AuthorTopic: help with steel walkway and stairs  (Read 2143 times)

Offline sancho

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help with steel walkway and stairs

on: September 11, 2018, 02:57:26 am
Hello. Thanks for this forum. This is my first post here so I will tell you that I am strictly a hobbyist and beginner skill level.   

I am working on some tiles for a tile map. I needed a steel walkway and stairs in orthogonal perspective.
I would like some help with the stairs. Mine looks like the last step is on the floor whereas it should be above the floor.   
The tiles are 32x32 but as you can see I combine to make the walkway.   
I like my walkway and I tried to add a handrail. But since I am using greys and the perspective any kind of handrail gets blended in and lost.   
Since these are tiles that have to be seamless on at least one border, I can`t use a black outline. 
I would appreciate any tips to make my graphics look better and especially if you can guide me to a handrail and better (more complete) stairs. 

First is a look at part of the tiled level. The wall and floor tiles are from opengameart.org.  I doctored the wall tiles to make them look like granite.
I post this to show the perspective my graphics are to be in.  The red is a placeholder for the floor.


Next is a look at the steel walkway and stairs in a room. This is a screen shot from within Tiled (tiling program).
The wall is three tiles high and the walkway is supposed to be one tile higher than the floor. You can see that I am cheating on the stairs as they are dropping three tiles. Obviously that is not an ideal situation. 


Here is the stairs isolated (100% zoom):
 
 
Here is the steel walkway tile sheet(100% zoom):


I do the graphics in paint.net.   
Any help is much appreciated.




« Last Edit: September 11, 2018, 03:03:45 am by sancho »

Offline Retronator

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Re: help with steel walkway and stairs

Reply #1 on: September 11, 2018, 11:04:11 pm
Here's a repaint, without looking at any references (which is what I would usually do if I were starting from scratch and just copy how these things look in real life). So my focus here was just to fix perspective/construction. Let me preface that I'm not really happy with the result, but it might point you in the right direction.



(click on the images to zoom in)



Things I fixed:
  • You had some weird transparency on the platforms. I removed that and cleaned it up to just 3 shades.
  • The platform going left-right in the back was just a rotated up-down. You can't do that, because the perspective gets wrong. You can only rotate the top (lightest pixels), but then you have to extrude the dark part down, just like it's extruded down on the up-down platform. (Technically you also can't rotate the top if you're going for a 3/4 top-down, but this looks like what I call 1/2 cavalier projection where you start from a completely top-down view and extrude down without foreshortening the height)
  • Stairs usually don't overlap, unless they're very steep, but then they're more of a titled ladder. So I made them next to each other. Also, you only dropped down half a tile, but like you said, the platform is 1 tile high. So the stairs also need to go 1 tile down. So I made them go 2 tiles right, 1 down, and also made them wider so they fill the full tile. Also there's no need for the first step to be on the same level as the platform, so I only made 3 steps that are all between the floor and platform (25, 50, 75% height).
  • A good way to indicate height is if things throw cast shadows. So I made the whole floor under the platform and stairs darker.
  • In general I toned down (less contrast) in the floor/wall tiles because they were being very noisy (high frequency detail) and stealing attention. I also made platform darker because it felt to fit into the scene better. This might have lost a bit of readability so might not be the best.
  • I added the railing and used different offsets for stairs and top railing so they don't blend together. Adding more items behind the railing (boxes, etc) will also help read the railing better. The top railing also has a highlight of 1 shade lighter to make it stand out and guide the player.

Like I said, it's far from good looking, but I tried to just fix the existing assets without starting from scratch.

Offline MysteryMeat

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Re: help with steel walkway and stairs

Reply #2 on: September 11, 2018, 11:41:11 pm
Honestly I feel like the bars are a bit too wide-gapped, they read more as cage doors. Real metal walkways tend to take more of a tighter pattern to 'em. See here:




rather than trying to make it transparent like this, it may help to instead focus on making it textured. Alternatively, you could change up the design to something more akin to this for clarity's sake since the guardrails are getting a bit lost in the detail and it clashes with the lines of the tile floor a bit:


PSA: use imgur
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Offline sancho

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Re: help with steel walkway and stairs

Reply #3 on: September 12, 2018, 02:46:17 am
Thankyou both for your input. 
@MysterMeat: I had the gaps tighter in my first draft and it just didn't look right. In fact it didn't even look good. Your idea of eliminating the transparency in favor of a texture is also something I tried earlier, albeit not completely. 
Here is I tried a steel walkway with a center path (like a tray) to walk on. The center path on the walkway was supposed to be a cheese grater type thing. The beige things were posts but didn't fit the steel. They look more concrete. There is also a chain connecting posts. I abandoned this after google-ing steel walkways and looking at some images.

Thanks, I may revisit that suggestion though as I feel it does have merit. 

@Retronator: Lots of improvements in your version. 
It took a couple of seconds for my eyes to see the rails on the stairs as rails. It looked wonky at first but once my eyes adjusted to the perspective it looked good. That is going to work for me. 
It never even dawned on me that I had a top step even with the walkway.   
I like the highlight across the top of the rail. That works to define it in such a hard to see palette. I think there are too many stiles however and it might look better with fewer. On the stairs it makes sense to have one per step.   
Toning the walkway down to 3 colors makes it look like painted black steel. It sure looks cleaner. I think I will go that route too.   
I love the shadow. I will have to make shadow tiles.
The floor tiles look better without the noise, but those are from opengameart.org. I will have to check and see if the license allows me to change them. 
Thank you both for your ideas.


 
« Last Edit: September 12, 2018, 02:49:59 am by sancho »

Offline sancho

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Re: help with steel walkway and stairs

Reply #4 on: September 12, 2018, 04:15:29 am
For sure you are right that the gaps are too wide. Realistically, feet would be falling through them. 
But it did give the impression of a steel catwalk and that is half the battle I guess.

Here is the walkway with much tighter grid and no transparency. Down to 3 or 4 colors.  No corners yet.
I had to cheat the horizontal tile pair as I could not make it seamless without making the bottom tile less than 32px.
I'm not sure if it is better or not. Maybe.   
   

The light steel is too light. I darkened it and it looks better. Still some work to do. Thanks again.

« Last Edit: September 12, 2018, 04:24:55 am by sancho »