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Teflon · 01-28-2004, 09:29 PM

When I made my first parks, I was mostly taking bits from other stadiums and putting them together to make a new stadium. The only editing I was doing was to crop, resize, skew perspectives and adjust brightness and contrast of the layered pieces to match. This was pretty limited as I could only make parks based on the pictures of existing parks. Back then, the average one took me a couple of hours and looked pretty crude.

I began drawing some of the things I needed in Paint Shop and over time have gotten to the point where most of what you see has been drawn. In Pac Bell, for example, everything except the ads, some trees, and the two boats were drawn. If you zooom to something like 8 x magnification you should be able to tell a difference in the pixelation. Even the background was drawn this time. I originally was going to use an existing picture for the background but just put some gradiant colors back there as a preliminary step to see the ballpark in context. I liked the color combinations so much that I kept them and added enough "noise" (random pixels) to give them the neccessary texture. The bad part about drawing so much of the parks is that they now take upwards of 20 hours to produce. There definitely is no shortcut to making good looking stadium graphics. Mine didn't look all that good to begin with, but I spent a lot of time at it and developed good techniques. Anyone else who wants to do it should go in realizing some time will be involved. The earlier park I posted, Ellsworth park took me two weeks. I wanted to have a city background that looked like it could have been in the 1920s. Of course, color images from then are non-existent so I had to sift through tons of historical society photos online to find black and white photos I could hand-tint. The background ended up being a composite from 4 or 5 different photos and took me nearly as long to put together as the park itself. I also wanted the sky to have a "vintage" look to it so I studied a lot of tinted post-cards from that period and tried to match their skies. Again, the entire ballpark and field were drawn in Paint Shop with only the graphic stadium ads taken from existing sources. The scoreboard was also hand drawn. About the only template I use is the field. I have a green underlying layer and various stripe and dirt portions. I also use a crude sketch overlay to help me with perspectives when arranging stadium components and lining up the horizon on the background.

I hope this answers the questions you've been posting.

01-28-2004, 09:29 PM	#12
Teflon Minors (Double A) Join Date: Jan 2004 Posts: 154	When I made my first parks, I was mostly taking bits from other stadiums and putting them together to make a new stadium. The only editing I was doing was to crop, resize, skew perspectives and adjust brightness and contrast of the layered pieces to match. This was pretty limited as I could only make parks based on the pictures of existing parks. Back then, the average one took me a couple of hours and looked pretty crude. I began drawing some of the things I needed in Paint Shop and over time have gotten to the point where most of what you see has been drawn. In Pac Bell, for example, everything except the ads, some trees, and the two boats were drawn. If you zooom to something like 8 x magnification you should be able to tell a difference in the pixelation. Even the background was drawn this time. I originally was going to use an existing picture for the background but just put some gradiant colors back there as a preliminary step to see the ballpark in context. I liked the color combinations so much that I kept them and added enough "noise" (random pixels) to give them the neccessary texture. The bad part about drawing so much of the parks is that they now take upwards of 20 hours to produce. There definitely is no shortcut to making good looking stadium graphics. Mine didn't look all that good to begin with, but I spent a lot of time at it and developed good techniques. Anyone else who wants to do it should go in realizing some time will be involved. The earlier park I posted, Ellsworth park took me two weeks. I wanted to have a city background that looked like it could have been in the 1920s. Of course, color images from then are non-existent so I had to sift through tons of historical society photos online to find black and white photos I could hand-tint. The background ended up being a composite from 4 or 5 different photos and took me nearly as long to put together as the park itself. I also wanted the sky to have a "vintage" look to it so I studied a lot of tinted post-cards from that period and tried to match their skies. Again, the entire ballpark and field were drawn in Paint Shop with only the graphic stadium ads taken from existing sources. The scoreboard was also hand drawn. About the only template I use is the field. I have a green underlying layer and various stripe and dirt portions. I also use a crude sketch overlay to help me with perspectives when arranging stadium components and lining up the horizon on the background. I hope this answers the questions you've been posting.