The Final Assignment

This the final assignment for my Game Design class. The objective was to take everything we learned from the course and apply it to making our final matte painting and a pair of textures.

For my matte, I was going for a feel similar to the first teaser image of The Walking Dead. I wanted to show a city during those first few hours of a zombie outbreak. I wanted to accurately portray the state of chaos and disarray a metropolitan area would be in during such an event while at the same time keeping in mind this is really just the start of things. To help convey this feeling I purposely kept the fountain active and maintained a daylight setting. I painted in the sky and clouds over the sky that was naturally in the image because it had whited out after I color corrected the image. i used a lot of adjustment layers though only a few layer masks. The most prominent use of layer styles is in the flames that i painted onto the buildings. By using the inner and outer glow functions I was able to make the fire look realistic and luminous. I enjoyed working on the project though I think I should've replaced the sky with another image rather than paint the sky in by hand.

Tileable Textures

This is an assignment for my Game Design class. The objective of the assignment was to create tileable texture that could be used in a video game.

The first texture was of a concrete wall. I made an attempt to clean up the image and remove any sections that would break the texture once it was tiled. I tried to minimize potential seams but the left side of the image proved to be difficult. I used multiple layers and selection to cover up the glaring areas. Adjustment layers were used to boost the details in the image to look more defined. I also used the content aware tool to clean up sections of grime that would have tiled over and broken the texture's tiling effect.

For the second texture I used a metal container image. I used the same approach with this one that I took with the second one. I cropped and offset the image to make sure it was the same size and that it would tile correctly. After that used the content aware tool to try to make the bordered sections match more cleanly. After that I made adjustment layers to emphasis the details. I used levels and curves and created copies of the actual texture and applied blending modes to them. This assignemt wasn't very difficult but it took some time to make the textures into something that looked good and still able to put up as a titleable element in a game. I had more trouble with the first texture because i forgot to offset it at first. I tried to fix it as best i could without starting over but there is a clear seam in the image about halfway through. The second texture wasn't as bad mainly because I did the offset first.

Content Aware

This is an assignment for my Game Design class. The objective of the assignment was to remove all people in the picture using the Spot Healing Brush and its Content Aware property.

The assignment started out easy because the bottom half of all of the people all shared the same background. So with the spot healing brush i just cleaned out everyone to fit the background. To do that i used the lasso tool to make small selections and then from there used the spot healing brush to paint away the legs on a new layer. This process was repeated until the entire ground was clear. I used the proximity property to clean up any imperfection I couldn't fix with content aware. From that point on I repeated the process until I got to the heads an din some cases the segways. This is where things got more difficult thanks to the cars in the background. In some cases just working in smaller increments worked but patience gave way to tedium and for the sake of speed I worked with larger selections. in some cases this worked out to my benefit but more often than now I was given terrible results. The hardest sections were the heads of the group of young women and the two sections where the segway riders are right in front of cars. I tried to work the best I could with the tool but I think i bit off more than i could chew by using this image. In the end I'm still happy with my end result i just need to get a better grasp of using the tool.

Matte Painting Planet

This is the matte painting assignment for my Game Design class. The objective of the assignment was to replicate a matte painting assignment we had started in class..

For this assignment I used all of the tricks that we had gone over in class. The idea was to make a realistic space scene like the one we had done in class. I used a galaxy background as a reference for the colors and how the stars should look along with the background. This assignment required the use of filters. The Clouds filters were used to make t background look more cosmic. I used noise filters and levels to create the star background. And the radial blur was used in combination with a dissolved brush to make the lightburst effect. The brighter stars were also made using a brush in addition to a layer style to give them a brighter glow. 

Cliff Demo

This is the matte painting assignment for my Game Design class. The objective of the assignment was to take composite three photos together to make one unified image.

For this assignment I used all of the tricks that we learned in class. The first thing I did was use quick mask to make my selection to cut out the man and the cliff. After doing that I laid him on to the background scene. I laid the sky onto the image afterward and then started to color correct the images. I used multiple adjustment layers on each image and tweaked them to give the impression of a cloudy afternoon. I mainly focused on adjusting the brightness and contrast of the images to give the scene the right look. I used a lot of quick selections and adjustment layers to darken the background to make the cloudy sky seem more realistic. I also brightened up the left hand ridge as the sunlight would have affected the edge just a bit.

Color Correction 2

This is the second color correction assignment for my Game Design class. The objective of the assignment was to take a picture at home and color correct it.

This assignment was pretty easy since we had done something similar with the last project. I took a picture of my cat just lazing around in the basement. in the original photo at lot of the image was either desaturated or over exposed to the flash from the camera. So what I did was put the colors back into the images and toned down the contrast. The sofa was a pale green in stead of the deep green shown.  The blanket picked up most of the camera's flash so I added more color saturation and added more contrast. The sheets in the background were a bit dim too so i just brightened those up with the curves option. I made all of my selections with the quick mask and then copied and pasted the selected items about the base photo. From there i just applied individual adjustment layers to each item. I mainly made use of the Curves and Hue/Saturation adjustment layers.

Color Correction Assignment

This is the color correction assignment for my Game Design class. The objective of the assignment was to fix the issues plaguing the images below as best we could using the image adjustments options

This first image had high contrast issues and the color was over saturated. By using the levels, curves and exposure options I tinkered around till I lowered the saturation of the colors and adjusted the overall brightness of the image. Then I used the variations option to further desaturate the colors.

The second image had the opposite problem of the first. It was too dark and so i tried to brighten it up with the Curves and Exposures options. I wanted to try to keep the colors as accurate as possible while pushing up the brightness and contrast.

The final image looked faded and old. I started out using the levels option again and then switched to Curves. When i was manipulating the curve line I pulled in a section toward the histogram which saturated the colors and made them look more vibrant. After that I tinkered with the contrast to refined the shadows.