08 Challenge NPR Again: The Importance of Writing

I played a part in ‘Tales of Legendia’. (2003-2004)

Keywords: NPR approach by technique, NPR approach from process, “color shadow”,

I was engaged in the establishment of its graphic representation for over a year as a chief designer. As I produced visual works, I was the best person who knew what kind of stuff the project needed, so I also assigned visual members, interviewed future part time stuff, contacted with out-sourcing companies, made schedules, and wrote a lot of documents.

First, I wanted to have a reality in ‘Tales of Legendia’ world so focused on the representation of the light (shading). We cannot see everything without the light in the real world; that is to say, the simulation of the light produces the reality in the world. I tried to make use of it. Then, using ‘Final Gathering (FG)’ and ‘Global Illumination (GI)’ renderings which can simulate the real shading, the real light was simulated, and using ‘RenderMap’, the simulated shading information was burned onto the background models’ textures (real-time renderings of FG’s and GI’s are too heavy to calculate), the light of the Tales World was represented. However, one of the attractions of Tales series is anime-like fantasy world; therefore, I really took care of adding colors to the lights and their layout on screen like artists put colors on their campuses. Also, I selected NPR approach of techniques for background graphics; it was texturing on the background images. At first, I tried several filterings of Photoshop and made up the idea of image, I then asked programmers the way of representation to realize it. By these processes, I think I could represent the reality and not “CG-ish” mild and soft graphics to the Tales World.

For the characters, I also used RenderMap and FG to represent the reality. However, a problem came about; characters' shades got dirty.

Here, I want you to imagine that you are drawing an illustration. First, you draw a draft for the illustration, and put colors for each object. And next, you will come to the stage where you try to put each shade color on each painted objects (I will omit talking about light colors). Then you would make darker colors adding black to each painted colors. Probably this is logically right; you can demonstrate by the color of the sky which gradually gets darker with the sun set, and finally it gets black.

Then, which color will you pick up when you make the shade color of yellow? If you mix black with yellow, the color will be dirty. Some of you might say it is not dirty. Then you are a designer and asked by a company for their company logo whose corporate color is yellow. Will you still use the darken yellow for the company logo? Maybe not. Because being dirty associates a negative image to the company. Thus, I will put red for yellow to avoid a dirty image. I assure that nobody says the orange-like yellow is dirty because I did not kill the attraction of yellow which is high saturation. Red is darker than yellow but still has high saturation so red can keep the yellow's attraction making yellow darker. For darker (low saturation) colors like green, blue, or purple, black works as shade color not making them look dirty; however, for vivid colors putting black shade tends to let them have dirtier images. How about Anime? You will notice that most Anime’s characters' faces do not use black shades on them. This is one of the techniques to draw the characters' attractions, and I tried to use it for our characters. This is another NPR approach utilizing how people understand colors.

One of the merits of RenderMap is automatic shadings so if I used the second NPR method, we would have to draw shadings manually. I knew it would take time, cost, and be hard to control the quality of the stuff from the experience of Seven Project. Therefore, I wanted to make the tool to do the work.

I liked FG's representation then I sought the way to composite its shadings with characters' textures. I looked up many illustration books or web sites and sought the relationship between a base color and its shading color one by one. Of course it was too complicated for me to deal with. Then I started again from the beginnings, and then tried to check the characteristics of the human's visual organ. And I figured out that human's eyes are more sensitive to the change of brightness than the change of hue or saturation; therefore, if you lightly mixed black shade with a base color, your eyes would feel sudden color change. Then I used a numerical formula for composite. And the result was near to my ideal image. Then I made an action, was a Photoshop macro, having the same algorithm. After confirming the composite action is working good, I asked a technical programmer, who mainly make designer's tools, to make a Maya plug-in, named “Color Shadow”, which made us to get easy outcome with a button.

I successfully complete what I wanted to create as a Tales graphics; however, it was very difficult for me and took us time to tell my image to other members. Representation methods that I created in the project were what we had never used before at least in the company. Most project members did not have enough experience in making games, further, the producer and the director had no experience of in-house project. So ‘sharing’ was the most important matter for the project. Thus, I had to persuade not only visual designers but also planners or programmers of what I wanted to do in the project. I wrote a lot of documents in which I explained the members, "Why is this representation necessary for the project?" "What are the merits of the representation?"

"Sharing image" is the most important thing for a project. The written documents were even for me effective because I could objectively confirm what I wanted to do by myself. Nowadays, a project is mostly divided into each occupation section. And each member has his or her professional; however contrary to this, each member does not have enough knowledge of the other occupations. Of course doing one's best in her or his section is the most important thing and we are all more or less job experiences and basic knowledge of the other occupations. However, each professional section's creativities sometimes will be beyond the boundary of others'. It is essential for group work to reach a goal together. So trying to tell is more important than do one's own best to his or her own work. Writing documents also means keeping records, the documents then will live as the project's knowledge, know-how.