Lemma Soft Forums

I was wondering if any of you guys use real life images for your games. I've seen in some examples of games where there is a altered real life image that has been pixelated or other effects to bring it into the game without it standing out too much. For example in "Dino Crisis" and "Resident Evil" it seems like they did use real images and pixelated them. Some of them look like they were pictures of hot models or something naughty in the background poster images. Even Metal Gear Solid 2 had a few real life images in the game.

Sure, in Before the Faire I used a set of backgrounds made from photos with an effect applied. Worked really well.

Yeah, I do a ton. There's nothing stopping you from making a totally photorealistic game in Ren'Py: I did it for Crunchy Lunch, Carrying a Microwave Down 3rd Ave, and Solidarity Forever. It's sort of like FMV... except with no full-motion or video.

If a photo is public domain or you take it yourself, you can use it as-is, run a filter over it, Photoshop it, or even trace over it. As felix mentioned, this is relatively common practice for backgrounds. Sometimes it looks cheap or clashes with the sprite art style, but when done right, most people probably barely notice.

I use "3D Renderings" in my VN work. Most of the best 3D rendered objects look real, because they are made from photographs of real items, imposed onto 3D objects. So, in a sense, yes... I use photographs of real things in my VN creation. (As well as, obvious photographs in picture-frames.)

Hand drawn art is becoming a shrinking trend. Both digital and real hand drawn art. Though I am 99.99% sure it will never die. (I said the same thing about "flash" too... I was wrong.)

It's just another art style. Not even a new one. It's just easier than it was in the past, like drawing was for many, after it went digital and you could erase pen-work and marker-work and paints, without wasting paint, pens, paper and brushes. Now, there are tools that go so far as to take simple 2D pictures and turn them into whole 3D objects, ironically, to render back into a 2D picture.

On the creep factor... You can even make whole AI generated real-fake people! (People that don't exist in reality, but potentially could.) Fully animated and with enough AI to talk back, even sounding like real people!

I did, especially in my first games. Mainly because I hadn't figured out how to draw my own characters then.

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Madeline's Misplaces Miscellany
viewtopic.php?f=11&t=11948

Yes, I often have used real life backgrounds for some of my games, including my recent one "Chance It!". Sometime I leave them unfiltered, like CI, or sometimes they will be filtered. Depends on the style I am going for. Using real life backgrounds (filtered or not) is quite common in OELVN novels, and even amateur JVNs as well. I feel like it gives an aesthetic all its own. Some people love it, others hate it, others have no preference to it.

As nice as hand drawn backgrounds are (I always feel they are the best in VNs, be it made specifically for the game or from a free-to-use pack), they aren't as easy to come by unfortunately, which is why using real life photos -- filtered or not -- is fairly common, and has been for quite awhile. I see no harm in using them and feel they give off their own charm. Some can even make them strikingly beautiful with the right photoshop skills ^.-

Yes, a lot of the backgrounds in The Last Secret are photos (either creative commons or those I took by myself for the game) processed with various software and with hand-drawn corrections and add-ons (like light rays, reflections etc.).
Here are some examples (one pic, three short videos):

https://i.imgur.com/hoCt6MN.mp4
https://i.imgur.com/vbDFkxz.mp4
https://i.imgur.com/ynwqtDW.mp4