Non-Anime Styled art in VNs

[Auro-Cyanide]

Alternative titles could be non-as-stylised art or more realistic art in VNs (I warned you that all I could really talk about was art :P)

As we are aware, Anime/manga styled art is by far the most popular in VNs. I would say this comes down to a) a lot of commercial (as in the majority) VNs come from Japan and so strongly influence the style b) the style is popular at the moment c) stylisation is seen as beneficial in this medium and d) people who are interested in VNs also tend to be interested in other things related to Japanese pop culture.

Personally I would like to see more diversity used within the medium for diversities sake if nothing else. My personal style defaults into manga inspired, but it's still nice to see other things. I get very sad when people feel they NEED to do anime style for a VN or fear their work will be rejected for not having anime styled work. I think it's a bunch of nonsense anyway. The two most important things for art in VN is a) it's relevance to the story and it's tone of voice and b) it's quality and how aesthetically pleasing it is. While everyone has personal likes and dislikes, generally people can agree on whether something 'works' or not and that is the primary function, 'to work'.

Anyway, the reason I brought this up was because we just complete a very short project that Camille did for one of her classes. We decided on not doing anime styled art because we didn't want people to dismiss the story because 'it was just cartoons' and because of the stigma attached to anime. Since these were people that were in her class there was no way of telling what their interests were. It was unlike posting on the internet in certain places were you knew at least some people shared that interest. We were tossing up between something a bit more western like the original concept art I did for Red Snow, or something more realistic.

I choose to do something more realistic to try it out and to do something different. As much as I love manga styled stuff, it can be a little boring doing it all the time. It's fun to change it up. My main focus was looking at how difficult this would be to actually pull off, which is my main point of this thread. I thought I could go over the pros and cons I ran into with this style. I was originally going to do something fairly messy and painterly, but I went into more details than I was expecting. And so these are my thoughts on the process.

Concepts and Sketches

For this part I was relying on photos a lot to study facial shapes, eyes, hair, you name it. Because I was stepping back from stylisation there was a lot of stuff I couldn't just guess. At the same time I had strong bases to work from and lots of references. I didn't really have to bridge the gap between realality and style as much. With a more realistic style, mistakes stood out more clearly (both a good and bad thing) and the details were more important. Overall, I don't think it really was more time consuming than usual. I was working more from reality and so there wasn't as much need for me to pull something from scratch.



Bases

Doing the base, especially the faces and hair, were time consuming. However, I don't think it was too much more time consuming. The most time consuming things with my usual style is the lineart and the blocking (god, I hate blocking). I had to do neither for this style. Instead the time was sunk into getting the blending right, facial features in the right spot, lighting and style. Since I was leaving of the mouth, eyes and eye brows there were significant spaces that were very rough that I hoped to paint over with the emotions.



Emotions

Were waaaaaaaaaaaay easier to do than I thought. I thought this would be something I really struggled with. Getting them to look right was a bit of a challenge and some parts like wrinkles and that were a pretty fine balancing act. However, after that it wasn't too hard. Once the first emotion was done, I duplicated the layer and edited it directly. This meant that all that space I had painted over remained generally the same and I could just change what I needed to. I think in some ways this was easier than my usual style were painting over isn't really an option since the style tends to be cleaner.

Poses

Simple arm poses were easy to do. The slight roughness of the style made it fairly quick to do these changes. Larger changes however were another kettle of fish and something I didn't fully pull off. With so many details defining who this person is, it is very easy to mess up and have it look not-quite-right. Stylisation tends to give you more leeway in this regard.



Layers

My layers in photoshop got really messy, really quickly. It's easier to be more disciplined when you have lineart>base>shading>lighting etc. With this style I had a terrible habit of 'touching up' areas on random layers, not naming my layers as well, not putting them in folders. They tidied up not to bad, but my adjustment folder was still a nightmare. Camille couldn't use her usual sprite process because of it, so I'm not sure if I could pull off this style for a larger project.

lol layers



Overall

Due to its nature, I'm not sure this would be something I could do a lot of just right now. I would have to improve my skills significantly and my sprite making abilities. However, I did learn a lot and I was pretty pleased with the overall visual effect it had. The adjustment layer thing would have to be something I got a grip on though. I'm not sure if I would do something like this again. Might try something more in the middle, like with lineart and fairly painterly shading or something. I honestly don't want to attempt to do people CGs in this style D: And that's my experience with doing something like this.

