Author Topic: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums  (Read 272362 times)

Vgr

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #425 on: 2014-10-22 20:49:09 »
You never fail to amaze me Mayo. Keep up the good work!

Salk

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #426 on: 2014-10-25 05:37:37 »
Really pretty!

Great job there!

Mayo Master

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #427 on: 2014-10-26 22:50:17 »
Update! Got some furniture done in the kitchen area, and made a render from the ealin_1 camera.



I have also made a bit of work to make a "fall-themed" still life painting, it will be in the next update. Now, I have to work on the tea set and the flowers - it shouldn't take all that long since most of it is already UV-unwrapped.

KnifeTheSky77

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #428 on: 2014-10-27 04:04:55 »
It is crazy how good you are getting at this, looks immaculate  ;D

LeonhartGR

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #429 on: 2014-10-27 09:35:09 »
Lighting and textures are amazing! keep it up!

Mayo Master

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #430 on: 2014-11-02 00:36:28 »
Update!

Well, ealin_1 and ealin_12 are essentially done. I may need to tweak a couple of things (such as the volumetric absorption of my tea material, which is currently too high), but it would be the matter of minutes.
I decided to change the lighting coming from the left window, as I felt the sun beams were coming at too horizontal an angle. Besides, this new lighting is more in accordance to that of the outside scene (eals_1).
Anyway, here's the almost-final version (from ealin_1 camera):



I hope you like it. Now, I'll have to start to work on ealin_2 (top floor) which is the last scene I set out to do for the year.

Salk

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #431 on: 2014-11-07 04:35:13 »
I like it a lot.

My only humble suggestion is - and it's a general gripe I have with many games - to lower the refraction for mirror-like surface. The way it is now it looks too clean and to me, it feels like the pavement extends to the wardrobe's doors.

Mayo Master

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #432 on: 2014-11-07 15:36:36 »
I like it a lot.

My only humble suggestion is - and it's a general gripe I have with many games - to lower the refraction for mirror-like surface. The way it is now it looks too clean and to me, it feels like the pavement extends to the wardrobe's doors.

I appreciate you feedback, although I am actually not sure I would change anything to the current glass material, and here is why:
First, I would say that glass materials in games or in CG renders used to be handled in different ways, because a proper glass shader takes quite a bit of processing power. In video games, up to the previous generation of consoles, glass shading was roughly approximated, because it was too demanding to process (and keep a steady framerate), and it was often treated as a reflective (specular) shader. Proper glass shading in video games started (I think) with the last games of the PS3/Xbox360 generation (and earlier on PC of course).
For a proper glass shader, you have to decompose into the refracted/reflected rays, which depends on the angle at which your seeing the glass material (Fresnel laws), and as a rule of thumb the more you're going to look at the material from a normal angle, the less reflection you're going to have (conversely, the larger the viewing angle from the normal, the more reflection you have). Additionally, whether you see "through" or a reflection will depend on how bright the environment is before and after your glass panel. Assuming a proper glass shader, given that this scene and most video games look at the environment from "the top", if you look at vertical glass panels, you'll have a great angle from the normals of the panels, so you'll see mostly reflection. But that's physically accurate! Generally, the effect is enhanced if the light comes from the direction of your view into the glass material. That's why, in general, when you're outdoors by daylight you see only reflections on the windows of building because the light outside is much greater than the light inside the buildings.
I can try to tweak things a little and see if I can increase the refraction/reflection ratio, although I am not expecting drastic changes (and as I mentioned, it will be less physically accurate). For one thing I could make the glass not cast a shadow onto the objects inside the closet, which should make these objects more illuminated. We'll see.

Salk

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #433 on: 2014-11-08 08:10:38 »
Thank you very much for your detailed explanation. I appreciate it. Technical but on layman's terms for my benefit. I guess that a way for it to be better (in my opinion) would be... how to say... make the contrast between the surface and the reflected surface a bit more prominent somehow? Perhaps it will be less accurate but at the same time I won't be thinking that the pavement extended into the wardrobe...  ;)

sl1982

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #434 on: 2014-11-08 20:08:17 »
The only other suggestion would be to have a non glass material. A material that is almost transparent but doesnt have the refraction/reflection of glass. I would be interested in seeing this. Remember we arent looking for photo quality renders and not everything needs to make logical sense as in real life if it looks good.

