Art CG trace

Hi. I'm making my second CG pic. I drew the original pic in paper and traced it with a compter after scanning it. Problem is, that the picture became very...umm, pointy? not so sure of the word, but i mean its not as smooth as i would like it to be. I used Adobe photoshop 6.0 and polygonal lasso to trace the pic. Help plz.

 

a pic to make the point

might be easier to help me if i put this here

 

I guess the problem would lie in the resolution of you monitor, the higher the res of your picture, the less edginess you should have. Besides that, unless you have a high quality art application, it will usually come out sharp looking. Since you have adobe, i would scratch the latter of the possibilities.

 

The polygon lasso tool has to be thought of as actual raw polygons placed in the code of a game. The higher the poly count, the smoother, and more realistic the character will be. For example Jill Valentine in Resident Evil for PSX was around 250-300 polygons. The Jill in the GameCube remake is around 5000 or so.

If you are limited to the polygon tool for tracing, then you'll have to make perhaps hundreds of points, rather then several. Think of it as a connect the dot. A character with 100 points will be a lot more pointy, then a character with 800 points. This is because everything is done naturally in straight lines, so to make it appear to be bending, you have to guide it in a much more exact way. In other words, a very time consuming pain.

If you are going to trace, you really need to go out and buy a wacom tablet. But even that isn't perfect. Rather, you are much better of finalizing your lineart as best as you can before scanning it in. Then press Ctrl+L and the "levels" option will pop up. Play with the stuff there. You will find you can more easily rid of very light gray marks that you couldn't entirely erase. You can also darken the lineart if done in pencil to where it looks like it was done with pen. That's what I do, and I find it works best.

 

Thanks for the info. This helps alot !