Wow! I'm so, so flattered, that's one of the nicest things I've heard, thank you so much! :) Yes haha it is very tedious to make all the maps like this. There are 4 other large maps and a few interior maps that I did in watercolor and it has taken many hours of my life haha. I'm hoping to streamline the process now that I have a tablet. Oh and yes, anyone can use these techniques for any art style! Would be exciting to see anyone take these techniques and use it for themselves. Thanks so much again! I have so many other KZfaq vids I want to make, but KZfaq takes a lot of time. Cheers!

Loving Vincent is an incredible movie! Absolutely gorgeous. Oils would look fantastic as a game aesthetic

Hahahaha, I feel you man, I'm def much stronger at pencil and paint as well. I'm glad it helped for your process and vision. I think there is still value in tilesets to supplement parallax mapping as only using parallax is very time and resource intensive. But the outcome is worth it, personally. Also this technique is literally a game changer as it's changed our games, visually *badum tish*. I'll see myself out.

Thank you, much appreciated! Parallax mapping is great, really makes it possible for any art style.

Thanks so much Kamina! You believing in me makes me believe in myself! In all seriousness, thanks again haha. Progress always feels slow, but I can't wait to show everyone more progress + tutorials.

Yes very true! I think I rasterized it even though I should've made it a smart object, thank you!

Anytime man! Yeah as a raster layer you’ll loose pixel data anytime you scale the image but even though smart object layers aren’t vector in nature, they do a much better job of retaining the pixel data.

Thank you heaps! The vid's a bit outdated but I'm still proud of it. Aw thats great to hear! You can do it man, I think its still a very rewarding, creative hobby despite it being real difficult, I def encourage anyone to try dabble in RPG Maker or any gamedev software and see what cool things you can make on your own terms :)

My pleasure, thanks for watchin!

Thanks heaps, and thats great, glad to hear 💖

No worries, thanks so much 😊

Hey sorry for the late reply, was a mission getting my new vid out. Thanks so much! Wishing you the best for your project!

Wow thank you! What an incredible comment! No need to apologize :) That sounds awesome, I highly encourage trying it out even if for experimentation, it's honestly such a thrill seeing your drawings take new forms and interacting with it. Yes, Disco Elysium's art style is also amazing and their influences from Eastern Euopean oil painters. I was originally wanting to put footage from Disco to show a variety of art styles, but in the end I instead chose strictly 2D examples as Disco Elysium's 3D assets might've made things a bit confusing. But it's still incredible of those devs expressing the visual language and techniques of classical oil paintings but done through digital drawings in their concept art + character portraits and through their 3D environmental world detail on both micro and macro scale. Like it actually feels like walking through an oil painting. I still need to finish that game ahhh there's too many great games. Really want to reply to all your points. Yes, real life studies and references are so important, purely drawing from imagination can only take one so far. You realize how much you don't know about the world until you try to connect what your eyes are interpreting and sending that information to your hand. I agree regarding art supplies as well! I've done a bit of oil painting back in the day and really enjoyed it but was scared by the price + drying times. Such a beautiful medium though. I stuck with watercolours from how economical, flexible and fun they are. Watercolours are pretty unforgiving though if you mess up, but it's fun learning how to integrate mistakes back into the painting and make it look intentional, compared to oils where it was super fun just pushing and pulling the different layers around the canvas over the course of days, like you're manipulating the fabric of reality. But yes, the limitations you mentioned also does force one to get creative! Yes! Totally agree with the point that when drawing the parallax you can think of it as it's own image rather than in service of the game, and it would create much more interesting results. The way I did it was born from a huge level of uncertainty of how to set up parallaxes in RPG Maker, especially from how everything such as game logic, warp points for doors, character movement and collisions are locked to an invisible grid. So I felt like I had to take the safest option by establishing a general layout in RPG Maker first, then have the drawing be birthed from that. But now after another 600 more hours on it and a lot of experimenting with plugins, I've found a way where you can pretty much ignore this grid + the constraints of RPG Maker, and you can import any drawing you wish and have RPG Maker bend to the drawing, rather than the drawing be in service to the engine. It's a lot of work but it's so much more rewarding and produces much more interesting results. Really want to share this method with everyone. The vid might end up being an hour long from how much more there is to explain, but I'm trucking along haha. "Old things, broken things, new growth, cracking paint, moss between the kerbstones or a lone poppy etcetc - especially if they can lend something thematic to the game. (A poppy - a soldier returns from war, marigolds - death is in the air, bunting - a party, or maybe it's factional, or both)" This is so beautiful, wow. Honestly very inspirational thinking about how one can capture these moments in a scene to bring the world more to life. London Spy sounds amazing I'll definitely check it out! Thank you for sharing it with me, and how it relates to your life experiences and how it connected with you. Yes haha it's likely that a lot of players might not notice details like that, but perhaps even those that don't notice these things, they might still absorb these details on a subconscious level. These details lending the world more credibility. But perhaps there's an opportunity to get creative with RPG Maker and have these elements be interactive in some way, but there's also nothing wrong with keeping them as purely visual. It's certainly something I want to focus more on for my own work, and those details are one of the biggest reasons why I love CRPGs like Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape Torment, where it feels like you're walking through interactive, ornate paintings rich in detail and personality. Thank you again, I love essays! Made my morning waking up to this. Had to write all this with my left hand, doctor said to rest my sprained hand til start of Dec. Cheers, take care!

