[HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

[Timu Sumisu]

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.

[Mayo Master]

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 
And if it just renders slowly, I'll lauch the renderings before going to bed 
If it doesn't seem technically feasible, then I'll consider matte painting.
 

[Timu Sumisu]

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.

[Mayo Master]

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.

[SpooX]

Nice work [thumbs up] 

note that the light rays are on a sprite layer



 

[Timu Sumisu]

Very nice

[Mayo Master]

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!

[SpooX]

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:

 

[Mayo Master]

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 
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.

[SpooX]

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:


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

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.
 

[Mayo Master]

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.

[SpooX]

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.
 

[edit]
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.
 

[Mayo Master]

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.

[whitERaven]

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.

[Mayo Master]

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.

[LeonhartGR]

Thank you! This is amazing indeed, the level of detail and everything! Is there a way to put a slight animation on those flowers like there is a light breeze from the waterfall? and some steam cause by it around the waterfall area?

[Mayo Master]

Thank you! This is amazing indeed, the level of detail and everything! Is there a way to put a slight animation on those flowers like there is a light breeze from the waterfall? and some steam cause by it around the waterfall area?

Well, the waterfall and the steam are definitely on my to-do list, it's pretty much the last big chunk I have to do. As for animating the flowers under a slight breeze, it's doable in theory via soft-body simulation. In practice, I don't think my computer can handle it - to be honest I'm pushing my machine pretty hard already. I will have to leave it at that (at least, until I get a new computer  ).

[Hellbringer616]

If you need extra CPU/GPU power if you tell me how to get it done i can do it. 4.5ghz 3570k and a 570 basically just idling at this point haha.

[Mayo Master]

If you need extra CPU/GPU power if you tell me how to get it done i can do it. 4.5ghz 3570k and a 570 basically just idling at this point haha.

Thanks for the offer! I'm not sure I'll need this for now though. First I want to get a still image right, animating would be a bonus (besides, even if I sort of know how that soft body simulation should work, I'd still need to learn how to actually do it before I could pass the information to you). We'll see about that later. Still, if I plan to make some crazy mountain landscapes for a later scene, or if I do want to make the waterfall using the fluid simulation for this one, I'll know where to ask 

[KnifeTheSky77]

   I think Mayo's issue is more related to manipulating his awesomely big and beautiful model within blender than
how long it takes him to render it. Running a remote virtual machine from your pc to his laptop might help but so could
running blender from a lightweight linux distro. But I really dont know what im talking about.
I really just wanted to say that field screen looks freakin beautiful

[LeonhartGR]

It's really a beautiful upgrade to this scene!!! So detailed! With a slight animation it would be a wonderful addition to its experience...

[Hellbringer616]

   I think Mayo's issue is more related to manipulating his awesomely big and beautiful model within blender than
how long it takes him to render it. Running a remote virtual machine from your pc to his laptop might help but so could
running blender from a lightweight linux distro. But I really dont know what im talking about.
I really just wanted to say that field screen looks freakin beautiful

well damn.. Alright i got $50 to donate for a new vid card, Who's with me?!

[Almighty_gir]

it's looking really good man, but i'm curious as to why you're going with tesselation + displacement, over low poly + bump map? you could recieve much the same result as you have now.

to be clear, not questioning your results, just your method =]

[Mayo Master]

Thanks a lot for your positive feedback, guys!

   I think Mayo's issue is more related to manipulating his awesomely big and beautiful model within blender than
how long it takes him to render it. Running a remote virtual machine from your pc to his laptop might help but so could
running blender from a lightweight linux distro. But I really dont know what im talking about.
I really just wanted to say that field screen looks freakin beautiful

At this point, I actually have both issues. As I manipulate my scene, I can work my way around by hiding the flower layers, and show it only for renders. Still, it's getting pretty slow. Then, yesterday I went for a full render with all the flower fields, it took about 1 hour to render. When I'm to including water transparencies and reflections, and then the waterfalls, it's gonna take time...

well damn.. Alright i got $50 to donate for a new vid card, Who's with me?!

   Well, that's what I got for having purchased a laptop to browse the web and use MS office   I plan on investing for a new desktop PC sometime next year though.

it's looking really good man, but i'm curious as to why you're going with tesselation + displacement, over low poly + bump map? you could recieve much the same result as you have now.

to be clear, not questioning your results, just your method =]

I actually used a combination of both. At first I wanted to do everything with displacement, but my laptop could not. So, I went for using displacements for large scale deformations, and use bumpmaps for small scale details. Bumpmap details are actually more apparent on this picture. I did not discard the large scale displacements, because I believe they are essential for 2 aspects:
- without the large scale displacements, the vertical ridges are too... "vertical". I needed some irregularities on those (check the side of the rock cylinders in high res, for instance). The displacements on the vertical ridges (and also on the back cliff) are also very important for the way the rocks cast shadows on themselves. Bumpmaps cannot do those things.
- It turned out that, in the completely shaded areas of the cliffs, my bumpmaps almost did not show. Without displacements, the shaded areas of the cliffs look very flat, and compared to the areas exposed to light, it was just looking really off. In a way, the displacements were almost the only thing that make the cliff look bumpy when it's completely shaded.

I think that relying on bumpmaps only could have worked at lower resolution, but as we go for pretty high-res, we enter a level of details where the displacements are necessary. I could say I learned that during my previous scene (at first I modelled a corrugated metal sheet with bumpmaps, but I considerably improved my results when I meshed the corrugations instead).

[anaho]

Bad render times? Turn of raytracing in the shading panel and use buffer shadows.