Are they common rules about creating Backgrounds for VN?

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Androol
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Are they common rules about creating Backgrounds for VN?

#1 Post by Androol »

I am starting to do some 3d background for a VN that I have in mind and I am wondering if the genre has developed some rules about doing background that I should know.

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Re: Are they common rules about creating Backgrounds for VN?

#2 Post by Tempus »

It depends on the visual novel. Most VNs today use characters sprites and position them as though they're in the background. For those BGs here's a few guidelines:
  • When characters are depicted in sprite form they're almost always seen from head-on. For your background to match you need to make the viewer's line of sight parallel to the ground, otherwise the characters will appear tilted.
  • You also want the viewer's eyes to be at an appropriate height, otherwise it'll be like you're crouching or on a ladder. I tend to put the 3D camera at nipple height on my human reference model. This is to compensate for the textbox which is usually at the bottom of the screen. It's hard to explain in words but the textbox's position causes most creators to place sprites higher on the screen than they would otherwise. By positioning the camera a little lower this will look more natural.
  • Speaking of the textbox, be mindful of things that will be obscured by it. You probably don't want to focus your energy into areas that won't be seen much. (I forget this pretty much 100% of the time)
  • Similarly, be mindful of where the characters will be placed. At various times they'll probably cover all parts of your BG so it's a little different from the textbox.
  • [Skipping this point b/c dinner's almost done]
  • Lastly, you can make a very nice piece of art that is simultaneously not right for a VN. All the above points can basically be summarised as "take other elements, such as the GUI and character art, into account when creating your BG." You can always do tests if you're unsure.
Personally I find those sorts of backgrounds boring to make now! But even if you're being asked to make BGs from weird angles, there's still likely going to be a GUI of some sort and characters too. Good luck.
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Re: Are they common rules about creating Backgrounds for VN?

#3 Post by Androol »

Thx.

I wasn't aware of these changes. I will be going for the old school, place on background and speaker on foreground.

I didn't think of the GUI and I guess, even with an old school VN in mind, most of your advise may still apply. They surely will for special scene since I had in mind to put character in the BG for some events.

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Re: Are they common rules about creating Backgrounds for VN?

#4 Post by LateWhiteRabbit »

Tempus touched on this (and he is a great person for getting advice on backgrounds from), but you need to make sure horizon line on your sprites and backgrounds match if you want them to really look like they exist together.

If your sprite characters are supposed to be the same height as the viewer/player, that means the horizon line of the background should cross through the eyes of the sprites. This site explains it very well with pictures.

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Re: Are they common rules about creating Backgrounds for VN?

#5 Post by Androol »

Ok thx.

I'm pretty well versed in perspective and I'm pretty sure that traditionally the horizon line is supposed to be at the height of the eyes of the painter/camera. So for integrated sprites I had in mind after reading Tempus comment to use the same camera height and angles, if I use integrated sprites. So this would not be a problem.

I don't think I will use integrated sprites most of the time but more old school first plan character. Will it be important to use the exact same angle then? The example I have in mind didn't did this I think. The BG wasn't always taken from the same height and angle in these old games.

Not sure what kind of sprites you are taking about.

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Re: Are they common rules about creating Backgrounds for VN?

#6 Post by RedOwl »

Hey, I just wanted to say thanks to Tempus and LateWhiteRabbit as well, for their informative replies to this thread. I am new to making backgrounds for visual novels, and I just recently realized that I have an eye-level problem in some of my backgrounds. Your comments and the link you shared were helpful to me in thinking about how I should approach the backgrounds going forward! :)
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Re: Are they common rules about creating Backgrounds for VN?

#7 Post by Androol »

Well the link is more or less bad.

First this perspective is physically wrong it's 15 century perspective theory. Real eyes bein spheres, perspective is spherical too. You can see in deformation with a camera lens that have the same distortion than the eyes and how most of the line are curved on the photos.

