need more tree like blobs in the background?

Almost forgot: Here's a wonderful photoshop plugin to do Deluxe Paint like gradients.
http://depthdither.graphest.com

[Ryan Timothy B]

I can't really tell with the temporary bright color of the house and fence..  adjust those colors to approximately what you plan them to be and I'll take another look at it.
But from what I can see now, the grass almost has that watery feeling like you had mentioned.

I REALLY like the house in the background.  Looks great.

[paolo]

The background is looking lovely. I take it you are going to change the house too - the house would be dark as well, and if the lights are shining through the windows, this would make it seem even darker or even completely silhouetted (as your eyes adapt to the bright light, other things nearby end up looking darker).