Definitely, RPG Maker has infinite depth. Best of luck with your endeavours!

@@mischa3343 thank you! ❤

No worries, thanks for all the nice words 🙂 Yes definitely agree with how easy it is to mess up the whole map, and cutting out certain areas to use in other maps takes a lot of editing and testing to get right. Best of luck with your projects 😀

Thank you!

Tysm! :)

No worries! Soz late reply. Glad to hear that, sometimes I worry I'm over explaining or giving too much unnecessary detail so it's nice to hear. Haha deltarune memey game is it's own genre. This type of mapping is also hard in it's own way but gives more potential.

No worries :)

Thanks so much!

Aw thank you so much!! 😃

Your welcome!

Thanks heaps :)

Thanks!

Nice! Glad it can help you out. Yes definitely, you can use Krita or PS digital art instead of watercolors. Honestly I've gone so much further than this tutorial when looking back, but the plugins I'm using are lot more complicated and I'm slowly losing my sanity over the past few months. But the plugin here, TDDPBindToPictures, still works real well. Best of luck with your work!

Thanks so much!

Wow, entirely coming from me, such a great quote. Tysm! Appreciate it, will keep working on it and making videos explaining this stuff.

Thank you! 😃

@@mischa3343 ^_^

Yea haha good ol' parallax, and wow havent heard of Sunset, thats awesome

Oh thats a cool tip! Can I ask why that might be? I'm guessing because photographing will capture the way light affects the painting as opposed to flat light from the scanner?

@@mischa3343 is because it makes the process easier c: it also makes it so that you can work on things with layers as well, so you don't need to clip the artwork when you scan it. Not only that, is easier to follow the grid when you are able to zoom in c: Also!! A another plug-in you can use for parallax mapping is orangeoverlay plug-in!! I use it for my game, and it gives you access to fog as well c: (1 last thing!! You can make sprites larger if you want to!! By doing that you need to name the sprites with a "$" on the start. This makes you use the size you want to use (my character is 2 tiles large than the normal size, which is 1 tile)

Hi Aisling, thanks for the really nice words of support. But definitely! I agree that it's a bit hard to convey what I mean at the end of the video and I've been working pretty intensely for the past few months to release a new patch that updates the game to 1080p, but there's always new roadblocks that I come across, mostly bugs. Hopefully in the next week or 2. Once I release it in a bug-free state, the next video I'll be working on will specifically be on the improvements to the process like breaking away from the 48x48 grid, 1080p resolution, etc, so you can look forward to that haha. Really thanks again for the question.

