[HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

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As far as I know, the softness of shadows in Blender is independant from the materials properties. In the material properties you control diffuse color, specularity, reflectivity and transparency. The softness of the shadows depends on the settings of the lights. Also, in this scene I believe the light is emitted from a "point" object, given how each object cast their shadow depending on their location.
 
I like SS96 best (although SS48 looks great too). On the other hand, I'm not sure that recreating the bumps on the floor would have a desiderable effect. I think it's fine the way it is.
 
I think I'll be agreeing with the trends so far - SS96 is best, SS48 is also really nice.

Are you going to disperse the shadows any further like they were in the original, or keep them well defined?
 
Definitely agree with SS96

Also damn good job on the modeling and texturing of that room
 
SS96 is looking good. However, if you just want shadows to be soft you can turn of the shadows of your current lamps.
Move a set of Spot lamps in a place where you want the shadows to be and check shadow only.
If you you set them to use shadow buffers you can tweak the softness seperately and it will render much, much faster than using 96 raytracing samples on lamps if you just want soft shadows.
 
While it is pretty evident that SS96 has the best shadows, it still needs some
dirt in the pipes and the boxes and almost everywhere.  Well done anyway! :)
 
Thanks for the feedback! I will go for SS 96 setting then.

SS96 is looking good. However, if you just want shadows to be soft you can turn of the shadows of your current lamps.
Move a set of Spot lamps in a place where you want the shadows to be and check shadow only.
If you you set them to use shadow buffers you can tweak the softness seperately and it will render much, much faster than using 96 raytracing samples on lamps if you just want soft shadows.
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Thanks for that rendering tip. I don't think I'll use that for this scene though. As a matter of fact, the setting here corresponds to the soft shadow size, not the number of samples. The number of samples here is set to 6, and this amount is enough to give good results while having decent render speed.

While it is pretty evident that SS96 has the best shadows, it still needs some
dirt in the pipes and the boxes and almost everywhere.  Well done anyway! :)
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I disagree with you about the amount of dirt. Hoping that I can convince you, I'd like to mention that I already added significant amount of dirt on floor, pipes and walls, and I have studied how brushed steel pipes get dirty. The place is a shop, and, in my opinion, should be well-kept. You may think it should be dirtier just because we're in the slums, but I can redirect you to counter examples (for one, Aerith's house is in the slums, and it's not dirty). Concerning the boxes and jars, I didn't add dirt because it wouldn't be relevant for these items to have collected much dirt if one assumes the cardboard boxes come from this morning's shipping, and the jars are frequently used.
 
96 looks fine with regards to the shadows.
As for the dirt, tone down the colors a bit, but you might solve that by a color correction after rendering.
I must agree, you will find not much dust in a shop, concider the owner, even in the slums, would be proud to have his own little shop. I don't think one should concider that fanboism, but logic needed to build the scene.

Nice going Mayo, keep up the good work (and please get rid of those full blown RGB posters  :P)
 8-)

Ps I'm still in the process to get my scenes back up and running....
 
Make sure not to confuse dirt/grime with just being dark. The place is sure to suffer from poor lighting. I think the current light set up is rather bright, especially when combined with the dummy textures.

Low lighting, combined with some yellowish lights will set the mood a lot more, though I don't believe you've gotten to the final lighting passes anyways.
 
Make sure not to confuse dirt/grime with just being dark. The place is sure to suffer from poor lighting. I think the current light set up is rather bright, especially when combined with the dummy textures.
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As for the dirt, tone down the colors a bit, but you might solve that by a color correction after rendering.
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I believe I got the light settings right. The original scene isn't poorly lit, actually. For each texture I made, I repeated a tedious looping process of rendering, compare RGB values with original picture, adjust texture colors, re-render and so forth. I may not be on an exact matching (for that matter, the color scheme of the original game as only 32 values for RGB as opposed to 256, so exact color matching is irrelevant), but I think I come close enough - you can make the comparison of RGB values yourself if you like.
 
