#moonlightfaust

[adequately]

クロノ・トリガー

Chrono Trigger

(SFC/SNES, 1995)

[bryce-bucher]

Been Learning to Paint Old Cel Animation Backgrounds

Lately, I've had the drive to learn and practice creating digital paintings that closely resemble the traditional background paintings found in older anime. As a first step, I decided to grab a Kingsfield 4 screenshot from @moonlightfaust and use it as a reference.

I honestly ended up kinda surprised at how good I think it turned out. I haven't really tried painting a background before, and I think this is a very good first step for where I wanna be.

How I do it

Firstly, I loaded up my reference on my second monitor and started painting away in clip studio paint. I sketched things out at first and then used the default gouache brush for the broad strokes. I made sure to use a nice variation of colors and values on the surfaces to give them texture. After that I blended stuff together using a custom blend brush I grabbed called "wet betty", and then I used the thin gouache brush to work on smaller details. I drew out the caustics and then painted some blue lighting on the walls on a layer set to additive (glow). Here are some wip photos showing all that off.

After creating the base drawing, I brought it into Affinity Photo and adjusted the brightness/contrast and added a softproof adjustment layer to make it look as though it was printed. I also used a white mask of the caustics in order to make those parts of the image transparent.

After that, I brought the image into blender in order to simulate the cel animation look.

I'm using a variation of @jam2go's under-lighting method here in order to get that nice, naturalish glow. I'm using a special compositing setup in order to simulate the little variations in light and lens artifacts you might get from capturing cels that gets processed onto the final render.

I've also given the image cel plane very subtle bumpiness in order to simulate real celluloid not being completely flat. (It's a little hard to see, but I just subdivided it and used a displacement modifier)

The light artifacts and the cell bumpiness are both animated, and I also added very subtle noise to the position of the cell to simulate how each frame in cel animation isn't placed in exactly the same spot. After rendering, it all comes together to simulate a cel animation look fairly nicely I think.

Anyway back 2 gamedev now

[easternmind]

Siren 2 - Japan Studio, 2006

Via @moonlightfaust

[superchat]

i rlly loved moonlightfaust's blog ): they had a ton of retro horror/gothic game gifs and stuff on their blog...

[goldenclaymore]

i just saw my queue posted a post from the blog moonlightfaust and that they have deactivated. i hate how most of my fav blogs have left tumblr. T _T i loved their retro gaming blog so much.

[superchat]

MOONLIGHTFAUST DEACTIVATED???