@@mischa3343 That's brilliant to hear! I'm subscribing so I don't miss it haha. I had another unrelated question which only just occurred to me: how do you go about adding NPCs and other sprites in a non-pixel art style? I know how to add sprites but have never strayed from the pixel art limits - is it the trick of adding a $ to the file name and making sure the sprite sheet dimensions are correct? Or is there any more to it? Thanks again!

@@aislingrose6140 Oh wow thanks so much! And yea wow, that's also a great video topic. So technically I guess all digital art is pixel art haha, even if it's a digital scan of a traditional drawing. But yes you're 100% correct, it's mainly having the $ symbol at the front of the file name to make the sprite sheet tell RPG Maker that it has custom dimensions. It then divides the sprite sheet equally in 1/3 horizontally for each frame of the walk cycle, then 1/4 vertically for each direction the sprite is facing. Then you align the sprites to the sheet then you're good. Having 3 frames of walking animation might feel a bit stilted, but it's perfectly fine in my opinion. There's a plugin by Galv called "Galv's MV Character Animations" which allows sprite sheets with way more frames of animation for smoother character movement, but it requires a lot of work and I'm still wrapping my head around it. I guess one thing besides the actual "programming" of it is that I first tried to hand draw the character sprites, but unlike a still background image, animation heavily requires consistency between frames. Traditional hand-drawn animation like early Disney/Looney Tunes/Anime require way more work and precision and use of a light table to have all the frames/cells of animation align. Like, I found it would take me 1 whole day to create hand-drawn sprite sheets with all the necessary frames and have it look believable. But with digital tablet drawing on Photoshop, it's so much easier to align all the frames of animation and have them be consistent, and I could complete character sprites in an hour or so. Since my game has about... 20 or so character sheets (I think), I made the decision to make all the sprites tablet drawings, otherwise it would've taken me about a month to complete everything. So it's thinking about the tradeoff between the time required and the results you want to achieve. Maybe that's why Disney stopped hand-drawing their animations with Princess and the Frog and all anime studios are now digitally drawn, I'm just speculating. Hope that answers your question and that it wasn't too long winded haha.

Ty!

Nice! Never too late haha. I'm transitioning to digital drawing now that I can afford a tablet and the process of drawing atop a template with layers and separating foreground/background is so much more efficient, so I do recommend this comment. Saves days, if not weeks of work. GALV's Layer Graphics plugin instead of TDDPBindToPictures allows for dozens of layers instead of the max of 2-3 layers for TDDP, so I also recommend that. Still need to make a new vid on this plugin.

That's awesome man, yeah Its easy to take for granted that going from traditional to digital is not always easy. I checked out Galvs plugin and it really reminds me of Photoshop layers lol. I can see how multiple layers can really help out a workflow AND make your game more complex and interesting. As an artist that has LOADS of layers in a single piece that sort of thing is awesome.

@@mischa3343 I might also add that I'm exploring into photobashing my set pieces on the map, cartoonizing it all with actions and throwing it all back into MZ. I also love AI as a workflow so may update you on that. If you want we can connect outside of yt as I really love your art style XD

@@kaizze8777 Hey soz for late reply, IRL stuff always ambushing. Haha yea Ive always felt intimidated by digital art because of the learning curve + cost of a tablet but once I could afford I just kept at it, failing over and over like a Dark Souls boss until I'm finally ok at it. But definitely the layers thing makes life sooo much easier, I def recommend Galvs plugin. That sounds real cool regarding photobashing and looking into AI haha, few people suggested I look into AI but after installing stable diffusion, it's like a whole other process of then feeding and training the AI your drawings etc and that's way too complex for me so I kinda gave up. Think AI might have a place in optimizing workflow somewhere and the artist can still be creative, I just can't think of a way atm. Oh yep I'm happy to connect, I don't use social media much but you can add me on discord if you want, my username is thinkingdistance. KZfaq def isnt the best place for optimal chats. Thanks for the nice words!

