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Hello! I've written another blog post about adventure game art, this time about foreground objects in adventure game scenery.

One thing that seems odd is the way you have quite a bit of black space at the top of some of your compositions. This is particularly noticeable in "Room with airshaft", which seems to have nearly 1/3 of the scene taken up by plain, black void. These high camera angles make the perspectives seem very hard to read, especially with the presence of a character, and the preview out the window in this room looks plain wrong. If you're willing to experiment, lowering the camera angle would be an interesting idea.

Maybe it's more apparent with a character in place (I kept him out because it shows off the room better with a wide shot)?

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/iRQ0O8Y.png[/imgzoom]

Ultimately, though, it's the strong perspective which shows us those windows looming above in an arch that gives the sense of scale. Compare how big those foreground windows are to little Boston. Ultimately it's probably less convincing than some of the other examples, but it's definitely one I wanted to talk about!

Thanks Mandle, will do!

Edit: updated first post with high camera angles link, too!

Hello! I'm still blogging away about art in adventure games - this time, looking at camera angles. I'll be writing about high camera angles soon, so stay tuned for that too!

Update: now I've looked at high camera angles too!

Blog!

Ongoing Full Throttle scenery studies! (these will be eventually be compiled into a full sized PDF on the blog, which will be easier to read, but for now you can get them here)

Yep, I definitely agree that using two opposing colours equally stops the feeling of a "feature" colour, and weakens the usage a great deal.

Cool video by Blender Guru, I like his stuff.

I've done another post, now with yellow and purple! Check the top post for details!

First page updated with orange-blue examples!

Yep, I've made sure I include some blueish greens and some yellowish ones, and some orangey reds and some purply ones!

I plan on covering the other complementary colour schemes soon!

Thanks cat!

Hi fellow AGSers!

I wrote some blog posts about adventure game art, this time examining the use of traditional complementary palettes in scenery!

Red-green!

Yellow-purple! 

Orange-blue!   

Yeah, I've noticed the other fellow's name, and much to my disgrace, have attributed some of the much more wonky cutscene backdrops to him, simply because I've never seen Chan draw quite this roughly, ever:

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/kLS7JFk.png[/imgzoom]

This is a completely unfair assumption on my part, though, and grounded in nothing more than conjecture.

Also, cool style study! Thinking and studying is the entire goal, so I call this a complete success!

Hooray! We agree on stuff!

It's interesting, I've been checking most of these with a reasonable amount of care for tangents, and not really noticing many - in fact I've been impressed because there's so few tangents between the forms despite crazy amounts of lines (compared to what I'm used to looking at, that is - my own backgrounds).

But you're right, the lines of the mattress and the lines of the floorboards do make some tangents - much more noticeable when you do the linework. Probably the darkness and lack of interest of the mattress meant I never paid the inside detail of the form that much attention.

I wonder if Peter Chan did the bike, and is guilty of those tangents. It's likely, but maybe objects like this were done by another team member. As for the hose, I'd honestly satisfied myself that a programmer put it right there, rather than dare think that my wonderful velvet owl Peter Chan could ever possibly make a simple error like this . This is because programmers have made tangents that I've had to ask them to adjust for me in the past, so I know their type. The same goes for that background detail - there's been times when I've drawn cool background details and the designer put it in game but never let anybody click on it, which feels weird because if I draw something interesting, my favourite thing is to see what the writer comes up with as a cool, interesting look response.

Artists are pure and flawless! Blame the programmers and designers!

As for the redesign of the bike, I wonder why they took the black tyres away. The game's full of black, I kinda miss them!

Regarding the massive quantities of edits, I mostly want to go back and take out all the bits where I clearly don't know what I'm talking about, which means I have to change huge amounts! I mostly use twitter these days to talk about art, which doesn't allow long posts like these, nor does it allows for edits. It's fun to come back to the good old ways! This is my third edit, hooray!

I don't want to make it sound like I feel that colour and light are the "Fundamental" device - the fact that I've made this thread to discuss pure form should be an indicator that I believe form is #1. I think the main difference is that I usually create form purely with block shapes and you describe it here with lines and block shadows.

The way I'm used to seeing painted works denoted by lines is Edgar Payne's sketches, which are very different to yours. Clearly Chan's linework is closer to your approach (his website is a treasure trove of design ideas) but I also notice he does more intermediate shading than this sort of block shading.

