Crazy Art Idea

#1 @Robert, what ever works for you ...

It's not really up to us to decide what is or is not a 'crazy' method for you -- who knows, it could sound crazy and have an outstanding outcome ... please do keep us posted though ... write up a nice .plan about the whole process when you've got some sample art to show ... I'm curious to see what happens ;)

#2 Not crazy... a while back there was a TGB project with art made of scanned ripped paper.

#3 The first image did not work out so well but I am working on some changes that might fix the problem. Note construction paper might sound like a good solution to the problem of a background but its not.

#4 Most likely, your problem with construction paper is that it is not lit correctly and causing a gradation of color when keying. It's a common problem when working with green/blue screens outside of a studio which is rigged for even screen lighting. As long as you set your tolerance on selection by color, you should be able to key out what you need, however.

#5 It sounds like a cool idea. Definitely has some nice style potential. I'm interested in seeing how it turns out.

As for masking the lego models from the background, if you have a program such as Photoshop or GIMP (free), try making a very simple backdrop of a color/value that's as far removed from your lego model as possible (bright white (illustration board has worked for me) perhaps with a light shining on it so there are no shadows). Then when you bring it into your editing program you can easily select the backdrop and delete it.

*EDIT: David beat me to it.

#6 Photographing physical objects was be real popular. Animation puppets have been used for making sprites. Some friends worked on the redo of It Came From the Desert. They used a foam puppet stop motion ant to do the sprites. I've been using Vue 5 heavily for games. I think there's a tendancy to limit ones self to painted art. Anything can be used as a sprite or background. I'd say more to decide on a look and feel you can pull of with what resources you have. Even with photographs try playing around in Photoshop or Gimp with radically increasing contrast or shifting color balance. There's also filters in Photoshop for paint effects. You can mimic a cartoon style with various effects. It might even be fun to do some sprites using things like emboss. A percentage of art isn't talent so much as knowing what looks good. Technique can do nearly as much at times as talent.

#7 There was also a game company (one or 2 man show) that used clay to make their characters and environments. I actually tested a sequence like that long ago for something we needed to do at work at the time but we used ..wait for it... GI Joe's.

It came out looking pretty good but we had a very good After Effects guy. So one can def use "stop motion" type graphic methods for making your 2D animations.

Let us know how you progress and the outcomes you get.

#8

Quote:There was also a game company (one or 2 man show) that used clay to make their characters and environments.

[lifts head from keyboard] "mrrrruuuu?" ;)

#9 They had a few more people than 2 (though there were two key designers on the Neverhood). They also had a large studio and five tons of clay, if I remember the documentary that shipped with the game correctly.

Man, I loved that game!

#10 We actually were doing clay ourselves. However I found it to be a pain in the rear. (shooting/reshooting took for ever! plus melting and erosion problems) So in 3DS Max9 we created a translucent shader built out of clay swatches that emulates clay nicely. This way we only had to mess with the clay once (doing the photo shoot of the swatches) and then we can go back and re-shoot our characters/scenery into sprites/tiles almost instantly. created a really original look.

works nice. ;|

#11 Shows how good my memory is!

I remembered a HUGE mound of clay in a studio (which I thought was in the tons because I remember thinking while watching it "HOLY CRAP THAT'S A LOT OF CLAY!") and a team of people (which could have been the ones making the documentary, but it seemed like a design team).

Great look and feel, though. And a sweet game!

#12 Your memory still holds probably. diff team. I actually love those Neverhood guys but not associated.

#13 Ah, got all confused. I know you've done a lot of work and thought you were on that team. But now I see the Max9 reference...which is a bit newer than the Neverhood.

It was a fun documentary to see some of those huge clay levels come to life. It made me want to go back and do claymation like I had wanted to back in the day. Unfortunately, I have NO skill for it!

#14 Yea. i REALLY need to check out that documentary. The guy that designed Neverhood character was the original designer of Earthworm Jim which we ported for the Gameboy Advance. I've always been such a fan of his work.

here is a really dirty looking render with a bunch of (C) and JPG compression of what we have going in the member forums.


www.garagegames.com/mg/forums/result.thread.php?qt=64951#473875

#15 Nice! I like the art style.

I found the making-of on YouTube. I haven't watched it yet to see how accurate my memories are of it, though. It was quite a while ago!
Making of the Neverhood pt. 1.
Making of the Neverhood pt. 2.

#16 Kenton Leach's mullet rules !!

Thanks for sharing that David!! Fun and inspiring clip we watched during lunch. That brought back a ton of memories of working in the early 90's when digitization was raging! All the major studios had blue screen rooms. It was a huge deal when we got our 3 chip cameras. lol. Digitization which really launched huge with arcade game Narc then Terminator 2 affected everything from Doom to 7th Guest.

Quote:Nice! I like the art style.

Thanks!!

#17 I was damn happy to have found that! Now I just need to get time to watch it again!

#18 Awesome ;)