Camp Handiba Development Thread

[DaFool]

So, how is the SuperDoll project coming along?

Ugh, slowly
I haven't even scanned anything yet, and the onionskin paper I'm using is in tatters (If one can't layer it on physical paper how can one layer it on the computer, eh? )

I hope I can use animation paper, but that means I'll have to steal an animator's desk with pegbar and flourescent backlight. (Right now I'm using staples )

[Jake]

It's just rough, but if that's the style, so be it.
If you look at it for its perspectives and sense of proportions it is very good.

Nnn...

I'll start by saying that I'm not being snarky for the sake of it, but I also am, if that makes sense. I mean your project no ill will, of course, and I don't want to say "I could do better!" 'cause even if I could time contraints prevent me, but I am intentionally being probably more critical than an amateur effort really deserves for the sake of providing hopefully-useful feedback to both you and your artist.

I like sketchy linework, myself, so I have nothing against that... although I wonder how appropriate it is over photographic backgrounds. The colouring looks a bit hit-and-miss - some areas have sketchy lines coloured over, as if the colours are (for example) on a separate multiply layer, but other areas have white/grey uncoloured pixels that throw the eye. I'd also suggest that while it would take a little bit longer, the appreciable gains of adding shading to the colouring would probably be well worth the extra time spent. I know you have a lot of sprites, but flat colours on a shaded background really does rather unnecessarily pop out the fact that they're different media.

The main thing, though, is that I'd disagree with the 'very good' on the perspective. It's not bad, don't get me wrong, but:

http://www.eviscerate.net/scraps/20070109b.jpg

RED is where I'd imagine the torso to be from the lines drawn. On the left arrow, there's apparently a bit of shirt bunched up suspended in mid-air... I'd suggest this is probably supposed to be the guy's right hand, and should be flesh-coloured. On the right arrow, the print on the t-shirt seems to extend right around the figure's side under his arm. Is this intentional? It looks kind of weird, I've owned plenty of printed t-shirts and the realities of screen printing mean that the printed parts are usually more or less centred on the front.

GREEN is the lines that pass through the shoulders, hips, knees and ankles. For that kind of pose, they should really all meet up at the same vanishing point. If they don't, one would expect them to fan out evenly... that they don't do either suggests that the guy is twisted in a rather uncomfortable manner.

BLUE is the most obvious error - the feet aren't lined up with the direction the legs are facing at all, but rather both twisted around to the figure's right side. Maybe he's had both his ankles snapped, I don't know, but it looks pretty painful whatever happened to them.



Now, I know just how hard feet are to draw, and perspective poses, and it looks fine at first glance... I just don't think 'very good perspective and proportions' is a particularly fair description of it. It's characterful, though, and I do like the casual sketchy style. Proportions do look pretty good to my eye, so long as he's supposed to be on the tall side.

[EwanG]

I wouldn't ask for comments if I wasn't interested in them. You've given me quite a bit to work on, and I'll see what I can do. Thanks!

[monele]

Good style... Actually so good that it'd deserve to be less sketchy . But my biggest grief is with the background :/... not the same resolution and too much of a shock between filtered-photo and the drawing.
But really, it seems this just needs a few fixes to become really good ^^

[DaFool]

Uh, yeah, but if you think about it, how many completed games are there made with shiny, well-proportioned, and correct-perspective character sprites? You see this board among others occasionally displaying some drop-dead-gorgeous design, but with no game currently using it.

I would still be fairly lenient on your artist, especially since she has to churn out dozens of drawings after all. You're not alone, anime studios have to make that decision all the time. (Now, if your story proves popular enough to warrant a DVD-ROM rerelease with improved art, then that's the time to become perfectionist.)

But you can still implement some of the suggestions in a quick way:
1.) Are you giving your artist the BG picture from which she then draws the perspective picture on top of it? If not, it might still be possible to tweak the picture (distort it) a bit so that if then lines up perspective-wise with the final sprite.
2.) You can have relatively clean lines without the effort of inking or using a pen tool by encouraging your artist to use a lighter pencil for the initial rough lines and a darker pencil for the final smoother lines. Upon scanning, you can then adjust the level so that only the darker lines show up. But as already mentioned, some people do like the sketchy stile.
3.) As mentioned in other threads, you have to set the lineart layer to multiply mode(and I believe there was some other technique given by Jake somewhere), where you make the white scanned paper background transparent, leaving the lines. Then you paint on a layer behind the lineart layer.

