Topic: Background Blitz :: Workshop Edition :: Concluded

[loominous]

Welcome to the first Workshop Edition of the Background Blitz!


Where the participants in the usual Blitzes work behind closed doors, emerging only when ready, this will be about opening everything up. Rather than focusing on the final pieces, it will be about the processes leading up to them. Working in an collaborative atmosphere, the participants will share their progress and ideas from the very first doodles, up to the final touches, giving and receiving feedback as they tinker along and improve their pieces.

There are many ways of doing a workshop like this, all with their own pros and cons, and after seemingly endless discussions between zyndikate and me, we decided that this time around we'd work on independant pieces, but move through the stages of the creation simultaneously, by dividing it up into the phases:

Since we're not sharing a physical location, and can't simply look the other guys over the shoulder to see the progress, the participants will compensate this by posting WIP (Work In Progress) pics during the whole process, the more the better. Apart from their own WIP pics, any material that might be considered interesting is welcome, such as photos for illustrating ideas, reference pictures, and even stuff like music, if it happens to be relevant.



The script

The goal will be to develop a background that follows this script: (it's in a pseudo screenplay format for no better reason than that I happen to like the look of it)

The reason why it's so specified is that it will enable us to work out and discuss solutions for problems that we all share. Everyone knows what the others are trying to accomplish, so there is no confusion about what someone's aiming for (a common problem in the CL).


Voting

After the last phase, a vote will be held with the following categories:

      Most Developed - the participant who during the workshop has developed the most
      Most Helpful
      Best Execution - the best execution of the script

The recipient of the most votes can then go back to a regular Background Blitz, a Mockup Blitz, or go for another Workshop Edition (perhaps with another approach).


Posting Guidelines

Creating posts

To keep the thread easy to read, please keep your progress for each step inside a single post. This doesn't apply to comments and discussions.

Also, to make it easy to know what comments refer to, please quote texts and pictures.

Don't hesitate to make bump posts when you update something, just make sure to include a link to your particular post like so:

Update: Example

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[url=http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=34542.msg451551#msg451551]Update: Example[/url]
To get the address to a particular post, simply rightclick on that post's topic line (the line at the top of the post usually called something like Re: something), and select 'copy address' (or something similar).

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Images

Try keeping image file sizes below 60kb, and if they're bigger then please create a thumbnail and link to the original image.

If you're including large ref pics directly from the web, such as images.google.com, then please include the thumbnail version in the post, along with a link to the full sized image. Like so:


Full size

Note: You don't have to create thumbnail versions yourself, just copy the address to the ones that google use (rightclick and select 'copy image address' (or something similar)).



--

On to the first part!

Edit: Fixed image links

[loominous]

Study sketches

These are pre-sketches that you do in order to familiarize yourself with the elements of the scene.

It's easy to fall back on more or less generic designs of elements, particularly when they play a less important role in a scene, and studying interesting existing ones will widen your understanding of the subject, allowing you to create interesting environments.

They can be everything from quick scribbles to elaborate artworks.


Design Sketches

These are pre-sketches as well, where you try out designs of your own. They can be adaptations of reference material, or completely new.

(two of the design sketches for the lighthouse in CMI)

--


In practise

All this may suggest that this stage is very time consuming, but it's really just as long as you feel like. You can study an element of a scene for a lifetime, or just glance at a pic. It's all about your level of interest and need.

I'm personally often too lazy to do study sketches, and find myself go straight to the design sketching. Study sketches do teach you extremely much however, stuff that just looking at images won't, so I really recommend doing them.


Tip

One thing I've found helpful is to set up a working space where you surround the sketch area with reference pictures like so:

Besides making it easy to go from looking at the sketches to the references, it also gets rid of that horrible white space you start out with, and I also suspect it helps you in some less conscious way, as being surrounded by a myriad of shapes and design elements is bound to affect you in some way, and hopefully influences the richness of your own designs. The last part is of course just pure speculation.

--

So, that's it, happy drawing!

Edit: Fixed links

[DoorKnobHandle]

Great idea. I'm working on a sketch. I'll post my first reference here, for finding it again later...


