Closeup cutscene concepts?

[Scavenger]

I was thinking, due to the nature of the art style I'm using in UTD (ie, easy), I could do close ups of the characters. But, the problem was that closeups need backgrounds, and I didn't want to bother my background artist TOO much. So, I thought up a way to make backgrounds for the closeups easier.



All I did was take a relevant section of the test BG, blurred it a LOT (until the pixels weren't noticable anymore), and added the character over the top =P. Does this look good? Professional, even? And if not, can you suggest an alternative?

And does anyone know which character I ripped off the design for the character shown? XP

[Kal-El]

That's very good!

I used the exact same concept in my cut-scenes.

Keep up the good work!

[TheCheese33]

Very very nice. This would pass in a commercial game!

[Paper Carnival]

That's a very nice technique. When the eye focuses on something near, the background always blurs, the nearer the focus the blurriest the background. So it's logically correct, therefore I suggest you to go for it

[Darth Mandarb]

This is actually the technique I was going to use for Amulet of Kings.  I think it's functional and looks good.

The only problem that arises is if you need to focus on something in the background ... because this creates a depth of field style.  And you can't focus on anything other than the foreground.

But if you don't need the background other than "filler" this stlye works quite well!

[fovmester]

I use something like this in my game as well. Saves a lot of time doesn't it?

Another technique I use is this: In a cutscene some parts of it will only be shown for a couple of seconds, maybe less. In that case the background doesn't have to contain as much detail as an ordinary ingame background (since nobody's gonna have time to see it anyway), so what do I do? I switch between zoomed in (blurred) ordinary backgrounds and new (other angle) backgrounds with less detail. The result is quite good!

[Gilbert]

Alternatively, you don't need backgrounds.







Loom was awesome. (Curse to the 256 colour VGA version)