[HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

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Posting my progress on eals_1, as I think I'm done with the modelling of the house (and many other things) - textures notwithstanding. Hope you guys enjoy it (click for high-res).

If the house looks like the original and does not seem distorted, it means I've done my job well. I hope you'll find it that way  :P
 
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house Looks great, just a little comment on the cliff.. it seems a little unnatural.. don't know how I should explain this.. the lines are kinda too straight and regular giving this feeling like I'm looking at a man-made structure rather than a natural cliff
 
I think that after it is textured it will not be that visible. I think it's looking great right now. If it looks unnatural after texturing though just try and move vertices here and there and I think you should be fine.
 
yeah, I guess it's cause of lack of textures, this looks great can't wait till it's completed, good job!
 
Just to clarify the status of this scene for you guys:
- In terms of adding objects, I have one pillar in the background to make, and a small one in the foregrounds, all the way to the left.
- What remains to be modified: the water, the ground, the cliffs, and making populations of grass and flowers. Grass and flower models are almost done. The cliffs will be done using displacement shaders, it's going to look cool. However, for doing that, I'll have to subsurf the cliffs like grazy, and I don't know if it will lead my computer to agony.
- I also have to add the waterfalls, which will be done by fluid simulation. Again this is going to be very computationally intensive.

In a way, I'd like to make all the stuff that does not put too much of a strain on the computer first, and do the cliffs and the waterfalls last.
 
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I'd do the water via matte painting. just get some appropriately shape waterfall/water resources and shoop it up at the appropriate resolution. Fluid dynamics will was yer render time.
 
I'd do the water via matte painting. just get some appropriately shape waterfall/water resources and shoop it up at the appropriate resolution. Fluid dynamics will was yer render time.
I do want to try to make it with Fuild Dynamics. My computer may not like it, but I do! You can call it a professional quirk  :D
And if it just renders slowly, I'll lauch the renderings before going to bed  :P
If it doesn't seem technically feasible, then I'll consider matte painting.
 
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its also a matter of getting the fluid to simulate the way you like it with the right lighting and glow. If there were animated frames to it, i'd suggest doing this, but for a single frame, the fastest and most accurate (to original) results will come from a matte painting.
 
I've been doing quite a bit of texturing, so it's time for a progress update.
So, here's a side-by-side comparison, at the original resolution.


... and below is a close-up on the house, whose textures are practically done (click for high-res).


I hope you'll enjoy.
 
Nice work [thumbs up]  :)

note that the light rays are on a sprite layer



 8)
 
Nice work [thumbs up]  :)

note that the light rays are on a sprite layer
I didn't know that! I guess I wasn't working with the proper reference image... I had made an effort to cast shadows on the scene to bring contrast to the rays (I set a shadow from the plate, plus soft shadows from clouds), probably I'll have to change that.
However, how would you recommend to render the rays? Do I have to make a separate HD render of them on their own?

Very nice
Thanks!
 
However, how would you recommend to render the rays? Do I have to make a separate HD render of them on their own?
Thanks!
I think a light layer in photoshop might do the trick, or if Blender is able to, you could render out different passes.
some info

Actually, there are more layers (in this scene the light-rays are animated by flipping the layers) others have objects you walk behind.

you can see it here:
bg2w.png

 8)
 
Rendering different passes should be totally doable in Blender. However, I'm not at all familiar with compositing and working with nodes. I have put books about it on my Xmas wishlist, so hopefully I should be able to do all that later on  :D
The necessity of rendering several layers (namely for objects you walk behind) wasn't in my mind, so thanks for reminding me that. As a matter of fact, there are many objects in my scene which are concerned by this: the picket fence, flower patches, the water tank... Probably I'll need some guidance as to what should be rendered on which layer to be featured in the game. But I don't think I'm at that point yet.
 
To find out what the layers are, you can use Palmer and extract all the different layers.

What I did to create the following scene:
mds7pb2sample.png


is to render the layer with object ID's (which I've put in manually) which gave me this result:
mds7pb22048025objectmxs.png

that makes it easier to select the different parts, and replicate the layers from Palmer in photoshop.

Apart from that, it's always possible to render just the different parts, but the catch there is the shadows and reflections you might mis.
 8)
 
To find out what the layers are, you can use Palmer and extract all the different layers.
The problem is that I don't own a PC version of FFVII, I only have a Playstation version. Probably I'll need to have someone do that for me  :-[

Apart from that, it's always possible to render just the different parts, but the catch there is the shadows and reflections you might mis.
Shadows wouldn't be a problem. I could save another blender file where I'd set the materials as "cast shadows only" of the relevant objects (I did that already for my "man in the pipe" scene, where the whole pipe is modelled but half of it is "cast shadows only"). Reflections may be trickier to deal with.
 
The problem is that I don't own a PC version of FFVII, I only have a Playstation version. Probably I'll need to have someone do that for me  :-[
For the psx version you can use 7mimic to see the layers, but I don't think you can extract them seperately with 7 mimic.
 8)

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But don't worry about the layers for now, modeling everything is still the way to go for now, just look at the layers in 7mimic so you'll know which parts you should model, the rest will come when the scenes are finished.
 8-)
 
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Okay, I've spent some time on texturing the cliffs of my scene, and I think it's time for a new update...  (click for high-res)



I hope you enjoy
Basically I would have to texture the ground, the water, make populations of flowers, and make a waterfall.
However, I'm currently encountering some technical difficulties... well, mostly, I'm hitting the maximum computing capacities of my poor old laptop. For the cliffs, I would have like to essentially make them with displacement shaders on heavily subsusrfaced objects, but with that method I'm just crashing (I would easily get past 5 million faces, which is a breaking point for my laptop). I have to considerably lower the amount of subsurf (from 6 levels of subsurf down to 4), and rely a lot on bumpmapping (which, alas, don't show detail on completely shaded areas, while displacement would). It reminds me of the old days when I was having fun with Terragen. However, if the Blender renderer can digest the amount of faces, rendering itself is not too much of a problem (this WIP took about 15 mins to render). Nevertheless, this causes some concern, as adding a population of flowers and the waterfall will put more strain on my limited computing resources. I'm actually wondering if I can finish it at all with my current hardware. I've dropped the idea of making waterfall with fluid simulation, though I hope to make it via smoke simulation instead.

EDIT: Well, fortunately I was able to partly solve my problems, I rearranged the mesh by adding some loop cuts and decreased the subsurf, which actually gives me better results with fewer faces. I'll post some progress on that later.
 
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Really awesome man, after all those himble stuff you said at the beginning, LoL you're pretty good with this .. good luck! hope you finish this soon.
 
Progress update: Flower power!!! (click for high-res)



Now, there are a few things I've yet to tune about these flowers, namely:
- More randomization on the distribution/orientation of the flowers (I've to tune the grass distribution as well).
- Maybe put the stems and leaves to a darker shade of green, and fine tune the translucency.

I hope you like it though.
 
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