[Angra Mainyu]

Out of the points that you make, I believe C is the most important.

I suspect you're right in regards to the fact that VNs don't necessarily have to use anime/manga-styled art. But I think highly stylized art is necessary. Well, perhaps necessary is too strong a word. Useful? Yes. Highly stylized art is useful in attracting the attention of an audience.

Looking over your sample images, it's obvious that they're technically proficient. I like the coloring technique and you appear to have a good sense of lighting. But to me, the overall style seems too...normal. Too average.

I like to hold up The Incredibles as a good example of non-anime stylization in character designs.



The artists chose to go with wildly-stylized proportions. Look at Mr. Incredible versus Violet. He could literally wrap one hand around her waist. But that's done to exaggerate the fact that he's a big, hulking strong-man, and she's a dainty young waif of a girl. But at the same time, it obvious that the artists know their anatomy. If one didn't know human anatomy to begin with, one wouldn't know where to start with the exaggerations.

I guess all this is to say: one's art is the first thing an audience is going to judge one's work by. If it's not catchy, or flashy or in some way unique, a lot of people are just going to pass it up. I imagine there's an argument to be made about not wanting to attract those sorts of readers. But, it is a different argument.

As for the amount of layers in your sprites running away on you...Oh, I can sympathize. The worst part is not knowing if the little details that I'm working on will even be noticeable in-game. Oh well. You can never have too much detail. Um, until you do...

[nubbycakes]

Thanks for sharing your experiences. This is relevant to my interests as I'm currently in the process of making an update of and while I was fishing for suggestions, one of the regulars at #Teacup said that it would be nice if I could present the story using colorful, cartoony visuals for the first half of the story and then switching to a more realistic style for the second half to reflect the change of tone.

The painterly style you used looks good and seems to work well for the GUI style used by the game. I'd go for a similar style for the serious parts of Hikari's Ribbon except that I have this allergy to using my tablet and would prefer the cleaner shades/lines you can make with a mouse and photoshop's pen tool.

The first part will be illustrated in an MLP:FiM inspired style similar to this:


Or something like the vectorized Tinierme style images like this:


For the realistic style, I could try going for portrait-style sketches like this one:

,but I'd have no idea how to color something like this digitally in an efficient manner using a mouse.

So I've decided on a mix between realistic and anime-style similar to this:

As a side note, The Morane Crisis by mikey uses an art style that's also a mix between highly-stylized and realistic. It uses hard lines but with soft shading and semi-realistic proportions. There are some screenshots here: http://games.softpedia.com/progScreensh ... 71949.html

[Auro-Cyanide]

I think stylisation is important for the same reason it's important in comics: it's just easier to replicate. You don't do it as often as you do it in comic, but it's still important to be able to draw the characters consistently. The less stylised something is the harder it is to redraw it.

I really like the style of The Incredibles, it's really nice to so something like that, though I don't think it would have worked for mine since it's not quite serious enough. The style tended to lighten the darker moments of that movie, while I wanted to make the art match the dark tone of our story. If I was going to stylise I would have probably looked into some of the more serious western graphic novel stuff. But then my problem would be less how-do-I-get-realism-to-work and more I-don't-know-how-to-draw-this-style XD Overall people have liked it, though obviously people can pick out the mistakes more easily (Seriously, it is not a forgiving style D:) and I'm getting a higher ration of normal to good than I did for RisAmo which amused me.

I think everyone will start judging with the art, and that's okay. Even when you think you aren't, you probably are. It's human nature. It's just good to not let it be your ONLY point of judgement.

Contrasts in games is really nice in my opinion. I would like to one day work on a game with another writer/artist pair and put all four of our work together in a concept about contrast. Maybe like switching points of view or something.

As far as style goes I'll probably use something different for every game I do. BCM is pretty close to my default style, plus my discovery of that default brush I really like~ RisAmo was all about "How quickly can I shade this stuff and still have it look decent". The Elevator was about experimenting with using realistic styles and what problems could arise with it. I have been toying with the idea of setting Red Snow in black and white with a restricted use of bright colour. We have a short psychological one planned set in the 1940's so I will let that era guide me. I think the style will be pretty realistic for that one too given the themes. And the next commercial one we do will be manga styled, probably with a sepia palette.

It's really nice to do short game though because it gives you a chance to try out something really different without looking yourself into something long term. I would hate to discover the problems of realistic styles a couple months into a massive project D: