Game programmer, writer, and artist with Project BC. Currently working on The Devil's Broker, a visual novel about guns, magic, and corporate espionage.
Today I’m going to show process for my boat background, which has a day and night version.
I started by assembling the scene in 3ds Max and rendering out a basic pass with cel shaded materials.
Then ambient occlusion.
Then lines.
I took them into Photoshop and composited them.
Then I dropped in a sky and a basic gradient for the water.
For detailing the water, I started by rendering fibers in Photoshop.
Then I skewed them into place, colored them, and set them to multiply.
Next I duplicated the sky, flipped it, and motion blurred it.
Some manual painting touchup to bring out the shape of the waves and add some small highlights (too small to really see here).
Did some paintover of the boat, most notably the bulkheads. I used a rough grungy brush to make it feel like painted metal. I also added a reflection to the portholes.
Finally, I added some lighting (a simple gradient set to linear dodge at the top and some dodging around the darker places, like the crates) and some color adjustment. I also added some land in the distance.
For the night version, I masked out the pier, painted a new sky, and did some color adjustment. I put a dark purple multiply layer on top of everything, copied over some color grading I had from another night scene for consistency, then adjusted it until it looked good.
Hey, I’m not dead! I’m currently working on a cool visual novel about wizards with guns called The Devil’s Broker, and I wanted to show the process for this background I made for it.
Now, this is actually mostly a 3D render, with the original house model by KDDesign. I started by taking it into 3ds Max, cleaning up and modifying geometry, assigning materials, etc. This is my base render.
I also rendered out an ambient occlusion pass (colored in Photoshop).
And a lines pass.
Then I composited them in Photoshop and added a simple gradient in the background for the sky.
The rest is postwork. I started by doing some basic paintover, mainly blowing out some of the texture detail to hide the 3D-ness and highlighting edges. I also did a bit of color adjustment.
Next I added some lighting, mainly a gradient on the roof. The light gradient is a big part of selling the anime art style.
Then I painted a bunch of vegetation using some specialized foliage brushes I have in Photoshop.
Finally, I painted a sky and added reflections on the windows (just duplicated/flipped the sky and masked it off).
And that’s it. I hope this was interesting!
Since the other thing I have on here is incidentally also a mansion, but much older, I thought it might be fun to start with a new version. I’ll post more WIPs in the future if you guys liked this one!
As an indie developer in a small team, I'm always looking for quick, easy ways to create game assets or repurpose free things online for games. Today I spent a few hours experimenting with blending 3D renders with quick painting to create this background, suitable for a visual novel or adventure game:
I started by finding this model by Felix H. on 3D Warehouse. I made a few changes to it, picked a camera angle I liked, set the time of day to create some nice shadows, then started pulling layers out of SketchUp.
The lineart. You can get this by setting face mode to hidden line.
Shadows. I set the time of day to create a shadow angle I liked. You can disable the lines in the styles window so only the shadows are visible. After exporting it, I tinted it blue, as you see here.
Solid flat colors from the shaded face style.
Ambient occlusion rendered with VRay for SketchUp. I forgot to disable the sun, so the AO on the front is a little blown out.
Next I took them into Photoshop and composited them together. Shadows, lines, and AO are set to multiply on top of the solid colors layer.
Next I put a gradient in the background and painted some clouds on top of it. Then I duplicated and flipped the sky, skewed it to roughly match the perspective of the building, and masked off everything but the windows. The solid colors layer lets you quickly create selections for different elements in the render using the magic wand tool.
I painted in some vegetation to make it look more natural. Since my goal is to produce backgrounds as quickly as possible, I left the painting rough. I drew the plants with a thin outline to match the building.
For the final step, I added in a light wash of texture (just assorted Photoshop brushes) on the building to make it look less artificial, then did some color adjustment. In particular, I added a slight gradient towards the top of the building to suggest a bit of atmospheric haze. When I was done, I pasted a merged copy of the document on a top layer, blurred it, and set it to soft light to strengthen the impression of strong sunlight. Bloom makes everything more realistic, right?
Here's a larger version of the finished image. I'll post more walkthroughs in the future if people enjoy this one.
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