As for the hose - well, taken from a lineart only perspective, if someone showed me this and asked for advice, I'd tell them off for making it have a bloody tangent with the line above. Though it might be true that the hose can be seen because of the lines, it would be far easier to see it if the colours were different, right? I'm not really sure what your point is, but mine is simple enough: a blue/yellow/pink/orange/periwinkle/grey/white/anything hose would stand out MUCH more than green on green.

Other than that, it's pretty obvious from workshops we've both participated in together than we have entirely different approaches, which is cool! Diversity is a good thing.

(I've edited this about five* times to try to make it obvious that I don't want to take a "you're wrong, I'm right" approach, the entire purpose of studies like this are for my own education, and I very much take the stance of a student rather than master, as you say, I think we're both studying very different things in this one scene)

*up to six now

I think what your lines mostly prove, here, is the true power of light and colour for establishing focus. In your lines only piece, the image feels VERY imbalanced - even with the knowledge that Ben is going to be there makes it hard to "get", hard to read, and even the figure (which *should* automatically draw focus, being that human beings are always the most interesting thing to us) gets really lost in the mix.

Seen in the original format, however, the detail on the left is much more obfuscated by being all dark midrange to dark in colour, Maureen stands out beautifully because of her contrasting hues and the composition feels much more balanced. I honestly think it's very easy to overestimate the power of stuff like spokewheeling (such as your suggestion that the shadow draws the eye to the hose) because it's often a subtle effect, and if we really want to draw the eye to specific stuff, subtlety can be a mistake. That hose is super hard to spot, making it similar in colour to the fuel can would make it massively easier to see.

Interesting stuff - though really we're getting a bit off-topic, which is probably still fine. Though it's cool to see the image without "being distracted" by the hues and colours and shading, as you say, it's also essential to remember that this isn't how our eyes see it, and that colour and light probably lend more visual gravity to these features, at least in our initial impressions of a scene, than those different densities of detail ever will.

There's a lot to process here, but it sounds to me like you're trying to make a distinction between "interesting features" and "visual noise" or "greebling".

I can definitely appreciate that there ought to be a distinction between the two. But it's a hard word to work around - even you in the space of two paragraphs have said it's not that detailed, then gone on to say that the amount of detail has you wanting to interact more. Perhaps we should adopt more specific terms if we're going to be discussing this distinction!

There's more to process here, but I need to read over and think over it a few times before I can respond in a considered way, so I'll leave it here for now. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

In the interest of comparison, I'll link to my analysis of the scene from last week. It's a bit poorly compressed by Twitter, sadly, but I'm planning to compile them all into a PDF once I've finished! Here it is!

Interesting breakdown of elements, Misj'. One element I'd add, mostly because it doesn't quite fit into any single one of the other slots, is elements included purely for balance - whether a rock added far off in the distance to fulfil a typical "steelyard" composition, or a miscellaneous object/highlight/texture placed at a particular spot to make a triangle happen in the composition. I guess these are largely considerations of a landscape painter.

As for filler, I think it's quite okay to use a lot of details, providing the contrast in them is low enough that the more essential elements stand out. Full Throttle does this very well:

[imgzoom]http://i.imgur.com/L8NBsCf.png[/imgzoom]

Plenty of detail there, but you can see how the fuel can and photograph have been given different hues to help them stand out. The hose hasn't, however, and is much harder to spot. Once Ben's bike is in the scene, also a different set of tones, most of the detail doesn't stand out too much, despite being admirably dense.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Edit: since Selmiak mentioned The Last Guardian, it's worth noting that if you want to study creature design with super interesting silhouettes, Shadow of the Colossus is a good place to begin! Here's a pretty good example!

Thank you! I also love Another World.

Thanks Mandle! Interesting example, and I think another factor that helps these forms stand out is the lack of clutter behind them. This really prevents them from being lost in visual noise, and therefore helps them read clearly. Thanks for sharing!

Hey all! I wrote a post about form and silhouettes in art, and the power they can have!

Here's the link!

The design of the benches could be nicer, currently it feels like it was built from children's wooden bricks. The upright poles feel particularly comical, but even the wooden slats that are intended to be sat upon look like massive, unrefined blocks. Working on making this design more ornate and more realistic would help.

Additionally, "mindful" has a single l.

I love how this looks Arjon!