[HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

[Mayo Master]

Ealin_1 and Ealin_12 are practically done, everything is modelled. I may have to retouch a few textures, rescale a few items and change a bit the lighting, but I'll do that later, when I have a more powerful computer. Finishing this scene was a real pain because my poor old laptop was short on memory. I could hardly do anything on my blender file in the end. In fact, I had to use another PC to make the renders. In the meantime, I hope you'll enjoy these (they're full res):

ealin1

ealin12

Feel free to make comments and suggestions, so that I could improve this scene later on. Mostly, I think I'll need to adjust the light setting: I had to use a lot of ambient lighting because of how the external walls are lit (and ambient light is the only light source for these), but it makes most of the scene with too diffuse lighting, and it lacks of contrast in my opinion. I'll also have to revise a few textures (I made the painting texture in 5 mins, I'll have to come up with an improved version, for one thing).
Also, let me know if it's already worth uploading to the file repository. This version may not be final, but I think it's good enough to start with.
 
Last, I'm really considering making a flower tutorial thread, though I'd like the mods' opinion if these forums are a good place to present 3d modelling tutorials before I'd do something like this.

 

[Hellbringer616]

Looks amazing.
Are any of these in game yet? Or is there some sort of conversation that's needed?

Lastly! I will soon have time to help you finish the waterfall

 

[LeonhartGR]

And that's a more than satisfyingly completed scene! Love the contrast!!! And texturing!

 

[Nightmarish]

Can't wait to have it playable

 

[Mayo Master]

Hey guys,

If you think these scenes are good enough to be released, I would appreciate if I could get some guidance in order to render the separate layers. SpooX mentioned earlier they can be retrieved with Palmer on the PC version, but I only have PS1 disks. Thanks!

 

[Cyberman]

Hey guys,

If you think these scenes are good enough to be released, I would appreciate if I could get some guidance in order to render the separate layers. SpooX mentioned earlier they can be retrieved with Palmer on the PC version, but I only have PS1 disks. Thanks!

7mimic I think ( look here ) (thanks lazy bastard for the link) will give you the layer information for the playstation. It could also mess with the animation sequences. Also note that layers where animations where supposed to be or covered by something sometimes had green sections behind them. That's where 7mimic can be VERY useful.

I know a tool exists to create / modify new field location image data (it's been a long time). I would suggest you start with a 'small' render so it takes less time and you can see what problems you have with the encoding. Pallet data might be somewhat of an issue.  I do remember their being a tool for it but for the live of me I cannot remember.

Stephen

 

[SpooX]

7mimic is a fine tool to use, I use it to extract the backgrounds, however to get the different layers, you do need Palmer, you also need it to construct the layers again to be able to put it in game (mod dir).

Since the psx version is bound to hardware, it makes no sense in trying to get updated images inside, exept if we have some briljant genius who can port the whole game to the ps3....
 8)

 

[Cyberman]

7mimic is a fine tool to use, I use it to extract the backgrounds, however to get the different layers, you do need Palmer, you also need it to construct the layers again to be able to put it in game (mod dir).

Since the psx version is bound to hardware, it makes no sense in trying to get updated images inside, exept if we have some briljant genius who can port the whole game to the ps3....
 8)

Really it would make more sense to use Q-gears XML controlled media data.  At least the format data can be tested. Hmmm I'll see oif Akari has some input on using it to test background data quickly.
Not sure how well the backgrounds work off hand in Q-gears.
The advantage of Q-gears is its "portable" to most anything. Flexible, and it mostly works (mostly). I almost compiled Q-gears but right now I have my system limping badly so one thing at a time.

I thought their was another tool than Palmer. as I said it's been a long long time.

 

[syntax error]

Portable to everything?
Oh..no FFVII PC rewritten in Java.

 

[Cyberman]

Portable to everything?
Oh..no FFVII PC rewritten in Java.

If it has a LUA interpretor in it and you decide to rewrite all that C/C++ code sure.

Cyb

 

[anaho]

1.) Ambient/ Omni/ World/ Hemi (whatever lol) washes away a lot of details, I think this is what you mean by low contrast.
2.) Walls and Floor look to flat and just like shades of 2-3 colours.3.) Wood texture looks so the same on every object.
3.) Porcelane and lamp and flowers look very good. They are the most detailed objects but take the least space.
4.) Towel on table looks good, carpet looks flat.

 

[anaho]

Lighting: Kill the hemi and use fill lights ( turn of spec) to get rid of completely black shadows.
Or use a proper rendering engine like Cycles. Will get you much better looking shadows, glass and reflections. And hours to wait until a render is finished
Texturing: Can´t really give any specific tips other than having simple UV´s help a lot. In Cycles you can resolve a lot in the shader directly, maybe take a look?

It is a nice looking scene. Would be a shame if you dont push it to the next level.

