I need art for my visual novell so I look towards assets from these engines...

Hello!

I do my small game - visual novell. I cannot pay money for artists so I cannot find good art and one thought came on my mind. There are two free very powerfull 3d engines. I plan to use them... as art source. Making scenes of nature, rooms, people. Well maybe it seems funny "using it for screenshots huh?", but you must know how difficult to form team at enthusiasm... And those greedy artists... =) What can you advise? Here is the Unity forum, Unity users. I am not very good coder and I don't know what is the situation with assets now. I need some nature art - forests, sky, and regular modern city - streets, offices, tables, common objects. Of course I seek free possibilities... What can you advise? UE engine, or Unity? What do you think about such idea? Any possibility to generate characters? Want to hear from experienced users.

 

Game engines like Unity is not something you called an 'art source', as their main function is not generating free design resources for you, but rather helping you to create something useful with them, free or not.

In short, you'll still need to find a way to get proper art resources yourself. There are some free items on Asset Store, but quality items will cost you some money.

That being said, it is possible to create such resources like characters, terrains, scenes with various objects like houses, and etc by combining existing assets together and customizing them inside Unity.

But if you are purely interested in creating rendered images for visual novel, than probably using something like Daz3D or even Blender might be a better option for you. Maybe you can create background images with such tools, then use Unity to create an actual game with those resources later.

 

Be warned, 3D art rarely looks good in a VN. Maybe you could do backgrounds, but it would probably be easier to draw in 2D than to make the necessary 3D models for your scenes.

Certainly not characters. Definitely not characters.

This is something I'm trying to figure out as well. You might look into Visual Novel Maker by Degica on Steam (not out yet). Apparently it will include some art assets.

 

You could always gather your friends, assign them roles and take some photos of them to use as placeholder 'art' . Add a couple of photoshop sketch filters on top and you will have a fun time while also getting familiar with the engine
There really isnt a magic way to 'find good art' you either are an artist or you pay one. Now about tools, there is a great free unity asset called fungus that could help you a lot if you want to do your project in unity. If not you could also take a look at the free visual novel engine renpy, cheers!

 

Learn to make art, or make some money to pay artists. UE and Unity are not designed to make art for you, they are designed to provide an environment in which you can create games from art. While they can theoretically be used by very skilled programmers to generate certain kinds of art from code, I'm going to hazard a guess that this is not the best route for you to take right now.

 

3d art is used in visual novels for pre-rendered 3d backgrounds. It is incredibly common.Now using 3d art for characters is incredibly rare.

 

Can you give some examples? Most I see don't appear that way at all, and I've read a significant number of VNs. Maybe I've been missing it.

The only real example I know of is VLR and ZTD, and honestly I think both would be better as 2D.

 

Well, two obvious examples are "Demonbane" and "Saya no Uta", but there is large number of games that use obviously non-hand drawn interiors that look a lot like a cg render. Another example is sunrider.

Basically... you're looking at anything that has:
1. Cars.
2. City pictured from above.
3. Spaceships
4. Giant robots.
5. Architectural elements with highly repetetive patterns.

And chances are it'll be a cg render. Because backgrounds are heavily tool-assisted either way, and some people even use processed photos (for example: Umineko did this), cg render is an obvious option. Of course, said render may be processed in 50 different programs afterwards.

Now, games that render 3d backgrounds by themselves are rarer.

 

I don't know demonbane. Didn't know Saya no Uta used 3d models. That's surprising.

I only played a little of the free sunrider game, but I didn't notice it there either (outside of the minigame).

 

Saya no Uta used those for "otherworld-y" interiors, and it was quite obvious, because you could see bumpmaps and phong speculars.
Demonbane had giant robots in it and cg for battle scenes. Those were also obvious.

Basically, in any case if there are a lot of machinery, repetetive patterns, etc, there's a good reason to use CG. There are anime studios that were quite successful with those techniques, so it makes sense to use them for visual novels too.

 

3d engines attracts me by their assets "environment generators" - forests, sky, lighting effects... 3d editors don't have so many samples... And very important is the camera position possibility - you can set any point of view.

 

Good points. But is it really easier? Something to truly consider. As I said, this is something I'm looking at too (I have basically no artistic abilities, but am writing a VN that will need art).

 

Again, I suppose you might have better luck with something like Daz Studio, in that case - a lot more contents, no programming required, easier to set up a scene, no need to sacrifice rendering quality for realtime animations, out of the box ability to make cut scenes, and etc.

