Any ideas for keeping the artwork line width ratio right?

I prefer to draw old school on paper, and then scan and edit my artwork digitally.
I'd like to do my backgrounds on pieces of A3-sized paper (a scrolling background will then be drawn on several pieces of paper put together).

However, I just got to think that if I use character scaling, the outlines of my character will also be scaled, and then the lines of my character artwork will eventually get thinner than the lines of my background artwork, which will be aesthetically unappealing.

One solution could of course be to vary the real life sizes of my background artwork relative to what will be the scale size of my character in that scene, which would include varying the width of the pen I use to draw the lines. This however seems to be a pretty tedious way to do it, and I will probably never know for sure beforehand exactly what scale size the character is going to be.

Has anyone worked out a good way to get around this?

PS. It seems to me that you would have the same problem regardless of whether you draw your original background artwork on paper or digitally...

Quick note: I'm not an artist.

Simple solution, don't add lineart around your character. Think in terms of vector, if you don't add a black line around your character then scaling up & down will be less of a problem as it will be harder to notice the artifacts. You could consider using a more subtler color for the lineart, by trying a slightly different shade of color based on what color is currently at the side of the line you are drawing.

Because VS doesn't have vector support, there's not a right lot you can do about scaling issues. Daedalic have created over 10 games with Visionaire Studio now & the scaling artifacts don't seem to bother them - at least I've not heard anyone mention them complaining about it.

My advice would be to try & draw the character at the size you want the character to be at 100% scale value. Maybe you could consider creating height chart for your characters that you draw on paper? If you can work out how tall your protagonist is, then you can figure out the correct height you need to make the rest of your characters.

Thanks for your input!

Hi, I use Photoshop. It has a filter called "make dark parts bigger" (called: dunkle Teile vergößern). If the line is too small, this filter generates new pixels around them (blows the marking up). Mostly one or two pixels are enough (if you have al line of two pixels wide it will be four or six pixels wide after using).
Other way is to mark all black parts (if you have only two colors or heavy contrast it's easy with "Zauberstab") and make a one-pixel-border around them (increases your marking one or two pixels) and then use the "Fülleimer" to fill it black.

In Deutsch könnte ich das besser erklären ...

Machtnix

edit: If your character zooms smaller using the Visionaire way-system function you can't do anything against it. You have to test a line width working on big zoom and small either. Using huge close-ups I prefer a new Outfit with other details. There will be a lot of tests... :-)

@Machtnix:

Thanks for your reply!

I actually thought about doing something like that also

I might eventually make a large and a small outfit for the character, and use the Photoshop tool on the small one - in that way the character and background line art will, all things being equal, at all times fit much better than if I simply use rescaling on the same outfit.

Still doesn't take into account the scaling up/down to the players desktop resolution. Though I suppose it could work ok for the character itself in a way, but it means a lot of work for you if you plan on triggering the correct character animations while using multiple outfits. The best method would be to use Lua script to play the animation as you can specify a character or the currently active character & also the currently active outfit of said character which means you can easily link to the correct animation unlike using action part queries as you would have to have to use values or conditions that you update each time you swapped outfits & then create some if queries to determine which animation should be played. Damn to think how much of a pain in the arse VS must have been before scripting was implemented!

Damn to think how much of a pain in the arse VS must have been before scripting was implemented!

Yeah. But I still don't use Lua very much, so I prefer all solutions without Lua first. This two or three little scripts I tried didn't get the attribute of "real" Lua coding ...

Damn to think how much of a pain in the arse VS must have been before scripting was implemented!

Yeah. But I still don't use Lua very much, so I prefer all solutions without Lua first. This two or three little scripts I tried didn't get the attribute of "real" Lua coding ...

I use it way too much!

If I can save time by writing a few lines of code in an execute a script action block rather than having to use about 20 action parts to achieve the same thing, then I'm going to opt for using the scripting method instead.

In truth I often use a combination of both Lua script & action parts so I get the best of both worlds as just like action parts it's not possible to do everything with Lua script alone & vice versa.