Click for full size...

EDIT: edited to follow new posting guidelines

[loominous]

Just added these posting guidelines to the first post:

Posting Guidelines

To keep the thread easy to read, please keep your progress for each step inside a single post. This doesn't apply to comments and discussions.

Also, to make it easy to know what comments refer to, please quote texts and pictures.

If you're including large ref pics directly from the web, such as images.google.com, then please include the thumbnail version in the post, along with a link to the full sized image. Like so:


Full size

Note: You don't have to create thumbnail versions yourself, just copy the address to the ones that google use (rightclick and select 'copy image address' (or something similar)).

--

Great idea. I'm working on a sketch. I'll post my first reference here, for finding it again later...

http://histpres.mtsu.edu/centfarms/rutherford_county/images/Sugg%20farmhouse.jpg (too big for direct linking, I believe)

Had a very similar house in mind, though with influences from houses like this one:


(from Beauty and the Beast, framenumber 4282 in this dvd rip)

[Andorxor]

Here are the  reference pictures,that i will use:
The house

Windmill:

[Blue]

I really wish I had the time to participate in this one... 
Great idea loominous!
I’m looking forward to seeing the entries 

[loominous]

Just a reminder that there are plenty of things to design beside the house, so while six days for just designing and studying stuff might sound a bit generous, it really isn't much, particularly since we're not doing it full time.

There's the sign, bridge, stream, playing equipment, swings, farm, windmill, and these are just the things mentioned in the script. A real environment contains ton of stuff.

You can of course just go for generic designs for these, but then there's a good chance that most parts of the image will be uninteresting.

And this doesn't mean that you need to spend a day just researching different swingsets. Three minutes browsing through images.google.com for "beautiful swingset"(to exclude the generic junk) will yield plenty of interesting designs that you can then import into whatever application you're using, and give your own design a go. Doesn't have to take more than 5 minutes in total, and you get another thing that will interest the viewer for at least a moment, and add richness to the scene.

And even though the prospect of researching stuff like signs may not sound thrilling, it's because we immediately think of the generic crappy designs that surround us. Doing a bit of research quickly opens your eyes to the many fascinating designs (particularly old handcrafted ones) that actually exist, and makes you look at these things in a new light.

And what's really nice is that for each thing you study, you gain knowledge that you can also use on all other designs, regardless of what object it is. So you can quickly build up a library in your head that will enable you to add enrichening design touches to any object you're working on without any references. And for each new design you learn, your whole library gets multiplied, as you can then cross this designs with the ones you already know.

So for each swingset you study, the better your next lamppost will look.

I really wish I had the time to participate in this one... 
Great idea loominous!
I’m looking forward to seeing the entries 

I hope that these big introductory posts and all don't give the impression that in order to participate, people will need to dedicate a large amount of time on this, or have any kind of artistic skill. If you happen to have 10 minutes on the bus each day, that amounts to 60 minutes of designs, which isn't bad.

So if you have a moment over each day, and find it interesting enough, I hope you'll join in.

[Mordalles]

free art classes with loominous. I'll definitely try something! thanks loominous, great idea.

[auriond]

This is such a cool idea! I'll scribble something if I have the time, but if not, I look forward to seeing the entries.

[MashPotato]

Aaaagh, the workshop has finally come, and I'm going to be going on holiday right in the middle of it :'(
I'll still try to join in as much as I can, though!

[loominous]

I hope you will mash!

Guess I'll make this my progress post.

Tried my first two quick sketches of the house (and a small try at a swing set design):



They're taking the 'rundown' description quite far, but I'm a sucker for crooked, leaning buildings. Particularly the right one looks extremely unconvincing, and just plain stupid, but I like the tower-like part of it. They both lack a porch, that I was planning to add, and which would also add more variation depth wise (right now their elements just vary height wise). Also want to make them very integrated into the environment, so I'm gonna try having some large tree lean on them or something, to make the whole sagging thing a bit more believable as well.

