Placing a bunch of decorations

How do you place a bunch of corpses or trees in a room well? You don't want it to seem too uniform, but it being too random can be a problem too I think. I often find it difficult to get a "balanced" look. Is this a good scene or would you change something about it? Are these corpses centered a little too neatly around that chunk of ground?

For corpse sprites, I think I tend to place them in clusters, like two or three nearby each other, then another one or two somewhere else, maybe with some trails of blood pool sprites arranged in curves that start nearby the corpses and taper off as they get further away. I like stuff like that, where you can maybe envision the fight that took place.

Putting other decor sprites in clusters, with some areas more crowded and other areas more sparse, might be a good idea too, but I haven't really given it that much thought...

Variety is key. There are several corpse and gore types for a reason. Being too close shouldn't matter much if they're all different sprites. As for placement, I usually grab one big sprite, like a tree, and litter corpses around it. Repeat as neccecary. If it feels too crowded or too empty, change it accordingly. Look at the scene over and over in-game until it feels right. Let the player make their own corpses, too!

Memfis said:

Is this a good scene or would you change something about it? Are these corpses centered a little too neatly around that chunk of ground?

The use of decorations in both screenshots seems OK to me.

Memfis said:

How do you place a bunch of corpses or trees in a room well? You don't want it to seem too uniform, but it being too random can be a problem too I think. I often find it difficult to get a "balanced" look. Is this a good scene or would you change something about it? Are these corpses centered a little too neatly around that chunk of ground?

My advice: avoid placing wide decorations near sector height changes. See how the pinky bodies clip oddly through the floor; it looks bad IMO.

Put them frankly in the lava, or frankly out of it. Try to avoid triggering these little rendering glitches when you can.

I like when sectors complement the things placed. Trees for example look better if they are on their own little hills or buttes that are 32 units higher than the surrounding floors so its three dimensional space is more apparent. Torches and lights are in their own little alcoves. My next project uses blood splattered flats to use around dead marines and other gore related stuff.

I rarely use dead monster corpses except for areas without monsters, as ambience. "someone has already been here...!"

I'll place piles of them around corners and obvious choke points too, y'know like where they are likely to have been killed.

Try to tell a story now and then when you place decorations, and not just the classic "marine and a SSG" which has been done to death. In one room with hanging computers I had - in a row - 1) a ladder 2) a dead marine sprite decoration 3) a health pack just out of his reach. This was the only one I did in that map, and it was about half way into this map almost directly visible when the player steps from a teleporter. The fact that it appears suddenly and without being telegraphed in any way is what I believe is the soul of this idea.