Technical art questions and discussions

Meglet · Mon 14/11/2005 09:24:18

I gave that a try and it seems to work pretty well. There's a few spots I need to be cautious about when coloring, but overall it's what I was looking for. Thanks!

Drawken · Sun 11/12/2005 22:30:36

I was wondering if someone could explain this to me. I found this page at http://www.fineart.sk/show.php?w=183

In the drawing above the following problem is worked out.
Draw a room 18 by 27 by 12ft. at normal eyelevel, with two figures standing 25 ft. apart, in single-point perspective.
Solution: Establish a vertical scale on a horizontal scale. Mark these off in floor units to be equal on both scales. Set the horizon at slightly less than 6 vertical feet. Set vanishing point of intersection of horizon and vertical scale. Connect horizontal units to VP. Establish depth at first square foot. Draw diagonal to horizon. This establishes VP of the diagonals for all receding units and also creates a unit 9 by 9ft. Repeat this unit with diagonals as shown.

Everything makes sense to me except for "Establish depth at first square foot." How am I suppose to do that accurately? If I put the line too high or too low it will turn out to be a rectangle.

If there is a way to do this accurately, how would you use this formula in 2-point perspective?

esper · Thu 29/12/2005 11:11:29

I was wondering if anyone could point me to an old english font that uses "f" for "s" like alot of early printing used to use...

Drawken · Sat 11/03/2006 10:48:19

What was the process of coloring images for CMI?
I've been trying to duplicate this image to test my coloring.
I can't figure out how there are so many areas with bunches of colors that don't even seem to go together.
One of those yellow knobs alone contains 50 colors.
Was this done by hand?
How were the outlines rendered without going outside the color palette?
--------
What is the process of creating a background and coloring it in this style while using a limited palette?
--------

homeworld · Fri 24/03/2006 10:18:21

Quote from: Drawken on Sun 11/12/2005 22:30:36
Everything makes sense to me except for "Establish depth at first square foot." How am I suppose to do that accurately? If I put the line too high or too low it will turn out to be a rectangle.

Thank you for posting this, that picture helped me understand perspective better! Initially, i was about to say that there's no precise way to calculate the square sizes, my teacher taught me always to estimate the square's depth, but then i figured out what the artist meant. From what i can tell, the diagonal vanishing point is needed.
http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b66/homeworld4/squares.jpg
After you have the diagonal, you can just put the horizontal lines through each intersection, the way the artist shows. Of course, my squares are very distorted, especially to the bottom, i'm not sure why they came out like that. Probably because the original artist put his diagonal vp farther to the left than me. I have no idea how to incorporate this into two-point perspective, though.

Play_Pretend · Sun 14/05/2006 05:48:35

I know with my own personal problems with perspective drawing accurately, I find it much easier to trace my own new vector art over a scanned photograph for my backgrounds. I was curious about the AGS community's feelings on this...is it generally frowned upon to essentially trace over, even though your art is technically original?

Ali · Sun 14/05/2006 14:00:42

Quote from: Drawken on Sat 11/03/2006 10:48:19
What was the process of coloring images for CMI?
I've been trying to duplicate this image to test my coloring.
I can't figure out how there are so many areas with bunches of colors that don't even seem to go together.
One of those yellow knobs alone contains 50 colors.
Was this done by hand?
How were the outlines rendered without going outside the color palette?
--------
What is the process of creating a background and coloring it in this style while using a limited palette?
--------

I can't say for certain, but I'd guess that the backdrops for CMI weren't painted with a limited pallete. I imagine they'd have been produced with millions of colours and then limited to under 256 with dithering to keep gradients looking smooth.

Quote from: Strange Visitor on Sun 14/05/2006 05:48:35
is it generally frowned upon to essentially trace over, even though your art is technically original?

Lots of AGSers trace images. Prince of Persia used tracing. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs used tracing! Lots of people trace, I don't think you should worry about it.

Scummbuddy · Fri 19/05/2006 06:59:25

Quote from: Drawken on Sat 11/03/2006 10:48:19
What was the process of coloring images for CMI?
I've been trying to duplicate this image to test my coloring.
I can't figure out how there are so many areas with bunches of colors that don't even seem to go together.
One of those yellow knobs alone contains 50 colors.
Was this done by hand?
How were the outlines rendered without going outside the color palette?
--------
What is the process of creating a background and coloring it in this style while using a limited palette?
--------

What you can do, is draw you backgrounds in pencil on a sheet of paper. Ink the final outlines, and scan that into your computer. Use that layer as a top layer in photoshop, or your favorite drawing program, and draw below it in new layers. I would suggest to "color in" the base flat colors of all the shapes outlined. For instance, the wall at the bottom of the image.... All the wall would first be colored the same color of tan/beige. Then after adding more layers of more colors on top, you would begin to see your shading and highlights. When you are happy, you can flatten your image and import it into AGS.

