Pac Bell Sans Fans

[Teflon]

Please - I don't want money. I do this for fun. I'm sorry I can't make all the parks people request - but this stops being enjoyable when I have a to-do list. I hope you will understand my sentiments.

Anyhoo, I visited Pac Bell while travelling for my job in 2001 and got this sense of it just hitting on every facet you design a ballpark for. A gorgeous view, interesting affects on the game, and very very comfortable. I hope this drawing does it justice. I plan to add some other touches such as fans, a few more boats, and maybe some more details on the out of town scoreboards in the right field wall. I can't say when that will be exactly, but thought you might enjoy this early copy, anyway. (I tend to like the ballparks better before I put the fans in them - cleaner lines, I guess.)

Again, thanks for all the nice words. If you guys want to spend your money on something, how about we pool our resources and buy the Brewers? Let's see, 200 million - if we each put up $100...

[HolyCow98]

OMG!!!drool...puts hand over mouth...shakes head...

Wow.....some one really should hire you.....what you do just for fun...boggles my mind....

As always...excellent.....

[Cuss16]

maybe he is already hired? another great park as always, hope to see more.

[Cooleyvol]

As always..................BEAUTIFUL!

Teflon, please email or PM me. I want to pick your brain about something.

[Giants44]

I am stunned - that is simply gorgeous.

You say you don’t want the money – but I feel I really do owe you. In fact the whole community does. I am not sure you are even aware how much you have made this game better for all of us.

If there is anything I can do for you – please let me know.

And if you ever change your mind – my offer still stands. In fact I’d like to change it to OOTP for life – that is as long as Markus makes OOTP, I am willing to foot the bill for your copy.

[Giants44]

I have to add one more thing and then I will stop groveling – I think the only thing that bypasses your artistic talent is your generosity. The online sports sim communities have not been the most pleasant of places this past year in my opinion. However your willingness to give to the community and ask nothing in return is truly remarkable. You make this a better place.

Thank You

[ctorg]

Originally posted by Giants44
I have to add one more thing and then I will stop groveling – I think the only thing that bypasses your artistic talent is your generosity. The online sports sim communities have not been the most pleasant of places this past year in my opinion. However your willingness to give to the community and ask nothing in return is truly remarkable. You make this a better place.

Thank You

I agree.

Teflon is the premier designer of stadia for OOTP.

[DrewKett]

Teflon, out of curiousity, how long does it take you to create these stadiums?

[LivnLegend]

Nice job. Hard for me to compliment anything Giants-related but that rendering is a beauty!

[DHS23]

Absolutely beautiful. And Teflon, you say "drawing" in reference to making these. How exactly do you "draw" them?

[Lindros 2 Leetch]

How about Shea

[Teflon]

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.

[Teflon]

Oh - and the Coke Bottle and Glove were also from photos - sorry.

[Cooleyvol]

I am at the point you were at to begin with, crude.

I WOULD however, be interested in where you found the city backgrounds at.

I've created 10 stadiums for the Base Ball Union at www. baseball-union.com They are under the Stadium Tour using the cut/paste/tint method, but the city parts are hard to come by.

[Teflon]

I found a lot of useful pictures in historical society archives. (Use "Historical Societies" to search on Yahoo! or Google) Almost every state has one online with various amounts of relevant photos. Google image search is good for specific things like "Lucky Strike Ad" and such. Ebay is also excellent for old ads if you browse the collectables under food, cigarettes, beer. A really good source of photos for ANYTHING is Web Shots, but you have to subscribe. Amateur photographers post millions of pictures there and by using their search engine you see almost anything in a current photo you could imagine. Most of my modern city backgrounds are from these amateur photographers.

I see you started your stadiums using those great old time parks from Old Time Baseball. I know myself and Henry both did that, too. Those parks were awesome. Even though that game is long gone - those parks live on, don't they? OOTP should run down the artist that did THOSE. That was a truly underrated game. It had all the teams in baseball history prior to 1981 with player thumbnails for most of the stars. Mel Allen or Curt Gowdy did play-by-play. Geez. Too bad I can't coax any PC made after 1996 into running it. Has anybody had any luck in configuring an XP to get it to work?

[DreamTeams]

Originally posted by Cooleyvol
I am at the point you were at to begin with, crude.

I WOULD however, be interested in where you found the city backgrounds at.

I've created 10 stadiums for the Base Ball Union at www. baseball-union.com They are under the Stadium Tour using the cut/paste/tint method, but the city parts are hard to come by.

I've always loved the leagues you create, Cooleyvol. Love the 'Team History' section. Also, the parks that Teflon builds are truly inspirational. I use many of them (modified) in my Metro Leagues. I've begun using a modified version of his Pac Bell Park to replace Easton Ballyard in my solo league. I've added fans and merged it with a famouse feature from Camden Yards. For anyone interested in seeing it you can go to my site and click on 'Ballpark Tour' then 'Easton.'

[Cooleyvol]

DT,
Thanks so much. Your league has been an inspiration to me since its inception.

I really like this league more than any other I've created as I love the teams and the names/histories. The parks/unis were just an added bonus. Unis have a page all their own.

The parks could use a little work, but I'm nowhere close to what Teflon can do--can't imagine how he actually draws all of that. I'm just not that good with PSP at all.

[Eugene Church]

Another great design...looking forward to the finished product.

You were really missed.

Welcome back.

[Henry]

Originally posted by Teflon
I see you started your stadiums using those great old time parks from Old Time Baseball. I know myself and Henry both did that, too. Those parks were awesome. Even though that game is long gone - those parks live on, don't they? OOTP should run down the artist that did THOSE. That was a truly underrated game. It had all the teams in baseball history prior to 1981 with player thumbnails for most of the stars. Mel Allen or Curt Gowdy did play-by-play. Geez. Too bad I can't coax any PC made after 1996 into running it. Has anybody had any luck in configuring an XP to get it to work?

Tef,

I finally had to build a P2 machine from old parts and put Win95 on it to be able to play that game LOL (yes, it was that good!). After reading your post, I went back and uncovered all the old original captures I had of the game's ballpark's. There's been a lot of variations - but maybe enough folks would be interested to post the originals ?

Henry

[Giants44]

Henry - let me be the first to say - yes!