Edit: Also, now that I look at them I notice a common flaw, in that when we lean stuff, we tend to lean them just to the sides, which is a boring and flat solution (it's the easiest though), so I'm gonna try having the different halves sag to opposite sides depth wise as well (i e, have one half lean away from us, and the other towards us).

080517:

Made two new design sketches. I tend to do one or two a day until I find one that feels like it has promise.



The right is an experimental sign design, and in the house one I tried a design with a walkway/stairway thing leading up to a door. Vertical variation like this tends to add interest (Bill Tiller (the Curse of Monkey Island Background guy) is a sucker for this). It's easy to go for the generic approach, with having everything on a flat groundplane, so it's often beneficial to at least test some vertical variation when you design stuff.

080519

Pretty close to the last one, less messy, though just barely:



The design is pretty inconsistent, particularly the left round tower thing, but the silhouette looks pretty interesting. One thing I'm going to try in the next one is some diagonals, depth wise (now it's an L shape, this would add some \ shapes).


--


Part II

080601

Haven't really had time to do any sketching until late tonight, which is unfortunate, since I really enjoy this step.

Here's what I hastily came up with:



I sketch in this zoomed out size (about 12% of the document size), where the actual size of the document is more than twice the intended end resolution. The nice thing with this approach is that I can then just keep on refining if the "thumbnail" turns out like I wanted, instead of having to resize it, and by doing so get ugly artifacts and blurry shapes. The high resolution keeps the strokes sharp, and allows me to enlarge areas without artifacts or blur.

I start out with just loosely n quickly scribbling down some ideas for areas, after which I paint the canvas almost black. I then "light" the scene, as oppose to "shade it", so instead of going from a white environment and adding shadows, I start with darkness and add light. I find that this helps me design the light much better, as I need to selectively and intentionally add light, since it's not there as default. It also keeps the image from having too bright values, which is easy if you go from a white canvas. (the reverse is true when going from dark though).

In this one I tried out some back light, which creates large shadows n thus low contrast areas, which should help keep the mood somber. I also tried having it create a desolate feeling by silhouetting the swing, which I put to the right, against the bright sky. The placement isn't optimal, and the general balance hasn't really been considered. Just trying out my first ideas. Gonna add a lot more vertical difference, as it's very flat at the moment.


080603:

Here's the latest sketch.

With outlines:


Without outlines, to get a better view of the general shapes:


Still just trying out ideas, and this one is lacking the nearby farm, but I managed to get the windmill in there in the center left, and I think I could fit the farm around that area as well. Or perhaps on the right side of the house.

The lack of real foreground is bothering me, but I think I'll just add some stuff on the right, that'll nicely overlap the currently empty yard as well, and get a few lines pointing towards the house.


080626:

(I think posting the current update in your bump post might make the thread more exciting, so here it is:)

Continued with the last sketch:



800xsomething


Added more foreground (don't ask me what that close thing to the right is - have no idea), which adds a few layers to give it more depth and lines, where the bottom part is leaning / to compensate for the heavy \ lean of the top (which the fence on the right also helps out with). The balance is still pretty messed up, and I'm once again
paying the price for sloppy pre-work by now having to try to fix things in this less flexible state.

There are many other issues, such as readability of the bridge (which is to the right beneath the sign post thingy, the stairway on the right side of the house, leading downwards, and other things.

Oh yea, I also flipped it horizontally, which is when I discovered the heavy \ lines of the upper part. Flipping it horizontally n vertically is a great way to spot these things, and also to see the image in a new light. In this case I ended up liking it more like this, but I might go back.

I've focused the light more on the right side of the house, to draw more attention to the center of the image, and kept the left in shadow, which also creates a nice silhouette against the sky. The bright sky is an annoying problem, as it creates strong contrast everywhere something silhouettes against it, which pulls focus. This could be countered by blocking it out with trees n stuff, but I want a pretty open feel, which that would rob. So I've limited the blocking trees to the sides to lower the contrast in those areas, and also frame the subject.

All in all, the melancholy feel is pretty much non existent at this point, much due to my weakness for strong sunlight, but I'm hoping it can be fixed with some details n colour).