Dan_N · Mon 03/07/2006 10:55:34

Hello. I know this might, no, will sound silly, but how do you post images? :'(

scotch · Mon 03/07/2006 11:37:52

Just above where you write a message it says "How do I post images, smileys and formatting?"
Click that.

Dan_N · Mon 03/07/2006 13:15:01

:o Oh, I see it...

Thanks...

Cookieswithmilk · Mon 21/08/2006 22:00:38

This is a little complicated, so it was hard to figure out where to put this...

I've hand drawn some sketches and would like to put them on the computer. I haven't colored them yet and was planning to do it on the computer.

Because the drawings were in pencil, there are all kinds of shades of grey on them. I'd really like to make it just a black and white drawing to make things simple. Is there a program that can do this for me? Revert the dark grey to black and make everything else white? I know I could make two layers and have the sketch in the background and go over it in black on the top layer, but I'm simply terrible at drawing with a mouse...

Any ideas?

GarageGothic · Mon 21/08/2006 22:41:04

Try playing around with the contrast/brightness controls to make the darks black and the light grays white. Pretty much any drawing/photo editing program more sophisticated than Paint is able to do this.
If you're using an advanced program like Photoshop you can adjust the contrast curves manually for better control of the result.

boojiboy · Sat 09/12/2006 04:27:58

Hey, a question for the more experienced artists.
I want to buy a graphic tablet. Can anyone recommend a good one? Or a good cheap one preferably. Something I can get from amazon or ebay?

MashPotato · Sat 09/12/2006 06:04:22

Perhaps this thread might help for some general info ^_^: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=27494.0

Elric · Sun 10/12/2006 12:19:52

To answer two of the questions posted during the last millenium ( Still, I think it's valuable info for anyone )

This is the way Bill Tiller painted the CMI backgrounds :
[Quoting from an interview in www.scummbar.com]

"The Project Leaders would give me a written description of a room or a small rough sketch and then I would make five or six sketches, in rough form, to show them and get feedback. I would then scan the rough drawing in to Photoshop and make all the changes the PLs wanted there. This rough scanned in sketch also went to the programmers and was used as temporary art so that they had some thing besides programmer art to work with. I would then print the scanned rough sketch out on a black and white laser printer. The printer paper was too small, 8” and a half by 11”. I would then blow up the printed sketch with a photocopy machine till it was about 11” by 14”. That was the size of the marker paper I would use, and I used marker paper because we had a ton of it lying around, thanks to Peter Chan, and the pencil went on it more smoothly than sketch paper.

I did all this scanning and photocopying to keep the proportion of the small rough sketch correct, because it was what the PLs approved and I wanted it to be accurate. I would then slip the photocopy under a piece of marker paper and sketch over it with blue pencil. The marker paper was almost as transparent as tracing paper but it was stronger and scanned well. I used the blue pencil because it is very light and I could sketch the layout without worrying about any mistakes because it wasn’t the final drawing anyway. The final step was to take the blue sketch that I just finished and put that under another sheet of marker paper and with pencil, draw the final line drawing. This was the final image so it had to be sharp and clean.

I would then scan it back in to the computer. In Photoshop, I would paint in some rough colors for my background painters to use. This was painted under the finished line drawing on a digital layer below the line drawing.

Next I would either do the final painting myself, if I had time, or I would hand the color rough over to Maria Bowen or Kathy Hseih for them to do the final painting. The last step required me to reduce the colors down to 245 from eight million. For this step I used DeBabbleizer, a program that specializes in just this sort of thing. The game could use 256 colors but the backgrounds only had 245. The rest went to the interface, inventory and to Guybrush’s palette."

And a tutorial on how to transform colored images to b/w ones and how to get rid of all the grays in a b/w image using the levels function :

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Sketch_Effect/

joelphilippage · Thu 14/12/2006 22:52:36

How did they do the sprites for the curse of monkey island? The animation looks very smooth.

Elric · Sun 17/12/2006 06:07:57

http://www.scummbar.com/resources/articles/index.php?newssniffer=readarticle&article=1013&page=2

zewb · Sat 17/02/2007 07:21:12

Ah yes, DeluxePaint was (and still is) a fine program for sprites and animation. Look for it in the "List of Paint Programs" thread. The DOS version has a built-in animation system.

joelphilippage · Sat 09/06/2007 22:59:22

Ive got another question I really like the graphics for Malcolm's Revenge but im not sure how they did them. Some part's look 3d and some parts look painted.

Technical art questions and discussions

Meglet