Making 3D backgrounds look more 2D?

[Steppi]

Having rendered several backgrounds in 3D, I have come to the conclusion that they don't go very well with 2D character art.
The characters look like paper cutouts pasted onto the BG and not as if they are actually part of the scene, the lighting doesn't look right and so on.

Now I'm looking for tips or pointers on how to change these backgrounds to make them look a bit more 2D.
A filter or combination of filters in Photoshop would be ideal, because it's fast and doesn't require re-rendering the whole background several times, but having experimented with filters for a while now, I still couldn't get a satisfying result.
Re-rendering the backgrounds is very time consuming but not impossible, and I've tried several different approaches already (extreme lighting and shadow, toon shading, etc.) but so far I had no luck.
Redrawing them in 2D is something I'm not capable of and would mean looking for a new artist.
Judging from the experience I've had so far, that might be the best way to go, but I didn't want to make a decision without some more input on the subject from people who probably have more experience than me.

So if anybody knows how to pull this off, that would be a great help.

[fortaat]

Obligatory.

[Steppi]

Obligatory.

Sadly not really what I was looking for. Though apparently I could apply it to my backgrounds, if I render them without any light at all and reduce the quality and detail of the textures a lot, which is exactly what I wanted to avoid.

I probably should have posted an image on the first post as an example right away.
Since I didn't, I'll do it now. [Example 1] [Example 2]

The problem is that they are mostly interior scenes and indirectly lit by means of radiosity.
I could of course just scratch the lighting and textures and go for a more cartoony look from there, but I've never done that before and I'm not sure if I could pull it off, so I thought I might be able to avoid that. Looks like I can't.

[Melkoshi]

Look at the rest of his blog. o.o he's useing sketchup and rendering in twilight with custom settings, so that it looks 2D without needing photoshop to retouch. You'd still have to 'dumb down' the detail in the textures though, thats the main thing i found is the problem with 3d rending to look 2d.

mainly this post: http://studiomugenjohncel.wordpress.com ... al-novels/

[Nuxill]

I don't know how useful this will be, but I managed to get a semi speed-painted look out of the picture with three different layers. Bottom layer has the paint daubs filter with a very low brush size and no sharpness. The second layer has the cutout filter with the max amount of levels and zero edge simplicity, and is also set to 'screen' with 100 opacity. The third layer uses the posterization filter on multiply with 24 percent opacity. You'll probably also want to flatten the image and mess with the levels after that to finish.

It's not cartoony but at least it might be a step in the right direction?

[pkt]

I was going to go for a different thing with 3d bg's though which was to render everything shadeless or white but with edge borders. Then use that as a guide for painting over the details. Filters may be more useful to most people though.

[mugenjohncel]

- CONTENT NO LONGER RELEVANT -

[MaiMai]

Gosh darnit Mugen, you really make me want to skip my classes so I can spend at least a week learning to use SketchUp (Which I have downloaded, but it is sitting on my desktop all lonely like).

*steals PSD*

[mugenjohncel]

- CONTENT NO LONGER RELEVANT -

[pkt]

I'll go on the record and totally say that both that Mugen's bg's are awesome and I don't mind 2d on 3d. Really OP you have to be able to accept your stuff. But do what you want really.