[HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

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Mayo Master

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Hi everyone,

With Ulpian having made a thread for the remake of sector 6, I'm going for Sector 5, given that's where I've made my first field screen, and that's where I'm going to make the next.
Anyway, I wanted to post about my latest progress, even though Ulpian's work makes me feel very humble  :-[



It's only the beginning of a very long process. Thankfully, playing around with lattices in Blender allows for getting variations of the flower position fairly easily. I'm aware the pic can be improved (petal textures, stigma and stamen to be resized, etc.) though I'll end up with a whole population of these.
Some random facts I learned while making this flower:
- the flower is essentially based on lilium longiflorum, a variety of lilies originating from Japan. It's also called Easter lily. I've read this flower was a symbol of purity and resurrection.
- oddly enough (basing my source on Advent Children), even though the flower bud is a lily, the stalk and the leaves are not. Real lily leaves grow in successive whorls, and have straight parallel veins, while the flower in AC are crenate, growing in an alternate fashion.
- there's a whole market dedicated to moulds of lily petal veins, which are meant for shaping sugar crusts for pastries  :?

Let me know if you have some advice, even if it seems very early on.
 
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Hi everyone,

...even though Ulpian's work makes me feel very humble  :-[
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Haha! Maybe you could share any knowledge to reach perfection together ;) Nice work on the plant too...
 
Well thanks for the props MM :) no reason to feel humble in any case, I think you're doing a pretty good job yourself.

So what field scene are you going for exactly? Loved the trivia on the Easter lily. The model could, IMHO, benefit from some of the following improvements:

- A more oval-shaped and overall curvier form for the petals. The curved tip here looks fine, but the rest of the petal seems a bit too straight and rectangular-shaped.
- I believe petals and leaves are a great opportunity to use material translucence. Doing so might help making them less plastic-looking.

(I'm basing those suggestions on this picture:)
W210-0901020.jpg



The rest (especially the pot and dirt) seems fairly impeccable to me.
 
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Thanks! I came across the same reference picture during my search, this one is particularly good. I also took some screenshots of Advent Children.
Concerning the shape of the petal (and leaves), with the lattices I'll be able to finely tune how they're bent. I realize that in my image, the petals are folded along a bell shape (a bit like a tulip), while the real deal is more trumpet-shaped. Concerning the petals themselves, I might have to refine that indeed. At first I wanted to deal with shapes by making a UV transparency map using a real petal, but it didn't work that well (namely the edges of the petal were not smooth - like an aliasing problem). Looking at your picture closely, it also seems like the petals do not all have the same shape : one triplet (with 120 degrees angle between each) is larger, and the second triplet looks more narrow. I'll verify that on other reference pictures. I'm also a bit worried about how much subsurf I can get to it, since I'll have to make a whole population of those (I'll be working on eals_1) and my computer is an old, unoptimized laptop.
Otherwise, I did read that translucency was a key factor in making plants look realistic, not plastic (though I haven't investigated a lot on that yet). So I did crank up the translucency, but it didn't seem to make much of a difference. I wonder if the light source itself has also a part to play in it, and I haven't bothered with that yet.
 
Hey guys,

I'm having some problem with my Blender modelling, I don't know if anyone can help me out. And I've not seen anyone around encountering this kind of issue!
It's very basic really. I started to make a picket fence, but when rendering, I end with really weird glitching texture/shadows on the pickets. I made the pickets completely plain (in terms of texture) to try and locate the problem. The odd part: if I take a camera up close, the pickets look completely normal.
I also noticed the weird glitching shadows are more apparent once I turn "ray shadow" on, but for that scene, I can't live without ray shadows.
Here are the pickets up close:



And here they are, glitching with my render camera.


Any ideas?  :|
PS: on my lighting settings, cranking up the "samples" or the softness of shadows doesn't do a thing.
 
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What shaders are you using?
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For "debugging purposes", I switched to a very simple material (all textures removed). I'm at work right now so I can't access my Blender files and tell you exactly, but it must be something along "diffuse white intensity 0.9", "specularity white intensity 0.1", no translucency, no reflectivity. Simplifying the material (or even changing to another material) didn't seem to have any effect on these glitched shadows.
 
This kind of thing is usually caused by polygons being too close to eachother, try making the pickets thicker
 
This kind of thing is usually caused by polygons being too close to eachother, try making the pickets thicker
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Thanks, I will try that when I'm back home. Though I'm a bit surprised, because my pickets - although thin - have non-negligible thickness (as far as I recall, the thickness to height ratio should be around 1:20). Verdict in 6 hours  :P
 
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yes, but when highly zoomed out it can mess up.
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Okies. I just read something about z-fighting which concurs. It was mentioned that z-fighting was emphasized when clipping distances where far apart, which is definitely the case in my scene. I will try to tune that too (I can definitely increase the distance of front clipping).