Plus he explain it wrong, by basically visually saying that the horizon is at the image character eyes level, to twist it by another bad explanation about "it's your eyes" and you probably twice the size of the character. Well now it's more often your phone since there is 100 phone photographer for one painter. In early photography period camera where heavy and never used at eyes level. Now using a not Standing eyes level point of view is one of the way of not doing tourist pictures images. But I guess if you start from nothing you learn it wrong and think it's right.

Then if you don't look at the horizon, it can be out of the frame. Watch your feet and you see no horizon line, same if you look too high. If you look at mountain ( which will be most of the time where I live) the horizon will be behind the mountain. No horizon line in space either. So you have to know it hasten't a lot to do with the horizon but more with vanishing points that may, or not, be aligned together or with the horizon depending of the flatness of the ground or the absence of any.

We always start by learning the old school flat perspective because the spherical one is very hard to grasp for most peoples, but this video is very confusing in teaching it IMO.

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Re: Are they common rules about creating Backgrounds for VN?

#8 Post by LateWhiteRabbit »

Androol wrote:Well the link is more or less bad.

First this perspective is physically wrong it's 15 century perspective theory. Real eyes bein spheres, perspective is spherical too. You can see in deformation with a camera lens that have the same distortion than the eyes and how most of the line are curved on the photos.

Plus he explain it wrong, by basically visually saying that the horizon is at the image character eyes level, to twist it by another bad explanation about "it's your eyes" and you probably twice the size of the character. Well now it's more often your phone since there is 100 phone photographer for one painter. In early photography period camera where heavy and never used at eyes level. Now using a not Standing eyes level point of view is one of the way of not doing tourist pictures images. But I guess if you start from nothing you learn it wrong and think it's right.

Then if you don't look at the horizon, it can be out of the frame. Watch your feet and you see no horizon line, same if you look too high. If you look at mountain ( which will be most of the time where I live) the horizon will be behind the mountain. No horizon line in space either. So you have to know it hasten't a lot to do with the horizon but more with vanishing points that may, or not, be aligned together or with the horizon depending of the flatness of the ground or the absence of any.

We always start by learning the old school flat perspective because the spherical one is very hard to grasp for most peoples, but this video is very confusing in teaching it IMO.
No offense, Androol, but that's the way art schools teach it, and professional artists at Disney and Paramount use it during productions. This coming from someone who has personal experience with both. You are taking 'the horizon line' too literally. Whether or not the Earth's curvature is visible to you, or you are staring at the floor, there is an artistic horizon line.

You asked about rules for backgrounds. The major rule is perspective. The link I gave you is teaching you the method artists in movies, comics, illustration, and painting all use. It is the basic foundation for 1-point, 2-point, and 3-point perspective. If you are going to throw out hundreds of years of artistic theory you may as well not ask for advice and chart your own avant garde path.

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Re: Are they common rules about creating Backgrounds for VN?

#9 Post by Lesleigh63 »

Morishita has some interesting points (though it's 2d art).

viewtopic.php?f=46&t=24009
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Re: Are they common rules about creating Backgrounds for VN?

#10 Post by Fuseblower »

Androol wrote: First this perspective is physically wrong it's 15 century perspective theory. Real eyes bein spheres, perspective is spherical too. You can see in deformation with a camera lens that have the same distortion than the eyes and how most of the line are curved on the photos.
Whether or not straight lines project themselves as curved lines on photos depends on the quality of the camera lens. High quality lenses have little to none "barreling distortion".

It´s true that the lens of the human eye is extremely bad. It would be completely unfit as a camera lens. Not only does it have barreling distortion, it also has chromatic aberration to such an extreme degree that the "blue receptors" are placed more towards the periphery. Note however that the retina being spherical actually reduces the barreling distortion, it counteracts the spherical lens (they're making spherical camera sensors nowadays to get that wide angle of view the human eye has).