Hey Daniel, thanks for waiting, work got a bit hectic. I haven’t used TDDP in a while so I had to go back through my old backups to figure it out. It’s a bit hard to recreate the issue that you’re having, but so far I found 2 possible causes. First possible cause is that you’ve only set the image as a parallax image and you haven’t created a ‘parallel’ event on your map with the “Show Picture” function and the Plugin Commands like “BindPictureToMap 1” and “ChangePictureLayer 1 below_characters” and such. Those are the necessary plugin commands for the map to render properly and to follow your character around as shown at 11:12. You need to have the png in your ‘pictures’ folder for it to work properly, not just the ‘parallax’ folder. Make sure the event is definitely a ‘parallel’ trigger, not the default ‘action’ trigger. If you definitely have this parallel event set up properly as per 11:12, then the second possible cause is that in your ‘Show Picture’ command in the parallel event, you have to make sure the origin position is set to ‘Upper Left’, not ‘Center’. If it’s at Center, then the map won’t move with the player. Hope that makes sense. If neither is the cause then I'm not sure what's causing it. I’ll make a discord and a video where you can join and you can try explain it to me through that.

Love the way more efficient process! There's a term called "greybox levels" where level designers would create levels using basic collisions + meshes with no textures to work out how a level would work and get feedback from QA to make adjustments before any of the final art/textures are created for the game, think this is the best way to work. Work out how the game plays best, then put the final textures/art at the very end once all that's done. Despite this video, I do think nailing gameplay is much more important than graphics/aesthetics. There's a bit in Indie Game the Movie as well which briefly shows how Jonathan Blow made Braid and how he figured out the mechanics/gameplay first using very basic assets, then added the oil painting aesthetic afterwards. He doesn't delve that deeply into it but still interesting.

Hahaha great comment, thanks

Hi, thanks for the question! I'm still working animating parts of the drawing and there's a lot of trial and error involved, but look into Orange Overlay Parallax plugin along with the animated plugin on this link. forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?threads/orange-overlay-v1-1-4-animated-parallax-add-on-updated-7jul17.80917/ Ill make a proper video explaining the process once I've nailed it down. Cheers

Naw thanks so much, I'm real flattered

@@mischa3343 i have a question, so if you want to change something in the future during development, would u have to redraw the one part you want to change and then scan it again and reattach it to the whole map or would u redraw the entire map again? 😳

@@imannatasha3302 Aha yea, thats pretty much it. That's the biggest disadvantage of working in this way using parallaxes compared to sprites where everything is modular and you only have to change certain bits. This way of working is quite inefficient, even though I love the final results. I've been spending 3-5 hours for each landscape and 1-3 hours per character portrait using ink pen to do black ink outlines for everything, which then I have to rescan onto photoshop then onto RPG Maker, which adds another 4-5 hours per drawing and its pretty intense, especially while balancing full time work. It's nearly done so hopefully can upload the patch like... maybe in the next week or so.

@@mischa3343 that sounds like a lot of work! 😳 All i can say is goodluck man, i can't wait to see more progress on this 😁

@@imannatasha3302 Thanks so much! Mega appreciate it. 🙂 Will definitely make more vids once the new version is up.

Thank you! The current build of my game uses very different plugins from what is shown in this first build, and there's so many different combinations of plugins now. But generally, GALV's "Layer Graphics" plugin is a lot more optimal at loading parallaxes compared to TDDPBindToPictures plugin, which I used here. The 2nd plugin by GALV called "MV Image Cache" allows your parallaxes to be loaded into the RAM before they are needed to be rendered and pretty sure this improved load times even further. Those 2 helped reduce load times and image stutter significantly. Will definitely make another, more comprehensive parallax tutorial vid along with a bunch of other improvements in the future!

@@mischa3343 thank you so much! Another video would also be awesome!

Nice suggestion, definitely! I regret not testing it out with the phone beforehand as I think it would make the image look a lot nicer than scanning. Will def try next time.