You people realize the more you nitpick this the longer it will take before you will see it released? It is a fine looking render
 
You people realize the more you nitpick this the longer it will take before you will see it released? It is a fine looking render
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I don't want to seem lazy, but I couldn't agree more with that statement. It matters a lot that we get things done, because there are some 600+ scenes in total. I'm aware of my own limitations as a 3d modeller, and scenes are always perfectible, but we have to get to a point when we're happy with what we get and move on. There are things I might have wanted to redo on the first scene I modelled, but I have to settle with it. Given my personal productivity (which hopefully will also improve with time), I should be aiming at completing at least one scene per month. If we have the ambition of carrying out this project to the end within a reasonable amount of time (still, about 6 years), we would need 10 times that productivity from the whole team, and unfortunately we're much fewer than 10 people on this job (a shame Ulpian seems to have vanished, really).
 
Well as long as you keep a backup of your source files then they can alway be revisited later if need be. It makes more sense to get some good scenes out now, especially since someone will always have something to gripe about with them.
 
I sure keep a backup of the source files, no worries.

By the way, for the anecdote, did you know that the way the scene is laid out is completely unpractical for the shop clerk? Actually, one can hardly use the till because the square pipe blocks half the way to the table! I wonder if that could be the sort of things people might want to revisit later, as well.
 
Haha! This is so entertaining! Wonderful work though anyway! My personal preference is scenes to become as most realistic as possible ;)
 
I hope you like where this is going (they're rendered at 25% of their actual sizes)...





Two remarks:

- Making all these rocks is a real trial of patience. So tedious. And still so much to do.
- The original design of the stairs is actually really flawed. According to regular building codes for stairs (check stairs on wikipedia for reference), the standard pitch angle (more or less the angle of the ramp with the horizontal) of stairs is about 30 deg, and the maximum angle is about 45 deg. Here, the pitch angle is 56 deg, which makes this construction something between stairs and a ladder. Another flaw is that, assuming the floor is about 2.30 m high, the number of steps on the original picture would yield a rise height (the height of each step) above 40 cm, which is clearly wrong (try to climb that!). Thus, I took the liberty of arranging slight modifications so that the stairs would be somewhat usable. The walkmesh being what is is, I maintained the pitch angle to 56 deg. I increased the number of steps so that the thread depths would be ergonomic (i.e. about 9 inches or 23 cm minimum) while decreasing the rise of each steps. The best I could do was to design the steps with roughly 34 cm of elevation (decreasing the rise more than that would result in unsufficient thread depths). It's still very steep, but much more usable, while fitting the walkmesh just like the original. I hope you're fine with these revisions.
 
you really can overdo things....stairs, regulations, next you're going to stamp an ISO number on the door...  :-P
as for the stones on the floor, go either with a displacement map, or even a modifier, in that way you can paint the stones and be done with it. I would love to see some wires of the current scene.
Nice start though, I see you refined the stair-pillars.
 8-)
 
You may say that it's a professional quirk that I want things to be functional  :-P  That being said, I think my modelling is improved by looking at actual references, so why not check out the real deal?
Concerning the stones in the floor: using a displacement shader was a possibility that I examined in the first place. However, I couldn't find a proper displacement map which would remain faithful to the floor pattern of the original picture. If I were to draw the map myself with Paintshop, it would take pretty much the same time as making the actual mesh. Besides, making the mesh of the rock is less costly in terms of poly counts than subsufing the floor to the level required for a displacement shader, I think. So I eventually decided to go for making a mesh of the floor. In a sense, I feel like the time I am spending making this mesh will be compensated by the fact that texturing it will be much simpler that way.

By the way, for reference, here are the wires, though they show some levels of subsurf (3 levels of subsurf on stair pillars and studs, 2 levels of subsurf on the rocks). As far as the unsubsurfed mesh is concerned, the stair pillars and studs are based on 16 sided cylinders, and each rock is actually based on 12 faces.

 
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