 

I took a look at Daz and it looks like you can't create characters in it. It seems like you have to have one from somewhere else. I didn't exactly understand the blurb on the website about what all it included.

 

It's quite easy to create diverse characters in Daz Studio, by morphing one of its 'Genesis' characters, and the good thing is that there's a vast array of clothes, hairs, textures, and etc available which you can just drag and drop into those characters.

Actually, the MCS in Asset Store is a port of that system which aims to provide the same kind of functionalities with acceptable performance for games.

 

You can, if you buy addons that support body morphing.

The program is basically a posing doll studio with item shop.Having said that, I definitely wouldn't use Daz for character in a visual novel. Their renderer produces distinct 3d visuals and usually those look very artificial.

 

Being realistic. You're asking for completely free solutions. You've already seen them. You can use engines for free and try to make use of the extremely limited selection of free artwork available or you can learn how to use an actual content creation tool. Outside of that you're simply not going to be able to get anywhere without money.

 

I can use free images with by adding effects or even without effects, but engines offer possibility to move camera - and another background is ready, this is the most valuable point, change light, weather, - and winter is done, do a bit more and it is spring. Why I look towards engines not editors - cuz here is growing community with high-level ready solutions, samples, even finished games... There are no so many "high-level" solutions in editiors stores, as I know. Finding ready free images for background is not the problem. Wishing to make fine art with shader effects and storyline pictured on detailed backgrounds, not "one background for one episode, second for another".

 

I assume you are going to get free assets off the store and use Unity's built in features to make your scenes. I think you will find this more difficult than you think.

First of all, not a lot of tree packs are free although maybe you can find some. Terrain is difficult to make look nice without paid tools from the asset store. You can try, but you won't end up with what you see in the screenshots from most of the people here. While Unity and a few asset store developers do have some free texture packs, which you will need to actually make your terrain look like something other than a greyish white landscape, you need to paint those on and make them look good, which is an art actually, and not as easy as it seems.

You will need to have rigged characters, and again, there are some free ones, but make sure they are all similar in style. That may be more difficult. Even if you do not use animations, you will need to know how to pose your characters.

I am really not sure this will be as easy as you think.

As for greedy artists, I would love to know what you think is greed? Being paid for hours of work done that you cannot do yourself? I think it is greedy to expect people to do things for you at a price that is not fair. The market drives the cost of artists as well as the quality of their work. If they ask for an amount you think is too high, it is most likely because others are willing to pay that much. Many of us value our artists as much as our coders.

Regardless, good luck to you!

Hmm, after another read of your last post, I see you are going to download free complete games or scenes and use those for your game. How is that quality? It is someone else's art as well as a mish mash of scenes from different sources.

 

For some reference, here's a cg from a well-known vn:



Good luck putting THAT together from free and easy assets.

Another newer (and cheaper/lower in quality) vn:



Still not very likely with free assets.

Here's a background, which might be more likely, but it's still not likely to work without extensive work of your own.

 

EternalAmbiguity, so at 1st screen effects are: blurring and mist? Mist placed as I see at whole picture, not according to rain lines.

 

I don't really understand what you're saying. But the important thing there is not the effects, but the actual art. The two individuals closely touching one another, showing folds in the fabric of their clothes. The long hair draped over the girl's body. The mutliple tree designs. There's no way you can pull all that out of a free asset without extensive rework, if you can do it at all.

 

Well I can say that backgrounds problem can be considered as solved, now I am looking for characters, maybe character artist at enthusiasm, but at the present I'm going o use free images again. My project is a story oriented short kinetic visual novell. While I learn coding I calmly port my story to 3d adventure (like Firewatch). But 1st version will be at Renpy. Coding requires much time to learn syntax -methods, constructors, etc, where is dot and where is ":" or at the left or at the right side must be placed new inherited, I can compare this work with sites building with those css - like "programming texts in MS WORD" - you can click by mouse at style buttons but you are forced to write statements. Lots of formal technical information. Need for "high level solutions" for story writers. It annoys mush if you don't do great program but just short deep story... And no any high level solution. This stopped me studing programming long time ago, but now, it all seems not so difficult now after years, it was hard to learn by youth. Why Unity not UE - cuz I have not so poweful PC, and Unity has more assets as I suppose.

 

Just keep in mind that the audience that regularly plays visual novels will expect a certain degree of quality. If you fail to match it they will just quit your game and leave you a negative review. Very few will waste their time with it the quality that will come from using free assets.