Whaaaat that's sick! Omg smol world haha. Think that watercolor paint was my uncles before I was born in 1993. Still works 30+ years later! Watercolors are weirdly immortal.

@@mischa3343 I think mine either got used up all the way or lost in a move. I use to paint and do a lot of drawings as a kid. I do like how your game looks. Different from other RPG maker games.

@@CosmicDuskWolf that's awesome wow, must've done a lot of paintings if you managed to use it up. Thank you! I feel like I'm walking through an endless desert making it. Thanks again. 🙂

@@mischa3343 You're welcome. Im also interested in the story as well.

Hi there, this is the tileset I made that's used in the video: drive.google.com/file/d/1OhqGgNKKzS0JqICt_A1ghoO3DfWynRq5/view?usp=share_link

@@mischa3343 ah!! thank you so much!!

That's if you want to primarily use tilesets to build your environment, which is a perfectly valid way of doing things. I'm showing the method I find the easiest to comprehend in my head, which is to make the map first with the default assets, export that out, then draw on top of it, then import the drawing back RMMV. Hope that helps.

@@mischa3343 yes, thank you, do you know of any tutorials that can show me how to do this? I’m making an rpg that is mostly hand draw (I color them in digitally) I’ve tried to find a tutorial to explain it to me but all I’ve seen are ones that you edit and draw in digitally (again I’m doing it hand drawn) so do you know any tutorials I can watch?

@@MINRoadkill @Hillbilly Hobbyist Hey, so sorry didnt see this. I swear KZfaq doesnt give notifications when someone replies to your comment. So I think the clearest tutorial will be "Creating CUSTOM TILESETS | BenderWaffles Teaches - RPG Maker Tutorial". He uses GIMP as his image editing software which I dont know too much about, but definitely the way he works can be done in Photoshop, if that's the way you're working. The main thing is taking a tileset thats comes with RPG Maker by default, open it in Photoshop/GIMP then overlay your drawings on top, then place the tileset into RPG Maker. I'll eventually mess around with importing custom tilesets and create a tutorial in the future when I wrap my head around it. That sounds awesome though! Hand drawing is satisfying and digitally coloring everything sounds awesome.

Thanks, no unfortunately as TDDPBindToPictures doesn't work on MZ, but I've since switched to Galv's Layer Graphics as it can be used for both MV and MZ and allows for better parallax mapping than what I've shown here. I recommend using that. Will do tutorial on it eventually as it can be quite complicated

@@mischa3343 Thanks for your reply, that's really cool! I do have the Galv's layer graphics and try to figure it out for a parallax map how you did it here. But it's really complicated yes. A new tutorial for it should be awesome.

@@maikw804 No worries! Yea it is quite a learning curve eh. Wish I could give a timeframe for when its done but there's a lot to explain and the script for this new tutorial is already double the length of this vid. I'd recommend checking out the new character tutorial vid I uploaded as the 2nd half shows off what Galvs Layer Graphics can do like animated layers, texture blending etc.

Aw thank you, I'm glad to hear that this provided you some solutions. If you want character tutorials then the last 2 videos I uploaded show how to make them, and I provided a template for you to make it in a high scale style to make it easier for you 🙂

@@mischa3343 i am watching it right now, thank you very much. You got some work done there but hey your solution is very great because you also solved an issue i had about enemies.. i want to make some giant bosses like octopath on battle, so i think it is possible now but also on walkable map. I stucked on this issue many times on smile game builder, now i see the right engine for me is rpg maker and since ps1 i always dreamed to make something on rpg maker. Now its the time! Also the gene plugin is an outstanding scene maker that will help me alot and is something easy like windows movie maker did in win7. Thank you for the great tips, i am also an lover of Water color paint style. I do love the results on clipstudio and i think its an great improvement making easy animate thanks to 3d from clipstudio and also paint maps to do this method you show here that is mind blowing.

