Laboratory Template & Backgrounds

[insanebrain]

Hi, I'm InsaneBrain.

I've previously helped out by making the backgrounds for the laboratory mode and thought it would be a good idea to show you what I've made and to also give you guys a template so you can try and make your own.



Above is a picture of the template. You can see it has 4 main shapes. The back wall, floor, right wall and left wall. Those are pretty much all you need to make a standard room. You would want to keep it the the proportions shown in the picture so any backgrounds you make won't have an issue with the floor being too low ect, so it will fit into the game nicely.

Here is a download link for the .PSD version of the template, complete with guide lines. All of the layers are also named to help you. Once you have your floor and walls, all you do is build on them.

Template Download

The best method is to use Photoshop, any version will do really. As long is you can go to EDIT > TRANSFORM > DISTORT. That's how you skew the walls to create the illusion of perspective. Once you've got the basics down you can make quite a few different things.



Above you can see my first try at a background. I've got the walls and decoration in place but the floor is a little low. It works in the game. But didn't give much floor space. All backgrounds after this one have the same floor level. This is some sort of test chamber, where 2 scientists, businessmen, whatever are monitoring what is happening in the room through the glass.



Above is my second attempt. I wanted to make an alleyway. How I did that was to remove the left and right walls and stretch the floor, however you can still see the the floor is skewed to give the illusion of depth. I wanted to go for a seedy kinda dirty place. So you can see some blood splatters, bullet holes, litter, syringes and some zombie themed posters of course. Also, when making these backgrounds DO NOT make any lighting effects. They are all added in game and it'll only look weird otherwise.



Above is my third attempt and this was a little more ambitious. It's basically a holding cell. In order to create the effect of a cell I've added 2 different back walls and floors as well as a layer of bars with transparent holes in order for you to see them. It's the same principle but with a bit more work. I've added quite a bit to this one, including a cell number, damp wall marks and some suspect white stains in the centre of the room.



Above is my fourth attempt, this one was rather tricky. You can see I'm still keeping to the template. However the back wall is bowed to give the effect of it being almost tube shape. There is also a rusty ladder with it's shadow curving on the rear wall. The main feature is the sewer water, in order to add that I just cut out the bottom of the floor (not too much) and added some water and changed the colour. There's a trash bag and some litter as well as some graffiti.



Above is my last attempt. It's what I imagine a lab or building of Umbrella's might look like. Again this was a little more involved. The back wall has 2 windows which over look on to some laboratories. Trying to find a picture of a lab with the right perspective was rather difficult but it turned out OK.

So, in short:
Keep to the perspective
Do not make lighting effects
Use your imagination


So that's what I've managed to come up with in the short time I made these and sent them over to Z-fied. A lot of what you see in the pictures are free online textures, photoshop brushes and a bit of creativity. So take that template or template picture and see if you can come up with something. I might be making some more in the future and if I do, I'll be uploading them here.

Sorry for the mammoth first post.

[Darkening Demise]

How do you make these things?! I've always wanted to learn how to do better myself.

[insanebrain]

Basically I think of an idea, say they alley. Once I have that idea I think about how it will look. So most likely a concrete floor and a brick wall. So I Google for some free stock texture images of those. Once I have them I distort them how I want them, either with a left wall, right wall, floor and back wall. Once I have the basics done, it's all about adding decoration, which could be more free stock images cut out and put where I need them, text, paint brushes, anything really.

I might do a tutorial in a separate thread in the next few days to give you guys and idea.

I put that all together using photoshop then save them as a .PNG or .JPG and send them to Z-Fied. Admittedly I haven't made one in a long while but I might make a few more again if I have some spare time.

[Darkening Demise]

Ah Adobe scam. I'll stick to voices then. Not paying a ton of money monthly because Adobe creators went greedy. Ridiculous how much you pay just to use them now. Guess MS Paint XP, Paint.net, and Gimp will do.

[dartred]

*cough*ididn'tpayformyphotoshop*cough*

[Darkening Demise]

Mar 7, 2014 0:09:47 GMT dartred said:

*cough*ididn'tpayformyphotoshop*cough*

Oh man I *cough* think we both came down *cough* with something *cough* but I gave that kind of *cough* stuff up almost *cough* *cough* a year ago.
Anyways how did you get the images to be sideways to make it into a three wall room?

[insanebrain]

I have an old Photoshop CS5.5 so yeah.

To slant the images I used the distort tool in photoshop, it allows you to change the dimensions of the image. So it will put 4 anchor points on the image, 1 in each corner. Then it's just moving them up or down depending on which wall you're editing. That will give the effect of depth.