Non-artist technique?

[Chroma]

Just wondering if anyone has tried creating a composite photo from various photos and running it through a filter that turns it into a hand-drawn looking piece of art. I'm no artist and I'm looking for alternate solutions that let me have some creative control and do it myself.

For example, take a photo of a wooden beamed basement. Then add separate pieces from other photos, ie a wooden chest, sword leaning against the wall, table, or whatever. Then retouch the shadows, and run it all through a special filter to produce a piece of art that looks like it was digitally painted by hand etc.

[Desktop Gaming]

Just wondering if anyone has tried creating a composite photo from various photos and running it through a filter that turns it into a hand-drawn looking piece of art. I'm no artist and I'm looking for alternate solutions that let me have some creative control and do it myself.

For example, take a photo of a wooden beamed basement. Then add separate pieces from other photos, ie a wooden chest, sword leaning against the wall, table, or whatever. Then retouch the shadows, and run it all through a special filter to produce a piece of art that looks like it was digitally painted by hand etc.
Sounds like you want something like LiveTrace in Adobe Illustrator.

Illustrator doesn't come cheap tho - I dunno if there are any other bitmap-to-vector conversion tools that you could use as a starting point.

[Chroma]

I'm using AKVIS Sketch atm with paint shop pro 9. It gives some pretty amazing results. I'm just wondering if anyone has some better advice or methods they could share.

[Christian]

Nothing beats the real thing, im actually invensting money in learning art myself, i think thats the best thing you can do...

[dannthr]

There's nothing really to invest except for time.

Get some paper, get some pencils, get to work.

I participate at an art learning forum for people of all different kinds of levels here:
http://forums.megatokyo.com/index.php?showforum=4

Feel free to practice and practice and sketch and sketch and post your work for some good old-fashioned peer criticism.

It's worth it.

[Christian]

Well, i guess sooner or later youll need to buy a book or pay a teacher to help you increase in skill...

http://www.drawspace.com/
www.conceptart.org

:D

[xDan]

I dunno if there are any other bitmap-to-vector conversion tools that you could use as a starting point.
Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org) does that (import a bitmap then go to path->trace bitmap)

[mot]

I don't think that any automatic vector tracing or plugins or similar
techniques can give you good looking pictures.

However, open the composite photo in Photoshop, set the opacity to 40%,
put another layer over it and draw your own version over that. I heard this trick
also worked with paper & pen :) It looks much more "organic" than the
machine generated pics.

And whatever you try, give it at least 4-5 attempts. NOTHING will look good
the first time!

[oNyx]

Auto tracing in Inkscape is good for a few things and while the implementation is damn awesome, for the most part it isn't really that useful. You end up with way too many nodes and an illogical hard to manage structure.

Manual tracing is a lot nicer in that regard. However, it obviously takes quite a lot of time.

Well, having some vector skills is surely useful. Even if you don't use it for your game media there are a couple of things you might want to use it for. Such as diagrams for internal usage, laying out your website and doing some graphics for it or icons in general etc.

Manual tracing of hand drawn stuff (http://kaioa.com/svg/carrot_steps.png) is also worth a try. The result looks pretty good (especially if you compare it with the crude hand drawing) and you can use as many guide lines as you need without having to erase em at the end.

See also Clipping1 (http://kaioa.com/svg/clipping.mkv) and Clipping2 (http://kaioa.com/svg/clipping2.mkv).

Tone-mapping with Qtpfsgui (http://qtpfsgui.sourceforge.net/) (Win/Mac/Linux) can also produce interesting results (before (http://files.myopera.com/agony_/blog/original.jpg) after (http://files.myopera.com/agony_/blog/bla_pregamma_1_fattal_alpha_0.1_beta_0.8_saturatio n_1.jpg)).

[svero]

There are a bunch of basic masking techniques you can use to composite elements of different photos. Some fo the photoshop courses at lynda.com are very helpful in that regard.

As for sketching... There's a ton of filters out there and so many ways to approach it. You can use edge detection filters and noise reduction filters to make things look more cartoony. You can combine those filters as layers in varying degrees. You can use contrast filters. You can use special filters like virtual painter. There's really no 1 good way to do this. Depends a lot on finding a style that suits your game.