@@CanalDojogames No worries! Oh wow Octopath Travelers great, I wish I could help you with with tips on larger sprites for battle scenes but thats still beyond my understanding. You mightve already seen but theres an Octopath Traveler plugin by Olivia which makes the battle system like Octopath, its really well fleshed out. Wow I haven't heard of GENE scene builder but it looks great! Such a cool way of doing scenes in RMMV. Yus now is the time! Love your attitude, you can do it! And Clipstudio's awesome, you can definitely achieve a unique style using that.

Hi, thanks so much for the question. So sorry but I still don't have a copy of MZ even though I'm saving up for it. From Google it looks like Galv (incredible plugin dev) has made a similar plugin for parallax mapping for MZ called MZ Layer Graphics. I'm not 100% sure how it works, but that would be your best bet. galvs-scripts.com/2020/08/24/mz-layer-graphics/ Unfortunately plugins developed by the community are specific to the version of RPG Maker and I've seen that it can be a decent amount of work for these coders to port it. One big reason why I used MV was that it was about 4-5 years old and already had a tonne of community plugin support, so unfortunately for MZ you would likely have to wait for the plugin community to develop over the next few months/years. MV is still great though in my opinion, I'm still using it, I see it go on sale for like $20USD from time to time.

@@mischa3343 Thank for takin the time to reply my friend! I had a look at Galv's plugin and it looks very competent, thanks for the help! Yeah i relized this was the case after purchasing mz... maybe i will buy mv as well! Cheers, rain

@@rainskoog4530 No worries, good luck!

Greetings! For this first build shown on this video I only used mechanical pencil 0.5mm 2B thickness, then I watercoloured on top of it, then I went back with pencil once it dried. There are very tiny elements of the drawing where I added pen, like the red tree in the centre of the village, but definitely not everything. In the current unreleased build shown in later videos, I went back to all these drawings and drew over it a 3rd time with black ink pen that ranged between 0.05mm and 1.0mm thicknesses, which took about another 40 hours if I recall correctly, especially with the outline of the trees, leaves and stone pathways. Hope that answers, cheers.

@@mischa3343 Yeah, it totally answers, thank you very much, surprised for the quick answer to a not so recent vid, really appreciate it, thank you so much, I was really struggling with how I could make things being there and not just being watercolour brushes.

@@danielpovedatoran6235 No worries, I get notifications on older vids so I'm happy to answer. Watercolour is a really weird/tricky medium by itself so I felt I need to ground it by using mechanical pencil + pen

Thank you, yes completely agree. Ive moved onto Galvs Layers for the past year and its much better at separating layers and allowing for more layers than TDDP, so really need to make that vid eventually. Cheers

@@mischa3343 Also, if you find you finished your drawing and you're like 'oh I should have done something with this area or that. Remember that Yanfly's Grid Free Doodads lets you create other water-color and pencil sketches, and add them to a map at whatever layer you decide. But I see you're using the QPlugins which are also awesome! Great and inspring work!

Hey there, would love to! Do you mean character walk cycles or do you mean portraits?

A character walk cycles. Thank you

Actually, can you make a teaching video about both(walk cycles, portraits) please?

The link should still be up on the RMMV forums under downloads: forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?threads%2Fbind-pictures-to-map.46776%2F

Thanks, much appreciated. Always happy to chat if you want to email me in my YT profile

Aw no haha, thats a bummer. Not sure why it'd be empty, there's a lot of factors involved. Working on an updated tutorial atm with better plugins and I'll provide a template project that you can just insert your own drawings into which should simpligy the process so keep an eye out for that!

@@mischa3343 Oh, ok! Thank you! ^^

안녕! I'm working on a 1080p tutorial which is looking to be 1 hour long, but full time work and technical difficulties keep getting in the way. Will definitely make a character tutorial after that. Happy new years!

@@mischa3343 oh thank you

Aw thank you so much! Yes I was going for anime characters but not chibi. I've been asked this question a few times. I was going to make a character video after my 1080p tutorial but that's taking way too long so I'll make a character animation tutorial first then do the bigger video after. Thanks again!