Anthony mentor MorteM

[Anthony]

I can't help but feel a bit humbled at the prospect of teaching someone else, but I will try to help MorteM in the following ways:

Understand the basics of the way light works
Rules of composition
Basics of color theory
Take a project from start to finish, in an effort to show a good workflow

This will take quite a bit of time, but hey, I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. The first assignment I gave MorteM was a classic practice in lighting. Here is what I said:
"Draw a white matte cube and a black matte cube on a white infinite plain. They should be sitting flat on the ground, rotated at different angles, but with the same light source(sun). I would like the shadow from one to be partially on the other. Don't kill yourself, but try to make it as defined and smooth as possible, clean lines and shading."

MorteM, wanna post your creation here? I look forward to seeing it!

[Olof]

Hey there. I must say I'm not off to a good start here.
I've only managed to do the white box, but I guess I'll post it to show where my perspective fails. I'll follow this up by scanning the whole rendered assignement tomorrow.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v65/MorteM/Sketches/box.jpg
I saved all the lines on purpose, just so it's clear how I did this. Probably will get easier to see where it went wrong.

.peace

[Olof]

Heya. I made another one where I tried putting two boxes using two point perspective with different vanishing points.

I'd like to know how I am supposed to use two point perspective and put a number of boxes in that aren't alligned to the same grid. I.e. placed in different angles.
I'm not sure my try did much sense, but I hope you understand my thoughts about the perspective rules. My previous teachers hasn't been able to answer this to me, even if I had some better theories than this. Last one I asked told me I only have to have the vanishing points on the same horizon, which I tried in my previous attempts.

I hope you can tell me the rules regarding several objects in perspective.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v65/MorteM/Sketches/perspective2.jpg

.peace

[Anthony]

You're doing well so far MorteM, don't get down on yourself! Not drawing the sky blue if you've never seen the sky doesn't make you a bad artist, it just means no one showed you the sky yet. :) I hadn't planned on teaching you perspective, but since you definitely need it, I'll put together a fairly comprehensive lesson for you on it. I'm at work right now but when I get home I'll take a couple hours to do that. I've found a couple good sources of info on it as well, so we'll use those as well. Post will probably go up around midnight EST.

[Anthony]

OK, I've found an extremely good resource on perspective drawing, written by a much better technical illustrator than myself. His name is Kevin Hulsey, and I'm going to take the liberty of posting a link to his Tutorial Index Page here:
http://www.khulsey.com/student.html
Also read this thread right here on ConceptArt.org!
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=108180

And if you have a year or so to spend reading more perspective information, I found this quite comprehensive:
http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/perspect1.html

I want you to read the following articles on that site:
- Basic Principles of Perspective Drawing
- 2 Point Perspective Drawing Tutorial
- 3 Point Perspective Drawing Tutorial
- Ellipse Perspective Drawing Tutorial

Let me make some comments on your drawings in relation to those articles.

1) The first image you posted is using a volume light source. The only reason to do this is if you want to create realistic diffused (soft) shadows. You basically draw guide lines from both sides of the light source, through each corner of the object. You thereby create a soft edge range, and depending on the distance/size of the lightsource with relation to the object, you will have a greater/lesser falloff of the shadow's hard edges. Obviously it starts out hard at the corners of the object and softens more and more from there. For now, let us use only single-point light sources, so that we do not complicate matters more than we need to...yet. :rendered: I'm attaching that image to this post with proper perspective lines drawn for the shadow. Notice that since your light source is relatively low, the shadow is quite long. The upshot of this is that part of it lies outside our FOV circle, and thus is distorted. :)

2) In your second image, I can feel your pain there. Your main problem is that you're not working with a Picture Plane (See first link above). A PP is basically where you have an overhead layout of your scene. Often this will be one of the views you get when doing commercial work. Please note that when you have objects that are not centered, or have an edge nearly parallel to the horizontal, you will want to use 1-point perspective on those objects, since to do otherwise will often place your object in an infinitely large POV circle, which we don't want. The basic rule of thumb is that if you have an edge toward you, use 2pt, and if you have a face toward you, use 1pt. Generally use 1pt at the edges of the image too. Remember, these are general guidelines, not hard rules, so you have to use your judgement which is more appropriate in a given situation. You can easily have both 1pt and 2pt objects in the same image. As far as the distance between the vanishing points is concerned, this is NOT FIXED and changes as your object rotates. Be sure to read the first link I posted, it has tons of great info on this process. The thread does too. If you still don't understand after all that, then we will do some exercises to teach you. No more assignments until you are done reading and learning the perspective basics :rendered:

[Olof]

aha! :)

none of my previous teachers has ever bothered teaching us students about the picture plane, no wonder it all turned out wrong. I have ead up on the subject but I haven' managed to use it yet, except for a failed attempt (see attached image). I'll continue with the assignment tomorrow or sunday, though it'll be digital since my school locks up and leaves me without a scanner.

