Where is the horizon line usually?

[this_barb]

Based on 800 x 600 resolution, where is the horizon line usually placed? It's an odd question, I know.

[Koveras]

I would go with the rule of thirds if I had no better idea. That is, place the horizon line between the middle and the bottom thirds of the screen.

[Deji]

Horizon line is always at viewer's eye level.
If you draw it too high, it might look like your viewers is really tall and/or is looking from above. A low horizon line means either your viewer is really short or is looking from a place close to the ground.

http://drawsketch.about.com/od/drawingg ... online.htm

For 800x600, one third from the top of the image is a good place to put it, I guess.

This isa really good tutorial on perspective, btw :3
http://fox-orian.deviantart.com/art/Per ... -118068853

[Jake]

Horizon line is always at viewer's eye level.

The not-immediately-obvious thing that follows from this is that generally, the horizon is also at eye-level on your character sprites. Characters shown on-screen with their eyes above the horizon are taller than the protagonist (or standing on something and thus higher up), characters shown on-screen with their eyes below the horizon are shorter (or standing in a ditch, or the protagonist is standing on a box, or whatever).

If there are twenty people scattered around your scene, all the same height and standing at the same level, then no matter how close to or far away from the viewpoint they are, all of their eyes intersect the horizon (or all of their eyes are the same proportional distance above or below it, if they're taller or shorter than the viewer).

[Koveras]

I guess that depends on how much effort you want to invest into the backgrounds, whether you do the scientifically correct but laborious thing or just take the quick and dirty solution. =)

[this_barb]

I guess that depends on how much effort you want to invest into the backgrounds, whether you do the scientifically correct but laborious thing or just take the quick and dirty solution. =)

Effort-wise, it's in-between. I'm going to use the 3D modeling paradigm by using transforms in Photoshop to map textures to landscape lineart.

[Koveras]

Effort-wise, it's in-between. I'm going to use the 3D modeling paradigm by using transforms in Photoshop to map textures to landscape lineart.

Personally, I'd prioritize the backgrounds according to the time the player looks at them, and invest effort into them accordingly... but that's just the project manager in me speaking. ^^

[this_barb]

Effort-wise, it's in-between. I'm going to use the 3D modeling paradigm by using transforms in Photoshop to map textures to landscape lineart.

Personally, I'd prioritize the backgrounds according to the time the player looks at them, and invest effort into them accordingly... but that's just the project manager in me speaking. ^^

Yea, that's what I plan to do. The most time-consuming part of my method is searching for free textures.

[Wintermoon]

Personally, I'd prioritize the backgrounds according to the time the player looks at them, and invest effort into them accordingly... but that's just the project manager in me speaking. ^^

I'm not sure if that's a good idea. If most of your backgrounds are great but that one special background for that one special scene is just average, it'll look like you cut corners. If most of your backgrounds are average but that one special background for that one special scene is great, then it'll look like you put in extra effort to make everything perfect.

[Koveras]

I'm not sure if that's a good idea. If most of your backgrounds are great but that one special background for that one special scene is just average, it'll look like you cut corners. If most of your backgrounds are average but that one special background for that one special scene is great, then it'll look like you put in extra effort to make everything perfect.

Didn't I say the same thing? ^^ Sorry for picking the wrong word... You should prioritize the scenes according to how much attention the player pays to them, not the time. If the player is in the middle of a minute-long chase scene, it's not the same as a minute-long dialogue with lots of awkward pauses.

I don't know if it is applicable to VNs but I think a great example of this would be the helicopter chase scene in Fahrenheit: you are so absorbed in evading the police that you just don't notice how bleak the textures and models are in the scene (you only notice that if you replay the scene in the unlockables). On the other thing, places like the cemetery where you meet Markus are beautifully drawn out because there are a lot of pauses and slow walks in it. So yeah.

[Jake]

I guess that depends on how much effort you want to invest into the backgrounds, whether you do the scientifically correct but laborious thing or just take the quick and dirty solution. =)

Honestly, it's approximately no extra effort at all, proportionally speaking, to get it right - so why not bother to do it?

All you have to do is to make sure that characters who are supposed to be taller than other characters have taller sprites and vice versa (obvious and trivial), and then make sure that the horizon line is at the same height on all of your backgrounds (also obvious and trivial). The only extra effort you have to put in is to pick a character who's the same height as the protagonist and set the horizon at the same height as their eyes (or vice versa). All of this will take you so little time compared to the time spent actually planning and rendering your backgrounds - whatever approach you take - that to not do it is simply inexcusable laziness, no two ways about it.


If you don't know how to do it, then it's one thing, but knowing all about it and then failing to put the two minutes of work in to get it right from the beginning just suggests you don't care about the quality of your work. Which is going to put me off reading your VN, because it suggests to me that it's probably not very good if even the creator doesn't think it's worth investing time in.

[Koveras]

Honestly, it's approximately no extra effort at all, proportionally speaking, to get it right - so why not bother to do it?

All you have to do is to make sure that characters who are supposed to be taller than other characters have taller sprites and vice versa (obvious and trivial), and then make sure that the horizon line is at the same height on all of your backgrounds (also obvious and trivial). The only extra effort you have to put in is to pick a character who's the same height as the protagonist and set the horizon at the same height as their eyes (or vice versa). All of this will take you so little time compared to the time spent actually planning and rendering your backgrounds - whatever approach you take - that to not do it is simply inexcusable laziness, no two ways about it.


