Oh hey, it’s been about a month.  Guess we better put something here.

Our backgrounds always used trace elements of 3D design for the sake of making sure our proportions and angles were correct.  Recently Curchack has been playing with using more fleshed out 3D environments for the sake of better backgrounds without sacrificing any of that hand-drawn style we’ve been working with.  We figured it might at the very least be a bit neat to see the steps involved.

The bare minimals are put in first off, though that should sorta be obvious.  Just a matter of making sure that the frame is set correctly, the angle matches the perspective of a character at eye-height, etcetera.

From there the image is fixed as needed (in this case, the building and the light post are swapped) and the image is detailed further.

At this point the base of the background is more or less complete so we move onto filling it out properly with miscellaneous details and begin the process of painting over it to seem more like a painting than a 3D environment.

After a bit more effort the background is starting to look a bit more prim and proper.  Some filtering is applied to it isn’t so dreary, and it’s close to being completed.  There are still some obvious 3D elements such as the building and to a lesser extent the light post.

After a while we have our finished result.  Everything is painted over, some extra details are added to flesh out the scene a bit and the entire thing gets a slightly browned filter to give an Autumn-y impression.

And poof: a shiny new background, ready for use!  I hope it’s been at least a little bit interesting.