Creating The Kitchen

So lately a few of people have been asking me about how i build the backgrounds i've been showing in preview screenshots, and while I'm not going to tell everyone exactly how i did it (i learnt threw trial and error, and I'm sure you can too) i will give you a basic guide as to how the backgrounds are made.

Step 01:



The first step is taking a photo that will provide the basis for the background, in this case my kitchen, you may remember this shot from the original release of The Ultimate Asparagus Episode 01.

Step 02:



Simply a matter of drawing around the objects in the photo, the fridge, the cupboard's and such. Its important to keep track of where there would be gaps in real life, such as between the fridge and the wall, this is so you can put them on separate layers in case you decide to ever have anything come out from behind the front objects.

Step 03:



The next step is colouring, this is as simple as using the colour picker on the photo and painting in beetween the lines, i do this on a layer below the original line art, this allows to be messy and get a more hand drawn look, but you can keep it clean and use the fill tool within the original line art too if you want the background to look a little less messy.

Step 04:



Once the fills have been layered out, the next step is textures, the way to get the cleanest textures is to copy the original fills and past them on a layer above, then replacing the fills with your texture of choice. Once all the textures are in convert that entire layer into a movie clip and fiddle with the alphas and filters until your happy with the look.

Step 05:



Adding atmosphere and lighting. In this case the air is stagnant with dust floating in the air, these are all just little lines drawn with the paint tool, several hundred are done so as to avoid a look of repetition, also a second lot is added behind it where they are much smaller to add a sense of depth. The lighting is also a combination of several gradients and filters.

And that's the generally how the backgrounds are made, some are a little more in depth with solid shadows for things like the underside of trees and plants and things like the sky to take into consideration, but i will cover these in a later post.