If you don't know how to do it, then it's one thing, but knowing all about it and then failing to put the two minutes of work in to get it right from the beginning just suggests you don't care about the quality of your work. Which is going to put me off reading your VN, because it suggests to me that it's probably not very good if even the creator doesn't think it's worth investing time in.

Well, I, for example, don't know where to place the horizon depending on the characters height. Putting the horizon at the same line is fine by me, that what I recommended to in the first place, but calculating its position depending on how tall your character is... is a bit too much effort for me, sorry. I am not like you artists who can just feel the right position for the line by looking at the composition.

[Jake]

Well, I, for example, don't know where to place the horizon depending on the characters height. Putting the horizon at the same line is fine by me, that what I recommended to in the first place, but calculating its position depending on how tall your character is... is a bit too much effort for me, sorry.

... that's why I explained exactly how to do it in the last post I made. In case that was still too full of technical art-science, here's a bullet-point version:

How To Make Sure Your Horizon Is At The Right Height In Your First-Person VN

• Draw all of your character sprites, such that they all fit on the correct-size screen and look decent next to each other. The tall ones should have taller sprites than the short ones.
• Pick a character who is the same height as your protagonist, or alternately draw your protagonist as a character sprite as well, fitting in with the other characters.
  
• The height for your horizon is the same height as the centre of this character's eyes.
• Draw all of your backgrounds, with the horizon at this same height in all of them.

The bold item is the only one which you wouldn't have had to do anyway.


Alternately, you can also do it the other way around:

Another, More-Involved But Less Workflow-Constraining Way To Make Sure Your Horizon Is At The Right Height

• Draw all your backgrounds with the horizon at the same height.
• Draw all of your character sprites in full-body, or at least with a bit extra at the bottom in case you need to reposition them. (These last two steps can, of course, be done in parallel with no knowledge of each other.)
• Pick a character who is the same height as your protagonist, and/or a character sprite for your protagonist.
• In Photoshop (or your favourite image-editing software) position this character on a layer above one of your backgrounds, and re-size/re-position until their eyes are level with the horizon, and they're sized decently for displaying in a VN.
• Resize and re-position all of your other character sprites so they look decent enough standing next to the first one. The tall characters should have taller sprites, and the short ones shorter sprites, obviously.

If You Absolutely Can't Manage The Other Two Options You Could Also Just:

• Make all your characters exactly the same height.
• Make your horizon on your BGs the same height as all of your characters' eyes.

Sorry if I'm being tetchy, but basically - you know how as a programmer, it's really grating to see artists render fantasy operating systems that make little sense and then give them recognisable names, like the "I know this, this is Unix!" in (IIRC) Jurassic Park? Or how as a writer, it's frustrating and difficult to read people's work if they insist on abbreviating 'you' to 'u' and not using any capital letters or punctuation?

Well, as an artist, it's often equally frustrating and difficult to look at scenes with the horizon set so that everyone's absurdly tall or the protagonist's absurdly short just because some programmer-type thinks that the ground's below everthing so obviously it should only be at the bottom of the screen. I seem to recall people like PyTom saying that they never notice this problem - well, lots of artists never notice that fantasy operating systems couldn't possibly work, and people with reading ages below three don't notice appalling spelling and grammar. It doesn't mean that it's not worth fixing those things.

(And really, it doesn't have to be precise. In the same way that nobody really cares if someone types 'del' instead of 'rm' when they're supposed to be using a Unix system in a movie, nobody in their right mind is going to be looking up the exact heights of your characters and doing the maths to work out how tall their sprites should be. It just has to be close enough to not look ridiculous. Yes, it's true that for the typical Ren'Py presentation, if you stick the horizon about two-thirds to three-quarters of the way up the screen, you're probably pretty close, but in case people want to arrange their UI differently (e.g. MorningStar, where the box was at the top of the screen) it's worth knowing why that's the most-common position.)

[PyTom]

Sorry if I'm being tetchy, but basically - you know how as a programmer, it's really grating to see artists render fantasy operating systems that make little sense and then give them recognisable names, like the "I know this, this is Unix!" in (IIRC) Jurassic Park?

Kind of off-topic here, but...

I remember seeing Jurassic Park when it was out in theaters. I had just started using Linux, with X, and laughed at the crazy system the girl was using in the movie, that she was claiming to be Unix.

Maybe 3 years later, I had finished high school, and was away for my first year of college. They had some fancy SGI workstations there, and this was back when workstations were notably fancier than your average desktop. Somewhere in /usr on these boxes, there was a directory filled with GL demos. Not OpenGL, mind you, but its predecessor. Since this was back before 3d accelerators were common, I had to check them out.

And so I ran them, and what did I find:

The 3d interface the girl was using in Jurassic Park. She had been using Unix all along.

In conclusion, I feel like an old fart right about now.

[Jake]

They had some fancy SGI workstations there, and this was back when workstations were notably fancier than your average desktop.

We had an SGI/Irix box in one of our labs at university; it was purple and grey, and called 'Mozzarella'. But it never booted... :/

(The question is, though, which came first? The GL demo, or the movie?