- Jan 4, 2018
- 680
- 752
This is a topic that I don't think has gotten a lot of coverage before, so I thought it would be interesting to see what opinions folks had on it. Lately I've been spending a big chunk of my time checking out the background art in VNs and anime to gather reference points to use while coming up with my own style of painting for the creation of textures for my 3D models.
One game I've been fairly impressed with the backgrounds of has been Glassix. It has a metric shit-ton of them, like 700+ even with my way outdated copy of the game if I recall. Though I tend to think most of them are from other sources, as there are a few different sizes of background images, and despite how good of a job they did with picking backgrounds that look like they belong together, there are definitely some that stand out to my eye as being less refined and almost certainly from a different source. I've also seen quite a few of the backgrounds being used by other games, for instance the backgrounds in Incestral Awakening pretty much all share the same origin as a subset of those in Glassix. I don't know if there's some Community Commons licensed background repository they are both sourcing from, or if one has taken from the other, or if they both have taken from other games.
But regardless, I really like quite a few of the backgrounds from those and I'm always on the hunt for other games with higher quality background art in that hand-painted anime style. If you have some anime suggestions as well, I'd be up for hearing about some of those. As an example, Monster Musume has quite a lot of really nice, high quality backgrounds - though one thing I did unfortunately notice is that the inside and outside of the main house completely fail to match up. But they stayed pretty faithful to the manga's background designs, so I guess the blame falls to the source material in that case, heh.
As a bit of a summary of some of my findings, on what I feel contributes to good background art, here is my list so far:
* Bright, but not necessarily over-saturated, color choices.
* There are no true solid colors. Pretty much every surface has various styles of blotchy/painterly color variations, lighting gradients, or texturing effects applied to make them more visually interesting and appealing.
* Well done details tend to be fairly sharp, but on the subtle side. They accent instead of stealing focus for themselves.
* They usually have pretty good contrast, unless it was a stylistic choice to have things look more washed out and/or muted with something of a more watercolor-like style.
* Ambient occlusion, shadows, and highlights are all well done in a balanced/natural style, that again don't fight for your attention but still manage to make the scenes pop,
* Relative proportions of various elements and foreshortening are accurately portrayed and avoid common amateur mistakes.
One game I've been fairly impressed with the backgrounds of has been Glassix. It has a metric shit-ton of them, like 700+ even with my way outdated copy of the game if I recall. Though I tend to think most of them are from other sources, as there are a few different sizes of background images, and despite how good of a job they did with picking backgrounds that look like they belong together, there are definitely some that stand out to my eye as being less refined and almost certainly from a different source. I've also seen quite a few of the backgrounds being used by other games, for instance the backgrounds in Incestral Awakening pretty much all share the same origin as a subset of those in Glassix. I don't know if there's some Community Commons licensed background repository they are both sourcing from, or if one has taken from the other, or if they both have taken from other games.
But regardless, I really like quite a few of the backgrounds from those and I'm always on the hunt for other games with higher quality background art in that hand-painted anime style. If you have some anime suggestions as well, I'd be up for hearing about some of those. As an example, Monster Musume has quite a lot of really nice, high quality backgrounds - though one thing I did unfortunately notice is that the inside and outside of the main house completely fail to match up. But they stayed pretty faithful to the manga's background designs, so I guess the blame falls to the source material in that case, heh.
As a bit of a summary of some of my findings, on what I feel contributes to good background art, here is my list so far:
* Bright, but not necessarily over-saturated, color choices.
* There are no true solid colors. Pretty much every surface has various styles of blotchy/painterly color variations, lighting gradients, or texturing effects applied to make them more visually interesting and appealing.
* Well done details tend to be fairly sharp, but on the subtle side. They accent instead of stealing focus for themselves.
* They usually have pretty good contrast, unless it was a stylistic choice to have things look more washed out and/or muted with something of a more watercolor-like style.
* Ambient occlusion, shadows, and highlights are all well done in a balanced/natural style, that again don't fight for your attention but still manage to make the scenes pop,
* Relative proportions of various elements and foreshortening are accurately portrayed and avoid common amateur mistakes.