To make matters worse : there's the retina itself. Visual acuity isn't distributed evenly. We have the highest resolution and color vision in a narrow field in the middle (about 2 degrees). More towards the periphery, the resolution gets lower and lower and color vision drops off radically. Basically, outside of a 10 degree field, we only see black and white. At the extremes we only see movement (a kind of motion detection at the edge of our visual field).

And then there's the contrast enhancing lateral inhibition, the difference in sensitivity between the rods and the different cones resulting in non-linear color perception (for example, we're better at distinguishing dark blues than light blues, the opposite holds for the reds).

But we don't see any of this unless we look at special pictures (optical illusions) that inform us of the shortcomings of our eyes. What we actually "see" is a construction made from a couple of visual cues collected by our eyes.

So... if my eyes look at a straight wall then I don't see the fuzzy, curved version alternating in resolution and color that my eyes see. I see the straight wall my brains construct out of it. Do I have to draw the wonky input from my eyes or do I draw what I actually see?

The traditional perspective isn't "wrong" because it's not what our eyes see (we don't see what our eyes see, we see what our brains construct out of the visual cues our eyes collect). It makes sense to draw a straight line for something that appears to be straight to us (even though it's curved to our eyes).

The linear perspective is a "drawing system". A drawing system is a method to inform the viewer about things like spatial relationships, distances, sizes, etc. It's not the only drawing system, there's oblique, isometrical, orthogonal, etc. There are also cues that can be included (atmospheric perspective, occlusion, textural perspective, etc.).

Spherical perspective is used too. It's often used for things very close to the viewer, as an exaggeration.

Of course, you can play with drawing systems and make them "wonky" for artistic effect.

But the important thing is that it still needs to inform the viewer about the spatial relationships. If it fails to do that then it will look like a mess.

Linear perspective is the popular choice for visual novels, spherical perspective works the same way as linear perspective but it's harder to pull off.

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Re: Are they common rules about creating Backgrounds for VN?

#11 Post by Androol »

@LateWhiteRabbit.
It wasn't to offense you either. I learned from a lot of your post on this forum, I think this video is bad the fact that perspective is badly teached commonly don't really change it.

Last time I learn it in an art school was around 10 years ago but it was already far better than this.

Art history context was provided with painting to illustrate how it changed art in Italian quatrocento. The fact that it's physically inaccurate and more accurate theory exist was mentioned. The learning wasn't giving wrong info for half the lesson to get a twist in the middle explaining "ok I teach it wrong until that point".

It was in a Swiss Photo school. Maybe at disney, they like to teach it like this, they have industry standard that need easy and fast methods for animation that aren't always the best choice for single images. Even on this angle, I still think in this video the visual explanation is at least counter intuitive, at worth misleading. But have no doubt they do more than a short animated movie to teach art theory at disney with a teacher providing context and answering questions.

@ Lesleigh63

Thx, I take a look. Anyway even with 3d tools your image end up 2d art ain't you're targeting 3d interfaces like 3d screens or VR and I'm not.

@ Fuseblower

The curving of lines on a camera I'm talking about don't depend on the lens quality. O_o
The whole point of perspective when it was rediscovered in the end of middle age was to get image more accurate compare to human vision compare to poor medieval painting. Greeks already knew spherical perspective as you can see in the building of the Parthenon that use counter curves to flatten these curves. You have extremly good quality lenses that provide an human feel too. For long before numeric camera humanist photographer where using fix focal lenses that where close to the human eyes, you have pricey fisheyes lenses that will push these curves even more.

I'm not against flat perspective. I myself will probably never be able to use the spherical one in a drawing as I m an occasional poor drawer. I just say that it's not the only option and it's poorly explained here imo.

Edit:

I didn't want to start a debate on perspective but with my big mouth I started it anyway.

I realized by this tread how making background is harder that I thinked since if you use a removable text panel in the UI you basically have to do two image in one one for the open UI and one for the closed one.

I'm seriously thinking of locking the text part for regular BG and text interaction and only unlock it for special scene to easy my work. But for now I try to adapt to these unexpected constraint.

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