Attached is another attempt done before picture plane reading, but with a one spot source of light and a failed attempt to do perspective with the picture plane correct. The number of lines made a mess in my head :(. sorry for the large filesizes, didn't notice until it as too late.

.peace

[Olof]

Some new ones. one figure with perspective plane and another failed attempt at multiple objects in 2 point perspective. I've learned alot alread, even if it doesn't show. For now i'll give up doing it by hand on paper, the number of lines makes it way to messy. Especially whenworking with more than one object. Also, I'll try to turn it into showing some values. I'd really like to move on towards assignments closer to character or creature design.

Even though I believe I've drawn all the lines right here, I still can't stop feeling that something is wrong. Did I mess up somewhere?

On another notice. You added me on MSN but with a mobile account, I don't know if I dare to write anything. My version of MSN tells me that it will bill you for every message I send to you and with my dyslectic repetetive nature that will be alot of munnies for you. How does it work?

.cheers

[Anthony]

Sorry for the absence, been busy! Don't feel down, you're improving and learning a lot. We can go into character design, but we really have to nail down some fundamentals first. You can't skip the basics!! I'll be posting a comprehensive reply to the perspectives you've posted on Saturday. My MSN shows me as Cellular because I'm usually offline :) I'll catch you sometime when you're on though. Stay tuned ;)

[jdeegz]

just read those perspective and basicly every other tutorial on that dudes site, thanks for the refrence anthony. :)

[Anthony]

Hey MorteM! I wanted to give you some more thoughts on this before we move on, and an example PSD (saved in CS3, can you open it?). Basically here is a rundown of what the various terms mean:

SP - Station Point - this is how far from the object we are standing. The farther we are from the object, the less perspective distortion there is. So to stand farther away, we move the SP down on the image. The pushes the Vanishing Points (VPs) out farther left/right, which obviously makes the image more orthographic.

NOTE!! An acceptable field of view (FOV) is 60 degrees in most cases. Anything outside of that will become distorted, as seen in my example image:
http://www.netonup.com/mortem/PerspectiveLayout08.jpg
Look at the cube in the center. Since our SP is so far back, that cube is so un-distorted that it looks weird. The cube on the left is on the edge of our acceptable FOV, and looks the most normal. The right hand cube is entirely outside our FOV, and is starting to look funky. Here is a link to the higher res PSD of that scene so that you can look at each cube's setup individually. Note that I cropped it left/right so those VP's are off the page:
http://www.netonup.com/mortem/PerspectiveLayout08.psd

Now, the picture plane...when you're laying out your objects on the picture plane, you want to select a part of the object that will be your "true" measurement. For instance, in my example, the left two cubes have the closest corner as a "true" measurement, and the right cube has its middle as the "true" measure. If I had a cube that didn't touch the picture plane (PP), I could project the cube's lines to the PP, draw the entire thing in perspective, then subtract the projected area from the 3d rendering. Note that the location of the picture plane determines how large the image is. So if you move the picture plane closer, you're essentially zooming out.

Vanishing points (VPs). There is only one SP in an image, but every object that is not aligned rotationally with another object will have its own VPs, calculated as you have seen in the other tutorials.

I think that pretty much covers what we need to with perspective drawing. Ask any questions you have and then we'll move on to the next task. Hope it was all clear!

[Olof]

I'll have to admit that I don't understand all of the rules, but if you wan't to move on (pm) I'm all for it. I've done alot of sketches trying to start with perspective grids and then putting objects in them, but blah. I'm going to make more of them tho. Some of the sketches are just buildings, with little or no perspective used in them.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v65/MorteM/Sketches/ptthumb.jpghttp://img.photobucket.com/albums/v65/MorteM/Sketches/ptshape.jpghttp://img.photobucket.com/albums/v65/MorteM/Sketches/ptbgd.jpg

.peace