I added a small character to help with the scaling, which is another issue, particularly with the fence and sign post.


080630:





This is the latest composition I've tried, and I think it's getting close to something I'm happy with. I've basically pulled the mid ground closer to the camera to become something of a new foreground, and ditched the old one. The bridge is now a wooden bridge, that is more easily read than the former stone one, and also produces less contrast which steals less focus from the house. In addition, it allowed me to quite easily add a stream beneath it, something that the other solutions (of which there have been many didn't provide. And even better, the sign is now close enough to be actually readable.

Other benefits: The sign now frames a bigger portion of the far background (where the windmill can be seen (a very messy area atm)), the fence now goes around the yard, forming a nice big curve:



which a) leads the viewer around the bottom part of the image up towards the house and b) as it's slanting /, it compensates for the \ lean of the top part of the image.

The downside is that there's now a pretty large distance to the house from the bridge, which isn't ideal. Also, atm, there's a perspective issue at the bridge, where we're pretty high above the character height, which isn't ideal either. It can be fixed by lowering the camera, which I'm considering.

Some other things: I but the right side garden area in shadow to detract attention and pushed the swingset further back, to open up the yard and increase readability. The swingset has been a problem ever since I put it in.

-

Finally got around to try some colours:




Larger resolution

Not very happy about it, but it's a start, and sort of capture a melancholy feel.

Must say I dragged my feet quite a bit about this, as I knew that the value sketch called for quite a transformation to fit the theme. Which is a shame since I really liked the look of the value sketch.

Having to open up one of the windows was annoying as well, as they create these weird gaping holes. My intention was to go with the right one, but the large centre one looked less bad, and does provide more space for the character.

Speaking of character, I tried quickly adding one, but the size poses a problem, so I had to go with 800x600 to make her fairly visible.




-

080911:

The second colour attempt:



Think it looks better, but lacks the melancholy feel that is called for by the script. Come to think of it, I think it's the brighter values that I like better.

-

080920:

Most likely final version, though there are still things to refine:



Some cleanup and colour treatment, and also added a couple of toys.

Edit: Fixed links

[Ryan Timothy B]

EDIT: Ok I think I'm going to have to skip this challenge.  I've been pumping out sketch after sketch with no concrete results.  Or at least nothing I'm proud of.  I just don't seem to have any imagination at the moment.

[Nacho]

I am not going to be able to enter, since I have an important exam soon, and I have some personal things to worry about (Lorena graduates, weeeh!), but congratulations about the topic! It' s amazing when a host takes this so seriously and makes this didactic.

[Jens]

Awesome idea. I will participate.

At first I did not feel like wanting to do research in such detail as I thought this would be boring. I thought, that I could design something out of my head, with only one or two references.
But when I entered the words into google and had a look at all those different designs of houses, windows... all those kinds of trees that each give a special atmosphere... all those different neat toys that could make the picture unique... well, when I've seen all this, I could not stop to gather reference material. There are so many designs to learn from.
Once again I notice, that I am still not doing enough research when painting images/backgrounds. Instead, perhaps because of my laziness, I am using stereotypes out of my head. You know, those like kids have when they paint those typical houses with the chimney and fluffy blue(!) cumulus clouds on a white sky... Perhaps a bit more developed, but principally the same.

However, I do not know if I will be able to put everything that I see on those references into a single new concept of my own. But that is also what this workshop is about, isn't it?

References

colonial house

"cottage"

The toys

The girl

natural elements

Bridge and stream

other stuff

Windmill and Farm

swing 1

swing 2

sign 1

sign 2

Designs


First sketch using references of (neo)colonial-style houses.


The designs of Loominous and zyndikate looked much more dreamy, a bit fairy-tale-like perhaps, what I liked. So I searched for more reference pictures of less imposing houses (cottages) and sketch up something new.


Third sketch (now without looking at reference pictures). planned to be an L-shaped-ground-plan but hard to see from this perspective.

[loominous]

Heh, feel bad about having you create all those links, must've taken ages.