[mikey]

Just a note, several well-known games use photographic BGs and generally, the world doesn't seem to care. It's this obsession with creating that "first trully ultimate fan-produced game which will finally establish blah blah" that's kind of annoynig.

This is not to invalidate Jake's comments, as perspective is IMO very important and he has pointed out things that I wouldn't really find or identify.

I guess that in the end, I wanted to say that the best way of making the game is to care, but not too much. If you stress the realism or "quality" of art too much, chances are the criticism will be strengthened accordingly - and you can basically find mistakes anywhere, as Jake showed.

So I'd take DaFool's advice, be lenient and forgiving, and your fans will be too - for the first project your game used stock backgrounds not designed specifically for your game, and I must say even though it technically looks worse, this new project is in fact an original effort, so at least to me, it's the more appealing.

[EwanG]

Well, I have to cut the artist some slack since the background, coloring, and minimal shading were all my own fault

Still, I wasn't feeling the best about the end result, and the comments so far have given me some ideas about changes I should make.

One question I have, would it be better to leave the photos as photos rather than using the artistic filters I'm using? I thought that the photos might be "too stark", but it sounds like the difference between the character and the artistic background might be just as bad.

One other thing I'm going to look into (that I've been avoiding up until now) are some of the 3-D environments out there. That may allow me to create an artistic/realistic background that looks closer to what you would expect one of these characters to show up in.

FWIW,
Ewan

[EwanG]

OK, this is a rather radical change of direction, but it has the advantage that I can almost guarantee the proper perspective and proportions - and that the character won't stand out from the background.

Would be interested if something like this is of interest/acceptable?

[DaFool]

Uh, I prefer 2D no matter how rough Although that can serve as good placeholder.

[PyTom]

You might also want to try cel-shaded 3d, to see what that looks like.

[EwanG]

You might also want to try cel-shaded 3d, to see what that looks like.

Pardon my naivety, but how would that look different from this 3d? Is that some kind of 3d to 2d conversion, or... ?

[PyTom]

Pardon my naivety, but how would that look different from this 3d? Is that some kind of 3d to 2d conversion, or... ?

Cel shading is a way of rendering 3d graphics that makes them look like they were drawn in 2d. It's also known as toon shading.

http://www.idolmaster.jp/character/index.html

A fairly good example is the art from "The IDOLM@STER", which seems to be done in this style.

IMO, it's not as good as good 2d work, but it's reasonable. I would suspect that this is probably the way a practical generic character maker would have to go. (I don't consider ALICE to be particularly practical, at least for non-commercial purposes, as drawing many variations of a character in many different poses can prove to be unrewarding work.)

[EwanG]

OK, so something like the attached?

[monele]

I'm usually not a fan of 3D when it comes to cartoonish ambiances but it's true that celshading is often acceptable and sometimes even really neat (Idolm@ster being a good example).
Anyway, the last attempt would be okay but that's not celshading yet. What software do you use for these? It might have a celshading option without you knowing it ^^ (Poser? Daz3D?)

[EwanG]

You're forgetting that I'm a writer at heart, and so avoid "drawing" at any expense

The program I used to generate the first image was a snapshot from Second Life. To then do the "toon shading", I brought the snapshot into Gimp, and then applied the "Cartoon" filter to it. I suspect that with a little more manipulation if would be possible to get an image closer to what you're describing.

So, I suspect that my options are (and I'm looking for some more input):

1) Cleaned up hand drawn image with the oilified photo background

2) Cleaned up hand drawn image with a "cartoon" photo background

3) Cleaned up hand drawn image with a non-retouched photo background

4) 3D character and environment without retouch

5) 3D character and environment manipulated to be cell shaded (or as close as I can get)

Note that I am skipping the "obvious" option - Beautifully hand drawn images with superbly painted backgrounds. I don't have the skill for that, I feel bad enough about the amount of time I'm already asking from my artist, and the one quote I got from a studio that specializes in artwork for independent gamers was just under $10K. Now, if someone on here is secretly wealthy and wants to hire them on my behalf...

Let me know what y'all think,
Ewan