 

[Mayo Master]

Thanks a lot for your feedback    That will be helpful when I am able to revise this scene. Currently, I have annoying limitations because my laptop is so old and slow. As the scene gets complicated and the file grows bigger, many things become impossible. Mostly:
- I can't do any proper render anymore, even with a downsized render. So, to test all the lighting/textures (which I've mostly done by going back and forth between the original image and the rendered pic), it becomes unfeasible.
- I'm limited on polys, so I can't make enough subsurf to apply displacement on most of my textures.

Anyway...
1. Yes, that's what I meant by "low contrast", everything looks flat. The problem with ambient lighting is that it cancels bumpmaps (which are revealed by a preferential direction of the lighting). If I don't use ambient lighting, then I'm wondering how I am going to light the external side of the walls. Or do I have to combine 2 separate renders with different lighting conditions?
2. I relied on bumpmapping for the walls and the floor. I could ramp it up, and while decreasing ambient lighting, hopefully it will look less flat. As for the colors, maybe it needs more shades on the flagstones (do you recommend the use of a photo texture?), however I'm not sure I need more shades on the walls (after all, I would think the walls are painted), unless you meant to apply a more elaborate dirt map or something. As for wood textures, I did try to have some variations there, I can try to have other texture images to get in there.
3. Thanks. The vases were easy, while I went creative with the porcelain. I used special flower fonts to make the UVs     The flowers took me some time, but I ended up with a decent method. I will make that "make a flower" tutorial some day 
4. I'd like to make the carpet less flat, and the one in your scene would be very much like what I'd like to achieve. Did you use displacement on your carpet, or were bumpmaps enough? I used only bumpmaps, however once again the ambient lighting killed them.

Then... at this point I've stuck to Blender internal rendering engine. I've never used cycles - I don't think my current laptop can handle it (the GPU of my laptop is very poor). However I think it's worth looking into it, I'll do that.

 

[anaho]

1.) I suspect that you have relatively low RAM count if the scene doesn´t render at all. Having little CPU power is a problem as well, but it only forces you to wait longer.
Things you can do to get higher poly count: Disable raytracing ( might be impossible for a lot of scenes but you seem to use buffer shadows anyway) or use Cycles.
Having all even quads on the object you want to tesellate helps a lot as well ( I suspect it will only be the floor and maybe the walls).
Using .jpgs instead of .tgas or .pngs can help but they have less quality, however I find that hard to notice.

2.) I find the walls look better than the floor. Didn´t you model the cobblestones by hand? They absolutely don´t stand out at all. Maybe extracting them further out, and mixing in a grunge map in on the concrete already does the job.
That Omni light makes bumpmaps pretty useless, unfortunately. Is there AO in the scene, btw? It looks like it is either of, or set to add. Setting it to multiply will also give you more depth.

4.) They are strands.

Seriously, give Cycles more than a try. It handles heavy geometry much better, and the overall quality is just superior. With BI in scenes like that all you can do is is throw around a bunch of lights and literally hope for the best.
You don´t need a powerful GPU to use it. In fact I am using it with a an HD4250, and that thing is probably the slowest GPU you can think of. Just make sure to use a small window ( not fullscreen) if you switch to realtime preview.

 

[Sapphire]

Fabulous work there mate.

 

[Mayo Master]

...

1.) Yeah, my laptop doesn't have a lot of RAM. That was a big limitation whenever I wanted to do some physics (could handle cloth sim, but not much smoke and fluid sim). Lighting creating soft shadows were also crashing. As for raytracing, I tend to prefer that over buffer shadows in order to render transparent materials, as raytracing enables me to do it with actual refraction indexes. Then... come to think of it, I don't think I have a single tesselated object on that scene. I didn't even try, else I know my laptop wouldn't have handled the necessary amount of polys.
Hopefully I should get a new PC (actually a rebuilt 4 years old pc) soon, which should help me with these problems.

2.) I did model the coblestones by hand. Though, after a fashion, I wanted them to be somewhat flat, thinking of practical matters (no one would like to have a cobblestoned floor in house, it'd be a pain to clean!). Still, as you mentioned, they look way to flat. The thing is: I originally calibrated the amount of bumpmap based on the results with hard-shadow lighting (because my laptop couldn't handle soft shadows), and that setting was ill adapted to soft shadow lighting (the bumps need to be magnified considerably, like x5, to give decent results). I forgot to change that in my previous renders. Then, I could also extrude them a little bit more. As for AO, actually you're probably right. I did put AO in the scene, but I don't know whether it's "add" or "multiply", I'll have to check. That last point was something I was not aware of, so thanks for the tip!

3.) There's no 3.)

4.) They're strands? Do you mean it as a Materials setting, or did you make hair strands based on a particle system? 

Fabulous work there mate.

