some things from our project to C&C(updated)

[TheSaint]

hello everyone.
ill upload some stuff from project I'm currently working on with my artists here, and i think some of you will remember it, it was posted last year, but since than we had certain holdbacks, style changes but now we are back on track and are supplied with boards to help fasten things up.

for start I'm posting portrait of the protagonist to remind you how it looked,  or if you havent seen it already to check it out.


this one is bg that i wanted your comments about. atm trees in the background are not shaded due to initial style set up but we decided today to cell-shade all generally. I'm aware that some of you mite dislike gradiental sky but it suits our needs atm so it wont be changed at least not in our plan for now. we are doing our best to make style consistent aka to develop certain cannon style for our game



edit:
new char for C&C

added Thu afrernoon

cheers

p.s. disregard dots or possible line crossings that are result of coloring

[ildu]

Looks awesome. Very Hanna & Barbera -ish.

But crits. Make the protagonist fully cel-shaded. Now it looks like it has the line drawing sketch under it and some texturing, as well as some kind of dodging on the knees. So simply outlines, flat colors and one shading layer.

Although the background looks great now, it could be magnificient with some simple tweaking. First of all, you gotta add basic shading to many areas that are lacking. Second you should add more texturing, hand-made texturing. Third, I would still advise you to get rid of the gradient sky. Just tablet your own gradients and add clouds. Finally, you gotta think about the color scheme. Now the colors look like they were from a cartoon show on tv, but as Bill Tiller stated, the background art in an adventure game should be better than in cartoons. Balance the colors into one ambience and start creating highlights and such according to a predetermined lightsource.

This effort has so much potential. I do hope you don't let it get away just for the sake of small tweaks.

[Snarky]

Just a simple comment. If you persist in using this kind of gradient sky, at least flip it. The sky should darken towards blue as you go up, not the other way around.

[TheSaint]

yes but if my light source is in top left corner of sky invisible on image? no im thinking u r right sky is going whiter far and bluer close. we will prolly change the sky aswell to follow all cellshaded style.

ildu : what do you mean protagonist fully cell shaded? his shade depends of light source always. he will be shaded accordingly to constant light source on the bgs. can u elaborate more on this plz. u mentioned flat colors, simple outlines etc.

[Andail]

Paint-over:


* fixed colour scheme (the original colours clashed)
* changed lightsource
* added colour perspective to establish depth (note how the original has literary no such depth)
* shadows where necessary
* added a path to break up the big yellow surface
* some highlights

Hope it can help you, good luck

[DanClarke]

nice paintover andail. 

I think one of the things i'd do is lose the gradiesnts all together. If you'd done a background consisting solely of gradients then this would have been fine, but to dance between paint and gradients just looks messy in my opinion. It's a nice BG though, i like the composition in particular.

Dan

[TheSaint]

great paintover andail thnx

*we intended to go for cheery atmosphere in game hence the colors,
*i agree with your comment about lack of depth,
*yes shadows were to be added as i said above the bg,
*cheers for highlights,
*path was supposed to be those stones u can see, artists deliberatly avoided path like this,
*lightsource is at wrong side tbh coz it breaks the consistency of other bgs, altho since all the places arent always at same position towards sun/light no need to keep shading same all the time. this might clash with char shading though.
*clouds look nice i spoke about adding those yesterday with one of my artists

great feedbacks guys, thank you all and keep them coming  , ill post another char during day so u can add comments about him aswell.

kind regards,
TheSaint

[Snarky]

Verrrry nice, Andail!

There's something that bothers me about the colors, though. I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's that there seems to be an imbalance, where the left side of the image leans towards red (the gradient in the sky and the closer side of the house), while the right hand side leans towards green (the other end of the gradient and that big tree).

I don't quite get why the gradient is tilted, either. If not just straight vertical, shouldn't it at least be slightly radial?

Also, if that's the sun shining out behind the house, the shadows are pretty far off. Since the sun is straight ahead, we would only see the shadow side of things (like the trees and the house). And since it's so low in the sky, the shadows would be much longer.

[Andail]

oh, the skewed gradient is just a mistake, I didn't see it until now (keeps a pretty dark monitor). It's supposed to be a straight vertical gradient, with no purple tones.

You're right about the shadows also. I didn't want to make too many drastic changes to the background at once, especially since I suspected that he wanted to go for a cell-shading.
So, well, there's much to with the shadows.