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• How we made the street scene

The Black Court street scene started life as a photo of a French street. Taken in the middle of a bright, sunny day, with a cloudless azure sky, the photo posed us a few problems! It is all 2D work with the exception of the sky. None of the buildings are 3D.

Our first task was to remove all sign of modern life, from drainpipes, and gutters to electric cables and roof aerials. This was standard Photoshop work with much use of the clone tool.

Our sky was created in Terragen, a wonderful bit of free software capable of generating highly realistic sky and land forms. We adjusted the sun and atmosphere settings to give the effect of a bright moonlit night sky, just after dusk (a few stars would have rounded things off but, hey, we are not perfect)

The original photo was copied and colourised to a blue/grey matching the feel of the sky. This was multiplied with the original, with a bit of opacity tweaking to retain some colour to the scene. A light in the back of the scene was given a glow and the area around had its hue and saturation adjusted to appear illuminated. We also selected the roadway and gave it a brightness boost to bring the detail out.

At this point, we realised the sunlit parts of the photo were still far too bright, so we selected them and adjusted their saturation and brightness. The position of the moon is important aesthetically, even though it does not cast anything near accurate shadows!

At this point, our scene lacked life, so we scanned a painted figure and composited it into the picture. We reversed it to stand against the illuminated wall facing into the street. To make it sit right, we matched its colour to its surroundings and added several shadows and highlights. We gave it a grainy effect to match the rest of the scene using the noise filter. We darkened the back half of the figure too....

The picture needed more of a focus, so we darkened the foreground in a 'U' shape, concentrating the eye on the end of the street with the shadowy form lurking near a doorway.

Thus was built the initial street scene for Black Court.

Then we had some fun, and made it just a touch darker. We added a second story to the street by cloning and distorting existing buildings, and placed a castle in the background to give the impression of a place deep in the heart of the city. We added a crack of light from a doorway, dimmed the light in the distance, adjusted the shutters and walls of the cloned buildings to make them a little more individual. We put a little smog over the rooftops and illuminated the pinnacle of the castle tower. To make it a bit more lifelike, we brought out the surface textures using the lighting effects in Photoshop. Here's the final image:

Black Court, in the heart of Cursed Solis, as we said, don't go there alone......