OutRun FX

[Xiaou2]

Just played around a little with Photoshop.   

  Added some subtle shader effect layers:

 - Road and Sky gradients to simulate more depth.
 - Car Layer adding a hair more contrast, and a little more noise.
 - Tweaked the cloud Tint & Brightness.  (A little too blue.   Threres a lot more detail in the clouds that gets lost, when palette is too bright)
 - Added a little noise for texture on road & sand.
 - Tweaked sand color to be more vibrant.
 - Its Unfinished.  Only one palm tree was filter shaded.

Enjoy
 

[BadMouth]

Have you checked out Cannonball?

Not sure if your changes would be transferrable to it, but that would be cool.
Playing around with the custom track option is on my "someday" to do list.

[BadMouth]

Someone also did this "Outrun Nights" mock up.
I think it would be pretty cool.

[Xiaou2]

Yes of course.   The thought crossed my mind..   though, it may be past the scope of what the Developer is looking to accomplish.

 I wanted to give a little more artistic realism, yet not abuse the actual pixel look.    I think it turned out pretty well.       The night mock up is nice as well.   Though, could use some tweaking for more realism.   I might mess with it...



(I guess I have to use an Outside address to get the larger pic.  Testing... )

[Xiaou2]

Please dont ridicule me for this..   This one was a very fast / sloppy / lazy effort:

[SavannahLion]

Strange that I've never noticed the palm fronds looking like they got chewed up by giant bugs.

You can do only so much with a limited number of pixels and when you're racing around you don't spend too much time looking at the trees.

[Xiaou2]

Strange that I've never noticed the palm fronds looking like they got chewed up by giant bugs.

You can do only so much with a limited number of pixels and when you're racing around you don't spend too much time looking at the trees.

 These are the kind of palm trees that have thin bristly like leaves.

 I heard that they actually traveled to various locations, and took photos of the landscape, objects, and cars.. for use in the game.

 When you digitize things on such a low resolution... the sunlight peering through the leaves would have been represented by what appear to be holes.   There wasnt enough resolution to represent the thin stringy quality of the individual leaves..   and doing so with completely solid graphics.. may have looked far too unrealistic.

 Do remember also... that the games look is far changes when seeing it through a real arcade CRT.   The shadowmask lines created a texture effect, and hid a lot of the artifact look that you see here.   Further CRT defocus,  shadow-mask light leaking (color blending),  glow,  and not being fully convergent (all color guns aligned)..  also helped to smooth out the image.

 Thats why Outrun still looks great even today.   The graphics are more like an interpretive  Oil-Painting.   Resolution isnt as important as Composition,  Color,  Shading,  and  Contrast.