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2D games: Shoot photos to make better & cheaper art (Part 3)
This series of posts are about shooting good pictures for 2D game art production. This post is Part 3: Tips about shooting architectures, interior, furniture.
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This series of posts are about shooting good pictures for 2D game art production. This post is Part 3. If you see this series for the first time, I suggest you to start from Part 1.
Trip 3: Shooting background elements
On this trip we would shoot pictures for making background art: architectures, interior, furniture. And the general rules of shooting them are similar.
Why shoot pictures?
Before shooting pictures for your game, you should keep in mind that Google and other stock photo sites are still great source for pictures. Don’t waste time shooting things common enough that Google could give you hundreds of results by one click. We would shoot these things:
Things hard to find on Google;
Things you need to fit into the perspective of your concept art;
Things and scenes you can easily find on Google, but usually you can’t find HD version to use in the production phase. We often get a photo from the clients, a bazaar in Istanbul, or inside of a palace. The clients say, the angle is perfect, only the picture is low resolution, that we need to reconstruct the scene by 3D and 2D approach later. If we can shoot such a HD picture by ourselves, the job to finish up the scene to production quality is minor, only 1~2 day’s overpainting work. Lots of bucks saved.
General notes for shooting:
The goal: is to shoot pictures of plain & even lighting. Please see this picture, A feels better visually, with better contrast; But for our purpose we prefer B, for we don’t want pictures with dark parts, those parts have no details in them, difficult for 2D editing & overpainting. “Plain” pictures with good details are generally liked by 2D artists. For they can always add the shadows, light colors later.
For Nikon cameras you can use Active D-lighting to make the shadows lighter; For Canon it’s Auto Lighting Optimizer (ALO).
And choose a white balance that the scene appears in neutral light color, no need to go after those artistic WB.
Best weather/lighting condition for outdoor shooting: Pros like to shoot cityscape in dawn & dusk on a sunny day, for artistic exposure. However our goal is different, for us the best weather condition is early afternoon of a overcast day, the lighting is even and somewhat bright. We should avoid shooting in bright sunny day, the pictures would have dark parts too dark, which makes the picture unusable(See below).
Take a zoom lens with you, which could go down to 18mm or less, this kind of lens is great for shooting architectures and interiors;
While shooting outdoor, the bright daylight would make the camera LCD display dim, that you can’t see accurate shooting result in real time. Thus it would be impossible to get correct exposure, for you couldn’t in the first place know whether the picture is good or bad, much less how to adjust the parameters to take a better one.
You would want to crank up the brightness of the LCD display, that you can see clear picture against the daylight. By all means not to do so. That would only help you to produce underexposed pictures. For the screen’s brightness would brighten up those pictures which are actually dim.
The best solution is to buy a LCD viewfinder, something like this, it can stick to the LCD screen, to keep it light proof.
If you want quality pictures, take with you a tripod and cable release. For overcast days have not enough lights, you would shoot in low shutter speed. For handheld shooting, you can crank ISO up to 400~640 to do the job, but it wouldn’t produce as good pictures. (While use a tripod, always use ISO 100, and turn VR on the lens off)
When you shoot flat things, use f/8 to get sharp pictures; for things with depth, use f/16 or up to get the whole thing in focus.
Shoot with specific concept art:
While you have the concept art of the scenes done, you want to shoot specific background elements for production phase.
Generally, you want to shot things match the angle of that on your concept art, and the things are of same or similar style/appearance.
Before going out shooting, make a list of items to shoot, plan the shortest route of shooting these things. And you can copy the concept arts to ipad, and take it to the shooting site. Then you can have good reference to shoot things in correct angle. The important thing is to keep your list and concept arts organized.
Once you get a good angle, have the tripod set, shoot multiple pictures with different shutter speed, white balance, that you can choose from them a best one when back to studio.
Shooting with no specific concept art:
For sometime, you would go to a castle, a museum, or a ruin to shoot some pictures to inspire concept art, and some pictures you could actually use in production phase.
Have an eye for elements and views that are typical to adventure games:
Stairs, doorways, whole buildings are very useful for HOPA/adventure games, pay attention to them.
Pay attention to intensely used scene elements. For example stone lions for Chinese settings, hero’s statue for western settings.
Windows, patterns. Shoot them in flat angle, that we can always use deformation tool in Photoshop to get them to other perspectives.
Interior & Furniture:
Many tips above could be applied to interior shooting. The lights inside of a building is much dimmer that outside, so even in a well lit room, you would need high ISO to get fast enough shutter speed. In daylight lit or lamp lit rooms, you would need a tripod. And you generally need wide angle lens to shoot interior scenes.
In a city, we always can find great rooms to shoot: in a castle/mansion, museum, subway station, old house, old office, old street, café, bars, etc,etc. Grab those angles that are most typical to HOPA/adventure games.
Furniture made of expensive wood generally have strong highlights(see below), you may use a polarizer. And furniture is but a large item to shoot, you can refer Part 1 & 2 for shooting items.
By the end:
Now let me conclude this series with a few words: It’s quite important to know what wonderful sites, museums, mansions and castles your city have, what things are in display. And you should be quite familiar with the blocks around your home/office.
Last time we need a Chinese stone lion in our scene, it happens that the next street have a pair of them. Then we take multiple pictures back and find a good one to use in game.
Thank you for your patience of reading my lengthy posts, if you’re interested in how we produce art works for HOPA/adventure games, please read my blog:
http://gamasutra.com/blogs/JunxueLi/940564/
Other parts of this series:
Part 1: Shooting Everyday life items
Part 2: Shooting in a Museum
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