If you plan on selling your visual novel I recommend finding an artist to collaborate with.

 

That's a very bad idea.
Visual novels mean certain very high quality art standard, and majority of western games fail to meet it. Free art is not going to cut it, pretty much.

For example, this is "alright" art:

Spoiler

Muv-Luv from steam.

PsychoPass anime:

This is bad art:

Spoiler

Umineko - the game is good, but art could use an upgrade.

This is pretty much what you should aim at. Good quality:

Spoiler

Nightshader from steam:

And this is another take on high quality:

Spoiler

Because character have limited animation and can blink.

Western visual novels usually fall into "bad art" category, though lately there were few higher quality games released.

You definitely need an artist.

 

And please make sure your assets are free and not stuff you get off google or out of other people's games...or from screenshots of other people's art. It is a serious newbie mistake that everything you see on the internet is free unless there is a price tag attached.

Copyright violations can take you down fast and hurt your reputation.

 

I wouldn't call Psycho-Pass "okay" art. I think it's very good (if a little odd when it comes to a few women). It's just not in that same style as otomes tend to be. Otomes tend to have a much...I don't know the word, but more flowery type of art, like in your images.

I wouldn't necessarily use character animation to denote "good." Pixel Fade's new VN Crystalline has quite a bit of character animation (and boob physics, because of course), but is still an OELVN, with that uniquely different (poor?) art style.

http://www.pixelfade.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Live2D-Teaser.mp4?_=1

 

We're starting to talk about apples vs oranges.

The reason why I labeled last example as good, because it has higher fidelity visible in motion, and significantly larger amount of artwork (sepearte close/far distance sprites, animation, etc). You pretty much need to see it.

The reason why I labeled psychopass as "okay", because even though it matches anime look, anime in general tends to have abbreviated slightly simplified art style. Plus the quality of cg scenes was not that high (based on screens).

Otome is just a random example of decent visual quality I managed to find. Another example of good art style would be persona 4 or sakura taisen character art from PS2.


Basically.. sprites are big, detailed, there are a lot of them, there's a lot of backgroudns, which are hand-drawn down to every detail without a rush. Then again... sakura taisen and persona 4 are very high budget games.

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By the way, one easy way to spot western visual novel is shoddy/rushed linework and poor handling of shading wit with rushed/quick gradients which occasionally scream "low quality deviant art drawing".

Japanese stuff almost always has extreme attention to quality of lines and gradients, to the point where there's doesn't seem to be any random errors, rogue pixels, or out of place details. As I said, western games usually fail to meet the same quality standard, though in recent years there were more new games appearing that reach "normal" visual novel art quality. Sunrider was a good example of decent character art, though style is still slightly different from what you'd normally expect to see.

On related note, decent/good westernized art could look like this, for example:

Spoiler

 

Found it. here....

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/34184

 

Seems moderately useful. I like the flowchart style, rather than having to keep everything in a script in Renpy. A few things seem moderately strange, like there not seeming to be a way to go back and re-read lines (typically scrolling a mouse wheel up), and Esc skipping lines instead of bringing up a menu (though that might have been just one specific demo).

I imagine keeping track of flags would be a ton simpler too, though I'm not sure if it's integrated into the asset.

I might try bringing a scene I threw together in Renpy into this and see how much simpler it will be (if at all).

 

Fungus seems pretty good. Pretty straightforward to create characters, dialog, add music, use variables (which is rather nice for big choice and consequence stuff).

The flowchart system is rather neat (and something I rather prefer to the scripting "interface" of working with Renpy), but it's a little wonky. For example, I have a choice in my story that simply changes a variable but continues the same way (for the time being). In Fungus adding a choice means you're forced to split off into multiple directions, and getting both back to the same place (without an additional menu choice) is a little tricky.

I would say the visual approach of Fungus is really good for a beginner (or for someone like myself who simply prefers the visual approach), but Renpy is probably kind of better for a beginner because while it does require delving a teensy bit into scripting for the actual writing, it takes care of the menu stuff--along with a number of standard options like text speed, volume options, and rollback. If you create a new Renpy project and "launch" it, you have a VN. Without the "visual" part and without the "novel" part, but it takes care of the basics more than Fungus does.

Kind of a mixed bag. I'm tempted to start working with Fungus now, though.

No way that I can see to change font though, and this default font needs to go. Urgh.

 

neginfinity,
thanks for help, actually I clearly understand importance of drawings in anime style visual novels. Graphical story has wider meaning.