Topic: Background Workshop II - Concluded

[cat]

just a short notice, please excuse my shortness on words, I have no idea how to paint over 3d renders to make them look cool. But then I have no idea how to make 3d renders look cool in the first place.
If I find any way I hope I can put my process into words...

I like your 3D render. If you can't find a way to paint over it, you could always continue to work in 3D adding textures and details.

[Eric]

@eric: straight lines are easy in every paint app, just keep shift pressed. making the swirly pearly lines look interesting and keeping them the same boldness is a mystacle.

I find that the straight lines drawn this way don't have any character, though. These are more the sorts of things I grapple with. But I won't clutter the thread anymore!

[cat]

Looking at the schedule in post one, it seems we are already in the feedback phase of stage two, with stage three starting tomorrow
So here is some feedback on the sketches:

loominous
+ I like the design, mood and composition.
- The exit to the left should be clearer.

selmiak
+ Interesting composition, I like the mood and colors.
- The large speaker and the blocks behind it puzzle me a bit size-wise. I don't know how big this is supposed to be. Maybe when you add textures, this will become clear.

Misj'
+ I love the comic style, the different layers and all those nice little details.
- The ship now has lots of embellishments that visually merge with the tower in front of it. Since I suppose they will both be made out of wood, make sure to find a way to distinguish them.

ThreeOhFour
+ I love where you are going with this.
- "Also keeping any "process" post stuff for stage III due to my use of colour" -> please do post some of your process stuff, I'm very much interested in it!

Dropped Monocle Games
+ Now this is some really good progress! The scene is coming to life.
- While I like the statue in the foreground, the bump under the breast (is this supposed to be a hand?) looks a bit weird, I'd remove that.


I'm sorry I didn't do this earlier, I was hoping for more entries to show up.

[Misj']

Misj'
+ I love the comic style, the different layers and all those nice little details.
- The ship now has lots of embellishments that visually merge with the tower in front of it. Since I suppose they will both be made out of wood, make sure to find a way to distinguish them.

That is indeed a potential major concern I had when drawing the line-art. Fortunately, the ship's design is very much inspired by the VOC ship Amsterdam (it's actually almost an exact copy):


The rear of the ship is very heavily painted, and as a result the green (cool) colors should help the crows-nest (warm brown/red colors) stand out. I will probably make the ship even a bit more colder (more towards the blue) to make this contrast even bigger, and to blend it a little bit with the background (this is one of the advantages of having an early color-pass even when working from values as a basis).

[loominous]

Perhaps we'll just keep things rolling til the end date without any specific phases/dates til then. Unexpectedly heavy workload during the last week really messed up my schedule.

Eric:

@eric: straight lines are easy in every paint app, just keep shift pressed. making the swirly pearly lines look interesting and keeping them the same boldness is a mystacle.

I find that the straight lines drawn this way don't have any character, though. These are more the sorts of things I grapple with. But I won't clutter the thread anymore!

I personally never use straight lines, I just don't like the stiffness, so I just use a large wacom tablet, and do everything by hand.

The reason the size of the tablet matters is that the larger the tablet is, the more you use your arm to control the pen, rather than your wrist/fingers, which leads to nicer more flowy lines in my experience.


Ben:

Feel free to post any progress regardless of stages etc, since I'd bet any insights into your process would be highly appreciated by many.

[Ykni]

I personally never use straight lines, I just don't like the stiffness, so I just use a large wacom tablet, and do everything by hand.

The reason the size of the tablet matters is that the larger the tablet is, the more you use your arm to control the pen, rather than your wrist/fingers, which leads to nicer more flowy lines in my experience.

@Loominous: So funny to read that you find it easier to draw straight lines on a larger tablet, my experience is quite the opposite. I find it much easier to draw smooth lines on a smaller tablet because I only need to flick my hand to draw a long line.

@Eric: I don't like rigid lines in a painted style much either. I had to change my painting style quite a bit when I started making portrait backgrounds in order to make them fit the comic style game characters. Because I don't have such a steady hand I usually do use straight lines to draw the edge of the painted objects, remove any painted bits that stick out and after merging the layers trace over the lines by hand with a blending marker. It ends up looking like this

x1 x2 x4 x8

I wonder if a very painted style like in your examples could work for game art? Wouldn't it be very hard to animate a sprite in that style for instance?

[cat]

Perhaps we'll just keep things rolling til the end date without any specific phases/dates til then.

Are you sure this is a good idea? Without a schedule we might lose focus on this project...

Stage III Colors!

Link to stage II post


Click image for link to main post.

Any critics/comments/suggestions?

Update 3.7.2015 Basic colors

Click image for link to main post.

I tried to follow the advice of using the hues to guide the player. Now the foreground should be towards yellow while the background is towards blue.
I couldn't imagine how to fit a hugh tree in the scene, so I added the sail of a ship to the upper right corner.

Update 7.7.2015 Some details


Update 9.7.2015 Some more details

[loominous]

Finally weekend, should be able to be more productive from now on.

Cat:

I think the image suffers from some focus isssues, so I whipped this up:

[loominous]

Last progress pre colors:

[loominous]

[ThreeOhFour]

Alright, I'll do up a post about colour!

Spent some time painting this morning, and also messily playing around with the colour palette to try and push some saturation contrast into it. I'll do up a post talking about this in a while, for now:

[xil]

Apologies for missing stage 2. I've been working on a MAGS entry so haven't had too much spare time.

I had a little go at painting my scene based off of the nice tutorials in the thread but I'm afraid it's just a little bit too much for my skill level. I am, however, experimenting with voxel art because I am doing a 3D game in Unity, so my scene will see the light of day at some point! If I manage to get something done in the next day or so I'll post it as my stage 3.

Other than that, a huge thanks to all of those who provided feedback and for the excellent tutorials about light and composition, they have been extremely helpful. I look forward to seeing more of the stage 3 images!

[cat]

@loominous: Thanks for the thorough analysis! While I fully agree with B & C I see problems with A, especially since the light is coming from back/left and there can't be a tree that makes such a shadow. But I get the idea and I will think about a solution

[loominous]

While I fully agree with B & C I see problems with A, especially since the light is coming from back/left and there can't be a tree that makes such a shadow.

Oh I didn't mean that the shape would be a tree shadow, just a tree, with darker leaves, which would look darker than the building facade, creating that shape (sort of).

[cat]

Ah, alright, makes much more sense this way.

[selmiak]

well, I'm sad, annoyed, pissed and confused:

Spoiler: ShowHide

was just painting along when suddenly the lights on the tablet went out and no more paintstrokes were accepted. My table seems to have very sharp edges.
That's it for me for now

[Cassiebsg]

Outch selmiak!

Spoiler: ShowHide

Maybe you could sue the table manufacturer for sharp edges?

[ThreeOhFour]

I retired my tablet from that era because the cable was getting worn. Sorry to see someone else having a similar issue!

[selmiak]

what tablets can you recommend ben? I need a new one! The intuos series seem to be very recent...

[Misj']

This stage is a bit difficult to share, because it won't make much sense to most people. This is all about figuring out the color palette without having to worry about (or bother with) shapes and light/shadows. You can easily see which hues need tweaking (the ground among other things), and and which channel (hue, saturation, lightness) is used focus the viewer and add contrast to the piece.



Stage I
Stage II

EDIT: Despite the fact that I'm running behind, I would propose to add an additional stage: characters. It doesn't have to be an in-depth character-design stage, but characters are such an integral part of the original description/task that I think it's important to how well the design will work once NPC's are added (plus I really want to design some of the characters I originally had as placeholders in the scene).