UPDATE: Bingo!  :) It was indeed an issue of z-fighting. I modified the clipping distances of the camera so that it would only encompass the visible area, and it worked. No need to retouch the picket thickness.
 
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Ok guys, I have an interesting issue to deal with. I guess you could call that one a problem of consistency.
Here's the thing: I'm currently working on eals_1:


Now, the issue is about the house itself. I thought, for accuracy's sake, that it would be best to refer to the field screens of the house in order to model it. The one below gives an accurate picture of the layout:


Now, if I try to replicate this layout on eals_1, I end up with something which is really off (the model is the wireframe, overlaying the reference image):
wipealshouseissue.png

As you can see the section on the flank of the house (the kitchen, actually) is really misaligned.

So... is there a guideline about this kind of problem? There are different approaches:
- Draw the outside regardless of the inside layout, even if it means a distorted geometry, relying only on the original reference image.
- Revise the drawing to account for consistency between the inside and the outside of the house.

I'm partial to the second option, but I know the first approach has been somewhat prevalent in this project so far. Some advice (particularly from the mods) would be much appreciated. 

I also think this kind of issue is bound to happen on numerous occasions. The most glaring example will be on the modelling of the church (the outside drawing is completely inconsistent in the original game, the versions of AC and CC are much better in that respect).
 
Keep the distorted geometry, just have em look like the originals.
 
This is just a graphical upgrade. Fixing inconsistent world geometry would require altered walkmeshes, which are outside the scope of Team Avalanche.
 
Keep the distorted geometry, just have em look like the originals.
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Got it.
This is just a graphical upgrade. Fixing inconsistent world geometry would require altered walkmeshes, which are outside the scope of Team Avalanche.
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Indeed the walkmesh would have to be altered if I had to fix the geometry in this particular case, so I understand the guideline.  :)
 
if entering the house simply loads a new area (the inside of the house), then the outside and inside models don't in any way need to be the same mesh.

so it makes sense to have one for the inside, and another for the outside, making sure they all look like the originals.
 
I know that the inside and the outside don't need to be on the same mesh, since they're loaded in different environments. It may be a personal taste, but I greatly appreciate when different aspects of the same object are rendered consistently. I just feel weird about having to make a non-euclidian house while there's no story-wise reason for defying the laws of physics. Besides:
- the inside of the house has a nice regular geometry which is architecturally sound.
- the outside is actually quite distorted, and from this viewpoint I wouldn't like living in there. Frankly, on that one, it's not 90's mangas which are inspirational, but the works of E.C. Escher!
- Having to align several objects with each having distorted geometry is a real pain, and modelling with messed up face normals is not fun.  I'm slow at modelling because I'm a noob, but this time I'm being extra-slow.
Anyway, I'm almost done with it (textures notwithstanding), currently into modelling the inclined hexagonal tower in the back. I feel like I may build another model of the house "as it should be" and store it somewhere, for my own sake   :P
 
Those 'defying laws of physics' geometry is pretty consistent throughout FF7
and is part of its style. Just look at the world map, chibi towns and forests.
In field, chibi field models and regular sized furniture.
 
Those 'defying laws of physics' geometry is pretty consistent throughout FF7
and is part of its style. Just look at the world map, chibi towns and forests.
In field, chibi field models and regular sized furniture.
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I believe the inconsistency I'm mentioning about the house belongs to the category of errors and mistakes that were in no way intentional, or part of an "art style".  Back then, the guys had eventually to release a game and were bound by the timeframe of the project, so if minor errors were made then "who cares?" (in particular, many of these errors are absolutely not obvious. Who noticed the house was distorted before I did?). You can actually find a bunch of these throughout the game (I already found some in my previous work on "the man in the pipe" scene), the following list reports a few of those in FMVs namely. http://www.ff7citadel.com/secrets/s_errors.shtml
Sincerely one could have ensured inside/outside physical consistency while keeping the same art style.
 
...You can actually find a bunch of these throughout the game (I already found some in my previous work on "the man in the pipe" scene), the following list reports a few of those in FMVs namely. http://www.ff7citadel.com/secrets/s_errors.shtml
Sincerely one could have ensured inside/outside physical consistency while keeping the same art style.
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lol, how I know that feeling, just the starting field MDSTIN has already some issues, notice the stairs at the end of the stage where you go up left...
It is definitely a challenge to find the correct solution for those, I'd say, try it out and see what the difference is, if it is not noticeable, go with it.
And with noticeable I mean, it's going to be a pain when the walkmesh has to be altered, I believe no-one tried doing that...yet.

but of course, this is just my two cents.
 8)
 
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