Farlander´s High School Quest art thread

[Nacho]

Hi people... I am doing this in PSP... I am looking for a Sam and Max Style, but I don´t care if it is not an exact copy of the style. The problem is that I´ve read in Miez´s tutorial that he likes to Anti Alise by hand.

That means that there is an automatic way to do it? I am going crazy with the soften tool. No matter if you know the function in PSP or PS, I have both.



P.S. Feel free to criticise the composition or whatever, but have in mind that the wings of the building are totally unfinished.

[Vel]

The way to AA automaticially is by using blur at low amount. Or you may scale the image a bit.

[Miez]

Yep - Vel's right: scaling is your best bet: scale the picture to (say) 95% and then scale it up to it's original size again. That will give you (slightly fuzzy) auto-AA.
Blurring might work, but on small BG's even a little blur has a huge impact, turning your pristine picture into carrot cake. Or something.
Nice BG, by the way!

[Pet Terry]

:o Very nice bg!

As for the AA, I've been making some bg in 640x400 resolution and then resized them to 320x200, work very well for the DOTT- or S&M-style. But I've used Miez's way also, it takes lots of work, but it works...

[PureGhostGR]

Very good work.

perhaps you might consider using the darkest green hue (dark shadow on the tree) to the front part of the lawn to imply a curvy surface..

also a small "twisting" cloud on the right side of the sky you look extra good.

keep up the good work.

[DodgeR]

cool nice picture! i like the bus best nice choice of colours and sweet perspective 8)

i would go with the resizing image as mentioned before to acheive a AA look

[12431]

I know something that will make it better. the sun must be whiter than the skies. that gives it a bright feeling.

[tamper]

On a related note, I create my artwork in a vector drawing package - I use CorelDraw, but Illustrator, Freehand, etc. would be just as good.

One advantage of this is that when you export the scene to a bitmap, you can do it at any size you want and choose whether to apply anti-aliasing or not.

I find this gives much better results than the heavy-handed anti-aliasing in Photoshop.

Apart from the fact that you can't anti-alias sprite outlines in AGS, do people generally have a problem with anti-aliased artwork? I've seen a lot of examples on this forum of people really trying to avoid an anti-aliased image. Why do we think this could be?

[Nacho]

Dunno Temper... I also was against AA, but when I started this BG I realised that looks better with that blur.

BTW, I am almost totally happy with this composition... What do you think?

[Scummbuddy]

Why does the flag pole go so far into the sky?  And do you really want straight up and down window bars with the cool perspective style of the building?

I really like this picture. I can see some DOTT in the tree though...  

[SSH]

I would have thought that you would be able to see some grass through the bus windows... it kinda looks like the building is on the edge of a cliff...

[La Lore]

\._. Nacho, you know my opinion but the rest of the people don´t know it.

I don´t like the windows (It seems al jail).
You can draw some stones on the path.

Kisses     Lorena

[Kweepa]

I love the sky.

I agree with SSH that it looks like it's on a cliff. Maybe you could just make the bus windows a bit lighter, or put another low building on that side, or a fence or hedge or something.

I think you should remove the dithering (or is that a reduce to gif artifact?).

To anti-alias it, I'd double it in size (without resampling), clean up the edges you want anti-aliased with the line & pencil tools, then reduce it back to normal size - using BILINEAR filtering - I find that bicubic blurs it a little too much.

That reduce to 95% then restore looks a bit nasty in my opinion - I think you'd be better off keeping the clean look it has now.

And tamper, I don't know if people have a problem with AA in general. It just has to improve the image, not detract from it.

Steve

[Ben]

I saw someone on another forum who was working on an automatic anti-alias filter. I'll try and find that (though I don't think it's finished yet)..

EDIT- This isn't what I was talking about, but it might work:

Joy!

This should look better than blurring as well.

However, you might still need to touch up some things by hand.

[TheYak]

The program I use has an anti-aliasing feature called "Average."  It takes areas of different shades and does some "tweening" to soften the edges a bit.  I've got photo-shop but have been so used to PhotoImpact, I find it hard to switch.  

When people discuss anti-aliasing and wanting to get rid of it...  for the most part they're talking about the sprites.   The reason for hating it when dealing with sprites is that the edges tend to take on the color of the background or character and create artifacts around the sprite.  The sprite itself also becomes less crisp.  As far as backgrounds go, I don't think too many people have a problem with anti-aliasing as long as it doesn't detract from the picture quality.  The purpose is not to make the image blurry but to get rid of jagged edges and harsh lines that draw attention away from the image as a whole.

[Ben]

I don't think averaging is the same thing as antialiasing. An average filter simply blurs lines so that they have a soft look. An antialias filter smooths out the edges of lines so that the edges still look sharp but don't look quite as pixelated.

Anti-alias always looks good when done correctly.

[Nacho]

Whithout looking to the source


After looking to the source (Dott)

Well... Petteri´s trick worked perfectly. Here is a total revisited version of the High school, which reminds me... TAKE a LOOK toyour SOURCES before trying to copy an style!

P.S. The annoting spots around the shine of the sun are caused by the "Gifizication" do not C+C it...  ^_^

P.S.S. I am realising now that I´m not completelly happy with the darker "gradient" of the sky.. I´ll revisit it...

[Kweepa]

It's certainly captured the style! It looks great!
I think I preferred the sky and clouds of the original, but the new sky is good too.
Two things:
1. the school is much smaller - it looks like a primary school now - but maybe that's not a problem?
2. I don't like the texture on the path leading up to the doors.

But the fence, the hedges, the bricks, the pavement, the grass... they're all perfect!
(Did you use a colour picker on a DOTT background?)
Great job!
I hope you can keep this style up for the rest of your project!

Steve

[Nacho]

The pallete has been made taking original colours from DoTT... I had an screenie and I looked for the colours I needed.

The building is evidently so much small... But I don´t think it can be a problem, since the "dimensions" in this goofy style paintings seem not to matter ^_^ But the way, I think I´ll use an upper view of the town in some moment of the game, and it will be noticeable that the building is actually so much longer that wide.

The path leading to the door... Well, that´s actually the only thing I pasted from Dott... and seems that people does not like it O_O (I´ve asked in #Ags before...) I´ll try to fix it, thanks.

[Nacho]

I think I´ll include here all the files related with my new project... As usual, I´ll do a lot of art and as soon as I can I´ll start the production, propperly...



Can you guess who´s he? hehe...

Tip: look at the notice.

2nd Tip: Take a look to "properties" and you´ll see the nick he uses.

For taking a look to the reference:
http://w1.522.telia.com/~u52207918/eiffel.JPG