Feel free to just include them all in a large file, and then create a thumbnail for that image.

However, I do not know if I will be able to put everything that I see on those references into a single new concept of my own

I hope I haven't come across as suggesting that you have to include anything at all from the references - they're just there for inspiration. But if you mean that you feel the urge to include a bunch of nice elements that you've discovered, but simply can't fit them all into just one design, then I can completely empathize. It's just a frustrating part of it.

But I'm glad to see someone else getting captivated by all the nice designs of mundane objects that are out there, right under our fingertips.

-

Oh, and don't hesitate to make bump posts when you update something, just make sure to include a link to your particular post like so:

Update: Example

Code: [Select]

[url=http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=34542.msg451551#msg451551]Update: Example[/url]
To get the address to a particular post, simply rightclick on that post's topic line (the line at the top of the post usually called something like Re: something), and select 'copy address' (or something similar).

(Note: You can't access these topic lines from write/edit post pages, as in, when you're typing a post, but you can of course get them from another window with the thread open, or prior to going into write/edit mode)

Going to add this to the Posting Guidelines.

[lord_hellfire]

I thought about it and I decided to enter the competition. As a lousy painter and someone who can't really draw in any popular (or even unpopular) 2D program I decided to prepare a background using a 3D graphics.
If you have any questions about what or why I do something feel free to ask here, or just PM me.
So let's begin.

Phase I
Design.

First thing is a list of things to model in 3D. I need to prepare:
 - Orphanage
 - Windmill
 - Farm
 - Swings
 - Bridge
 - Sign
 - Trees
 - Ground
 - Other playgroung stuff
 - Doors
 - Background

The list is not complete yet, but till now it has to do.

So now we can play with our imagination. Let's begin with a House. (Orginal approach, isn't it?) I was thinking about finding a real orphanage, and recreating it, but the only one I could find was a modern green house, with big garden. It wasn't even close. So the next idea was something like that:

Those are buildings designed for the railways workers, build eighty or so years ago. They looked kinda good, but not good enought, but than I remembered about diffrent place. So here it is:

It was an old dormitory block, so I guess It's pretty close to what we're trying to achieve. If you want to see more photos, than I've uploded them here:
http://rapidshare.com/files/115333878/reference_images.zip.html
aprox. 25MB Total 12 pictures, all in resolution 3872x2592. Inside you can find both buildings. One picture is slightly out of focus, and few needs to be rotated but they will help. I also made few more pictures in RAW format. They are much larger, so I will later upload only those which I will use as textures.

Next thing is a sign. In my opinion it should be big, made I'm marble or wood with brass or even golden letters. Maybe with few ornaments to make it look even better.
So here's my first attempt. Wood and golden letters:

I don't know how about anyone else, but for me it looks awful. Wood looks like a small part of some kind of board, and gold doesn't look like anything similar to gold or anything else. Let's say goodbye to standard materials and fix them a little bit. I also chandged the lights a little bit.

It's better, but still not What I was looking for. Let's change gold for copper, and the letters look just a little bit too modern for me. Also the entire sign looks just empty. After few changes:

Smoothed cyliders look almost like a bolts. Upper ornaments are just 3D letters. To create them I used celtic font.

This was probably the easiest part of picture, maybe except for the trees - there is a tool for creating them instantly.

So now is the time to open google for the first time and look for pictures of windmills, swings and bridges. I spent many summers on farm, so I won't look for pictures of it. And for the rest is simple enought to make them without any help. In a nearest future I'll also scan my hand drawn notes to show what I'll try to achieve.
To be continued...

19-05-2008.

I've completed a first reendering of the entire scene. Of course it is not finished yet, but it allows me to show what I'm thinking of. It's in lower resolution than the final image, because I want to save time. Lightning is set, with assigned shadow map - It's much faster than raytraced shadows, and at this stage it doesn't really matter.

