OHIO GO SAY MUST!… You know… just because I’ve been silent lately doesn’t mean I’m not active…

On the contrary, I’ve been really active behind the scenes now that my strike-zone is no longer limited to OELVN’s (aka Visual Novels) since I now started dipping my feet into making Platformer games now that I gained some little knowledge in programming Physics which I will not discuss here since Uncle Mugen persona is strictly for OELVN’s (visual novels)…

Anyway, here are a few teaser images from a project I’m involved with as a BG Graphics Guy… (Sorry about Watermark… this is necessary at the moment)

Yes they are 3D, yes they are Sketchup and yes I know some of you are tired of hearing me and my quest to find that one button cheap solution for quick and effortless BG’s that looked good enough for OELVN (Visual Novel) use but please hear me out anyway…

For quite a while, my focus was to get the Renderer to output hand drawn BG’s that will look good. Of course in doing so… I inadvertently increased the complexity of my method which contradicts my goal of trimming the steps to just maybe 3 or 4 steps and despite all that, the results are pretty much mixed which is apparent if you look at my BG dumping ground “aka Uncle Mugen’s FREE OELVN Resource thread”… CLICK HERE to go there.

After thinking long and hard I realized that maybe I’m doing it wrong. If I wanted optimize things then I will start trimming on the 3D part. For that we begin with a Sketchup Scene. Either you create a scene from scratch or merge a few objects to create a scene… that’s step 1. Afterwards you will simply hit render. No complicated steps this time. No Material properties, No Bump Maps, No Lightmaps or anything complicated. Just select the proper light you want or place a few lights here and there and hit render… this is step 2. And for the final step, I used a Photoshop script I found in Lemmasoft (sorry, I forgot) where your image is turned into something that looks like hand drawn or painted… all in one convenient button… and that’s step 3… So in three quick and easy steps, I managed to get this result in under 2 hours (render time excluded)

Sure, it still looks 3D but hey… 2 hours vs a day or two doing BG’s?… for someone like me who prefers efficiency, the choice is obvious 🙂

You can even push things a bit by doing some effort and post processing to get variations but… I’m usually too lazy for that thing…

Anyway, that’s all for now…

“POOF” (Disappears)

It’s been a while… time to post something… anything…

First and foremost… Hello World! Next is an image to get your attention… Second, never in my wildest imagination I’ll be doing what I’m about to tell you today…

The image you see above is for an Otome project where I Uncle Mugen is currently part of. We’ll go back to this later…

FREE BG’S FROM UNCLE MUGEN for use with your OELVN (aka VISUAL NOVEL) projects

And now we come to the juicy part… I the handsome UNCLE MUGEN has been quietly developing and refining my Sketchup BG making techniques. My main objective is to reduce the steps down to five and make a tutorial so everyone can make their own BG’s without much effort… so far so good I managed to bring it down to a safe 8… still 3 steps more than my ideal goal but I’m still working on it.

Of course along the way we have to do things by trial and error and sometimes we end up with a few test BG’s that are byproduct of the experiments. Some of them are good enough to be used in a project and it would be a shame it I just discard them right?… So I quietly compiled them in a nice little thread that is being updated regularly where I post them backgrounds together with other resources like frameworks and sketchup models for everyone’s use.

Terms are pretty lax… anything goes FREE to use, modification is OK , even OK to be used in commercial projects… just say hi to me Uncle Mugen when used…

To visit the thread click HERE

“POOF” (Disappears)

Reusable trees are good but…

OK… I know I’m hell bent on streamlining on optimizing my workflow in creating BG’s and reusable trees is an integral part of it but you see…. after using and abusing the same tree template for 5 years in so many backgrounds and graphics… I too get sick and tired of looking at them…I need to try and do something fresh…

I know, I’ll try and draw trees manually… easy right?… Err… not quite…

I’ve been using and abusing the same set of template trees for so long that I haven’t drawn any trees manually and I’m beginning to wonder… do I still have what it takes to draw a tree… manually?… No use procrastinating and better get to work…

An hour later (which is a long time) I managed to make this in Photoshop 7… Hmm… Seems passable, not to mention I can manually change the colors and hue of either the leaves or the trunks since they are layered and independent to each other unlike the previous template which is nothing but tree images photoshopped to hell and back to make it look like hand drawn… maybe I should draw more trees manually… what do you think?…

Anyway, in case you wanted to use the Tree Template for whatever project you are doing, you can grab it HERE…