After an EXTREMELY long 20 minutes =] I had the balls to try and make a proper background, here's my first test on backgrounds (I don't usually do backgrounds, so tell me how it is)

I've also added the 3d abstract which you can just see there, and made the blood spatter a tad more realistic (as it was HUGE in the first one)

All gibble-de-gook aside, here it is!



Once again, suggest some variations which would look cool, and I'll see what I can do.

Edit: Oh lord! I didn't see the bevel there, that's been taken out, and I'll upload it in the more finalized version

Alright!!

After just over an hour and a half of fiddling, I've made a basic structure of a banner. I couldn't quite get the text right, I spent the most time on that actually, just haven't found the sweet spot for it yet...





I'll work on that text a bit more, try and get it to fit in better... :[

It looks pretty good.
I used to take care of a forum, but that was a while ago. Is it possible to make some colors transparent ?
Oh wait, even better...
If you could make the background uninterrupted (because I'm assuming you just made 2 halves for it), by putting both figures whole, and adding some more blood splatter and wood texture in the middle, maybe we could replace the blank gray of the forum by an image, say, one black pixel, with 40%-ish transparency (.png format), repeated all over. That way, we'd have that great background on the whole page (or at least around the banner, at least), not just on the sides.
Because I find the modified version looks weird, with the banner lost in the middle of all that gray, with great background bands on the sides.

Exactly my thought on the banner!!

I'm not to sure how this host works with the grey area though, if it's just based upon a certain few colours, or if an image is able to be placed over that. But that would be easy enough to do, I could just feather it around the banner, to give it a slight 'fade in' effect, which should look alright. To my belief, many hosts have the background, and the content background as different images. I don't really used photoshop for this (mainly use it for texturing models) but I'm certainly willing to muck around with it.

About the blood splatter, I hesitated going overboard with that, since with blood all over the walls, I'd seem a bit crazy

The problem I see with adding the background to the content area is the blending of the renders. Since I've only added parts of each render, not the full thing, so it would look a bit awkward. I'm sure there's a way to get it to blend into it right though, it would just take a bit of experimenting, which I'll do later, since it's nearly 3am here, and I need a bit of sleep. =]

Thanks for the suggestions, Faucon!

- Thor

The way I see it, you'd only need to make your background a full image, for the whole length of the forum.
Then all we'd need is add a 1px image repeated over the content area. That way, the content area looks a bit darker (so we can see all the white writing without problem), but we can still see the background behind.
Now, I think it might not be as easy as I thought to introduce an image to the background of the forum... We'd need an admin here to talk about what is or is not possible. I've been looking at my old forum, which is also powered by phpBB, and it seems you can have access to the css. If we do, I'm sure we could make all that gray transparent ! I'm gonna work on this...

Anyway, another thing you can do is make your banner part transparent. It blends much better that way ! I can try to work on it, if you want. I use Gimp quite a lot. If you make a banner a bit larger than needed, I can see what I can do as far as transparency goes.

OK, found it on my old forum.
If this one is anything like it (which is highly probable), it is doable to put a picture instead of the gray...
So if you can make a nice background, and we have an admin willing to try the changes, I can tell him/her how to do that.

That's some great work, Thor. I really like the Aoc-Rp image.

Unfortunately though, Rami made this forum and I have little clue how to swap backgrounds and images and the like. I have a little experience with HTML coding but I don't think this forum works that way. So for now we'll just keep this thread up (not that I'd close it either way) and hope Rami changes it a bit when he gets back

What about you try to get to "Administration Panel" link, that you should have on the very bottom of the forum ?
In there, if it's anything like my forum, you should have a display tab, where you can easily change images.

If you can get there, we'll see about setting the forum frame transparent, because it's a bit more advanced.

Oh, and never mind if you don't want to try it, I would understand you don't want to risk screwing up anything ! It's not like it's anything urgent. We can certainly wait for Rami to come back !

I do have the admit panel, as I've structured some of the layout of the forums themselves. But I'd certainly not want to risk screwing anything up as pressing some buttons is a lot different from altering other data

You're right about the layers.

Anyway, doesn't matter too much indeed if we don't get it done ! Kept you busy making it, and kept me busy figuring out if it was doable !