Bridge texture will be replaced, This one is only temporary. Just like the sky - now I put there a gradient map with fractal noise applied to it. It doesn't look bad right now, but I can't say that it looks good either.
Of course the boxes wisible on the image will be replaced with buildings. The boxes are made in scale. Pink one is a farm (I will probably add more than one building) Brown one is windmill, and the last one is a house.
And If you want fo comment water than, please say no word. Spare me disgrace.

Meanwhile I made something more. I made bricks... Sounds impresive? I don't think so.

But here's the problem. I'll try to explain it to everyone who never modeled anything in 3D. Let's say that you want to make bricks look real. Let's say that you want not only to have bricks painted to perfectly flat wall, but you want to make them look like the real bricks. The thing which can stop you is mathematics. You can take a wall, use cut toos and them extrude them to make it look 3D, but brick is about 30 cm long and 10 cm high. When you crate three meters long and two meaters high wall it means that you'll need to prepare about 200 bricks. Each brick will have at least 5 Faces to brick and at least 2 more around them. It means 1400 faces on a really small wall. And the result will be disapointing. (Trust me, I've tried it) So let's borrow few ideas from people who make games for PS3 and X-BOX 360. The thing called bump map.
Bump map is a part of shader engine. It changes the way whadows appear on your wall. Maybe insteadof talking I will just show how it looks like.

In the upeer left corner is only a gray plane. In all other reenderigs it has the same shape and size. Tha camera is also the same. Below is the same plane in the same colour, but with added bump map. Right images are with bricks texture added. Upper one is without and bottom with bump map. Sorry for the quality, but my battery is low, and I've got only few minutes left. If anyone wants, next time I can upload maps, but they are quite large (48 MB in 2 files)

30-05-2008

Today update was bought to you by Golden Pheasant (If you don't know what is than either you are too young, or you don't know what great things slovakia makes)

First of all, I think I must expalin why I haven't updated for so long. I was simply too busy. But now I got few things to show.

First thing: The swings.
This is a good example of the limitations of the 3D graphics, so let me write a few extra words about them.
Let's assume that we want simple and relativelly cheap wooden swings withs seats connected to the frame by metal chains. So let's prepare the frame (It's really just 7 boxes - 30 seconds of work in worst case scenario)

Now, let's prepare a chain link. The easiest way to do it is to draw two splines (lines without any thicknes) One in C shape, and a circle. Using loft tool we gat a perfect link.

Can it get any simpler? Let's just copy the chain link, rotate it by 90 degrees, move it a little lower. And we can easilly copy the both links enought times to get a full chain.

Of curse a chain like this could be easilly animated, all we need to do is to attach reactor to it (a phisical engine) choose weight of each link, set up gravity, add wind and perfect swing fuly animated in a metter of minutes! Wonderful? Unfortunetly no.
There is one little problem. Each chain link got in this example 1010 faces (flat surfaces which are combined to create a 3D object)  The entire chain is mae out of 62 links. To prepare four seats we need eight chains This gives us a total of 500960 faces for chains alone. For everyone who are not familiar with 3D graphics I expalin - It really a lot of faces. This means that you will lose a lot of time to reender scene with thease chains. And It your computer isn't fast enought it might even refuse to reender anything at all. And of course the swings alone ain't enought to make a good game background. So the only thing left to do is to delete a whole thing and start again from the begining.
That's one of the reasons why I decided to make a swings out of steel tubes. Seats are conected to frame by steel rods. I "painted" it with awful blue paint used on most of palygrounds in 70's and 80's in all around soviet block.

The only problem is that the description siad barelly usable, and this one looks fine. So let's fix it too.

Now technically speaking it's 50% usable. I tried to recreate the ways they broke down in the real world.

And I also was working on house itself.

I still need to add doors, basement windows, tower windows. Make textures for the roof (both of them) And fix that brick texture. I don't like it at all. I'll probably just make a new one from diffrent wall. (I use real photos to make textures)
The windows look a little weird, but it's because I assigned reflective material to them and it got nothing to reflect. Lights are identical to the ones which will be used in the final scene.

