Background Creation

I started to make the background based off the design I drafted. I spoke with Lucas and he told me that the background needed to be able to tile, meaning the top and bottom and both sides needed to match up. The hardest part of this would be making the trees match up first and then making their textures match. I started by making a tree base in illustrator, using rulers to make sure that the top and bottom were in the same place and that they were not angled too greatly. I then brought the image into photoshop where I cut the branches off and resized them, placing them in varying locations to get four different trees with matching tops and bottoms. 

 I added a texture to these trees, I chose a multi layered fabric piece from the Global Fabrics textures Jenny and I did. I used a black outline to make the trees pop and not look flat. I then put them on a 1280 by 720 background piece and chose a green fluffy texture for that. I was playing around with vibrancy and saturation settings trying to make the greens more vibrant when I accidentally moves the tree layers from where they had been sitting. It was very surprising to see a very light and vibrant tree in the same shape as the previous one underneath. I still do not understand how I did it but I managed to stamp the tree imaged onto the background texture leaving a brighter green.

I added the wooden frame that we as a group decided to have (I made it in illustrator then added textures in photoshop) on the top of our background. The wood would be tied into the game through the use of platforms, buttons and counters. I showed my teammates and they liked the stamped tree more than the textured tree, so this was the direction we decided to progress with. 

My next step was to make sure the background would tile. To do this I made 3 copies of the background. I pieced them together into one big file then used the blur tool to blur the edges so that when they were tiled it looked nice.

After finishing this I sized the file to the right size and then uploaded it to the teams dropbox. I did not put the frame on it as I decided that the frame should sit in the foreground of the game and therefore it needed to be put in separately.