This is what The Precinct looks like from the outside. It is located in a popular ethnic shopping strip, next door to Mr Lowinsack’s famous bagel emporium (soon to include a new espresso machine!).
[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.nakedfella.com/animation/theprecinct/precinctbg.swf” width=”360″ height=”200″/]
Test includes dusk, dawn and late night colour schemes. As you can see, I’m implementing an actual “night” colour scheme for the characters (as opposed to just using Flash’s “tint” settings to darken/bluify them).
Personally, I prefer the handdrawn backgrounds I did for Herman, The Legal Labrador to this Flash-drawn one, but as yet I don’t know of a good way to implement them without getting nasty bitmap-juddering and flickering when trucking and panning. Probably I need to work on the bg design a bit more.
He’s got nighttime eyebrows too!
Yeah, with Ackersley’s awesome fringe it becomes a bit hard to see his eyebrows when he’s not angry. Luckily he’s almost always angry.
Very nice David. I dunno, I’m a fan of the vector background actually.
Also, this is probably a pointless comment seeing as this is just a background test, but in the night version when the light is on, you should maybe make the highlight on Ackersley’s right side brighter…maybe add some light around his hair too. Although yeah, that wasn’t the point of this…so sorry : P
Cheers Mike. I think probably a “rougher” look might be the way to go, but I basically traced a pencil drawing to get this, and I think (as I often do) that it’s lost something in the translation. I’ll have to post the drawing…
And no, that wasn’t so much the point of this, but you are right. I reckon including some “standard” highlights in the character design (along with the standard front shadow, as seen on Ackersley) would be a good way to go.
Oh right, yeah fair enough; and do post it. If you want to use the traditional backgrounds, but not having to worry about how Flash handles bitmaps, maybe you should save out layers and composite everything in After Effects, or even just a standard NLE? (After Effects is pretty tops though) But, I suppose it depends on what your final output is going to be.
And yeah, standard highlights and shadows always make characters look better.
I’m pretty keen to have vector backgrounds having seen what talented people (not me) can do with them. I think there’s a simpler, possibly more abstract look that’ll be the way to go. It will depend on the kind of production this becomes, though.