[Mordalles]

i started with my attempt. after those 2 small attempts on the right at designing  , i decided to just draw something and see where it goes.



quick sketches:



i have kinda the idea of how i want to scene to look like, so i'll go try to design most of the other stuff around the house etc. i'll definitely start using some reference for the windmill and other things in the scene. I'm trying to stay away from the style I'm using for my current game project which is a bit more structured and less freehand (and lower res). i have nul experience in painting woods scenes.  so this will help a lot.
loominous, speak now before i do too much damage!

[loominous]

lord hellfire:

Cool to see some 3d as well.

I hadn't even thought about 3d entries -- such is my narrow mind -- but I guess the phases should work out for these as well. Would it work for you if you just built the models in this stage, and then applied materials and textures, and set up lighting in the next? Any suggestions regarding this?

Keep in mind that  these phases are hardly ideal for 2d either, but seemed like the best compromise which would allow us to focus on one aspect at a time, so I can understand it if some might be frustrated with the workflow.

Speaking of which:

Mordellas:

Great to see you join in, and that's a really cool design you got there! You might want to hold your horses a bit though, as you seem to be moving on to the layout (the phases are vague in that aspect). I thought we'd do the environment sketching in the composition phase, since as soon as one starts placing objects in an environment, you're into composition. There's nothing wrong with including a small surrounding environment in your design sketches, but these should be expendable, to allow complete flexibility the composition stage.

Guess all this shows that the introductory posts, extensive as they were, could've been a lot clearer on many of these issues.

Gonna add a bit to the phase part.

Btw, is that a moon I see in your picture Mordellas? (the script says 'before noon', which I thought would indicate that it could be everything from morning to noon)

[Blue]

I hope that these big introductory posts and all don't give the impression that in order to participate, people will need to dedicate a large amount of time on this, or have any kind of artistic skill. If you happen to have 10 minutes on the bus each day, that amounts to 60 minutes of designs, which isn't bad.

So if you have a moment over each day, and find it interesting enough, I hope you'll join in.

I wish I had. I follow this workshop closely though!
I need to focus on my exams for now, that's the reason why I don't have the time.
But the whole idea behind this workshop is so inspiring, that I'm definetely going to try it out as soon as I can

[Theme]

I have a lot of things to do. But I'll try to participate in this, hope I can finish my work.

here are my references:

and a quick sketch of the scene:


I'll try a 3d entry too. Modelling and texturing takes long time, so better start now. The modelling would take to the second part as well. I say on the second part, we try to light the scene which is a important part, then render which takes long time too. the final would be post-process the final render in photoshop and composition.


update:
the model of the house. No texture yet


update (06/27):

I changed the house model a bit following loominious suggestion.
This would be the layout of the scene, the lights are going to be changed
You have the house, the bridge at the botton right, the sign close to the bridge, the swing and toys to the left and the farm and windmill at far back
Still need to add vegetation, texture, prepare materials.

update (07/02):


I had a hard time trying to fit all in the camera, and then the objects like the sign were to small to read (and still is) so I rendered a big res, HD 1080p. Maybe if I played with the focal length settings on the camera but I don't really know much about it.
I used large textures (4096x4096) on the main objects, like the bridge, house, landscape.
The bridge, the terrain and the mountain far back (which almost don't appear) have normal maps and displacement. So it was around 400mb of texture. More than 1gb of material.
Uv was done some manually and some automatic mapping (cubic mapping, etc)
The materials could be better, more realistc. The models don't have many polys mostly. I don't know if the light is good, but I tried a darker ambient with light hitting the main objects.
A little light at the back left of the house, just to draw attention to the path way to the back of the house. The ugly model of a girl at the window and a bear toy and a car toy near the swing.
I had lots of problems to extract good z-depth and ambient occlusion renders due to tranparency issues, but after that I used some layers to composite in photoshop and with z-depth pass I made the depth of field effect, which I guess it wouldn't fit for a game bgs o_O

update (07/11):


I made another render, without the too strong dof and less foggy
But without fog makes the back part very empty
And you can really see how my textures are very crappy by the house

here a part of the house texture, it joins photographic texturing and paint on top
http://www.2dadventure.com/ags/texeg.jpg

o/