Thanks! I hope I can give you some motivation for continuing your awesome Midgar model, or make a field screen 

 

[Sapphire]

Thanks! I hope I can give you some motivation for continuing your awesome Midgar model, or make a field screen 

Sorry buddy, bad news i'm afraid. As I was going through all my stuff that I was able to salvage during a format it appears as though I backed up the wrong Midgar file I am pretty far back now but that's okay, it just means i've made room to perfect what needs to be.

 

[Mayo Master]

Hi folks,

Just to show that I've started to work on mds5_w. I actually got a "new" computer, in fact I tried to repurpose a PC that was being disused in my work... unfortunately, it turned out that I have only a chipset acting as a graphic card, which is terrible. It has a bit more CPU and RAM than my laptop, but the GPU is so poor that it creates aliasing problems on the renders.
Anyway, back on the mds5_w scene (weapon shop in the slums, set up inside the what remains of a bus): I only have "dummy" textures at the moment, I didn't fiddle with that very much. I made some very basic lighting. I will have to look into that when I work with the "cycles" rendering engine - except that I don't think it's an option with my current GPU. Even though I think I started fine, there are a few issues on that scene that I'd like to discuss... so first, here's my current scene:


The original picture can be viewed at: http://mirror.ff7data.com.ar/ff7/data/field/flevel.lgp/mds5_w.png.

So... there are mostly 2 things that have been bothering me in that scene. First is the seat on the left hand side, near the back wall of the bus, where one of the shop clerk sits. This particular seat is actually considerably smaller that all the other seats on the scene. I thought of resizing it so that it matches the others, but it looks like the walkmesh in that area corresponds to the small height of the seat. So...
a/ I can carry on with a seat whose size matches the other, but we'll have to test how that'd look in game
b/ I keep the seat tiny, and we'll have to assume that a kid's seat is being used in that place.

The other part that concerns me is much worse: the bus driver seat, dashboard, etc. In the original picture, it's actually a complete nonsense. The seat is misaligned with the cabin, the height of the seat and its position would make it impossible to see the road when driving, it's a mess really. I made some corrections already in my version (the seat is closer to the dashboard, higher, and the steering wheel is more vertical, like in an actual bus), but if that's fine with you, I'd like to redesign that part quite a bit. I think the original picture from the outside of the bus (http://mirror.ff7data.com.ar/ff7/data/field/flevel.lgp/mds5_1.png) could be used as some reference (in addition to some photos of real buses). A redesign of this section would not be a problem as far as the walkmesh is concerned.

Well, actually there's a third thing that may need to be corrected. There's some sort of metallic handrail+grid between the bus driver seat and a passenger seat behind it. In the original picture, this handrail/grid is in the middle of the walkmesh  ???  I'm of a mind to put it on the edge of the walkmesh (moving it towards the front of the bus), especially since redesigning the bus driver seat section will move this part more towards the front of the bus, as well.

So... that's about it for the moment, some feedback would be appreciated.

 

[mystery_editor]

It wouldn't make any sense to have a seat that is that dramatically different in size. Could you substitute it for another kind of seat that would logically be that size?

Also, although there is a walkmesh in that area, there isn't any characters actually walking in that area, correct? So would it matter as long as it looked correct with the sitting NPC?

 

[SpooX]

Just to show that I've started to work on mds5_w. I actually got a "new" computer, in fact I tried to repurpose a PC that was being disused in my work... unfortunately, it turned out that I have only a chipset acting as a graphic card, which is terrible. It has a bit more CPU and RAM than my laptop, but the GPU is so poor that it creates aliasing problems on the renders.

you could use that old baby for different purposes as well, I just set up a NAS with Nas4free, with a low powered PC to have all my files in a central place and available from any computer I might be working on.

So... there are mostly 2 things that have been bothering me in that scene. First is the seat on the left hand side, near the back wall of the bus, where one of the shop clerk sits. This particular seat is actually considerably smaller that all the other seats on the scene. I thought of resizing it so that it matches the others, but it looks like the walkmesh in that area corresponds to the small height of the seat. So...
a/ I can carry on with a seat whose size matches the other, but we'll have to test how that'd look in game
b/ I keep the seat tiny, and we'll have to assume that a kid's seat is being used in that place.

could be a child-seat, I wouldn't worrie about the size difference.

The other part that concerns me is much worse: the bus driver seat, dashboard, etc. In the original picture, it's actually a complete nonsense. The seat is misaligned with the cabin, the height of the seat and its position would make it impossible to see the road when driving, it's a mess really...

Well, actually there's a third thing that may need to be corrected. There's some sort of metallic handrail+grid between the bus driver seat and a passenger seat behind it. In the original picture, this handrail/grid is in the middle of the walkmesh  ???

About the other things....considering we are in the slums, where everything around is being used, trash is dropped there from the plates, so it is most unlikely the bus will ever drive away. A driver seat might be adjustable, the rail might be moved to a different place... who knows. I wouldn't worrie about it all too much.

Use the force your instincts Luke