Kaldarasha

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #435 on: 2014-11-08 21:11:55 »
The only other suggestion would be to have a non glass material. A material that is almost transparent but doesnt have the refraction/reflection of glass. I would be interested in seeing this. Remember we arent looking for photo quality renders and not everything needs to make logical sense as in real life if it looks good.


FF7 should be as much realistic as possible, at last that was the plan of the dev team. However, my problem with this very strong looking reflection is that the character model won't be mirrored on it, which will be more noticeable with this. So a weaker reflection would be better indeed.

sl1982

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #436 on: 2014-11-08 22:13:21 »
Realistic is fine as long as it looks good. If it doesnt then what is the point? This is a fantasy game after all

Sent from my SM-N900W8 using Tapatalk


Mayo Master

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #437 on: 2014-11-09 23:17:32 »
My approach to modelling is to be able to have something looking realistic AND good - or at least tend to the best compromise I can manage. I also think we can't really be bothered by seeing environment reflections and no character reflections, because the first thing is that character models do not even cast shadows. I'll see what I can do for the kitchen closet of that scene.

Otherwise, I wanted to present some early works on ealin_2 (top floor), and I have decided on several drastic changes with respect to the original scene (a bit like my works on mds5_w). My motivations for these changes were:
- Make the top floor consistent with the fact that it's located under the slanted roof. Thus, the walls are slanted in the top part.
- Make the light sources consistent with the windows layout from the outside scene picture. At this point, the sun beam source hasn't been made consistent with the one of ealin_1 and ealin_12. Additionally, I believe that extra light sources such as those from light bulbs will be needed.
- Ensure scaling consistency. This means that the scaling should be consistent with the bottom floor of the house. Actually, they even share some of the mesh, the fact that they're using the same stairs objects is the most blatant in this case. However, I haven't shown the stairs on the render below. This scaling process revealed a very big problem: the size of the beds had poor scaling, or at least one could say they were scaled for small chibis. Meaning: the beds were about 80 cm wide (which can be plausible), but with the original aspect ratio the same beds would be about 1.20m long! Thus I went for a drastic redesign of the beds, with an aspect ratio more in the line of 1.9 m x 0.8 m. I made some in-game testing to see what parts of the walkmesh I could use for making the beds longer. Because of the longer bed in Aerith's chamber, then I do not have the room for the chest of drawers, which I decided to replace with a shelf (I am thinking of stacking several of these shelves, actually).
- By the way, my works on scaling gave me an order of magnitude of the characters' sizes for ealin_1, ealin_2 and ealin_12 (with Makou reactor tool), using Kaldarasha's material. I obtained good settings with 1024 size for ealin_12 (yeah, that much - but it does look much better), and about 768 for ealin_1 and ealin_2. I suppose these sizes could be further optimized, but they're a good starting point.
- One thing that is a bit annoying: if the scale of the character models is adjusted for ealin_2, then there is a problem with the animation of Cloud getting up from bed. More particularly, there's a discontinuity between the end of the "getting up" animation and where the character is placed afterwards, as he's walking out of the room. It'd be great if someone could look into it. 

Anyway, so here's the picture:



Still quite a bit of work to be done - unfortunately work has been piling of late, hence less time (and much less energy) to do much Blender on my evenings.

Kaldarasha

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #438 on: 2014-11-11 08:29:38 »

Realistic is fine as long as it looks good. If it doesnt then what is the point? This is a fantasy game after all


True. That's why I said as realistic as possible. It needs to be immersive so that the player won't draw out of the fantasy and realize that he is playing a(n old) game.


My approach to modelling is to be able to have something looking realistic AND good - or at least tend to the best compromise I can manage. I also think we can't really be bothered by seeing environment reflections and no character reflections, because the first thing is that character models do not even cast shadows.


I think adding drop shadows isn't to hard to make. All what is needed is to add a shadow model to the current position of the model, but I'm not sure if it is really that easy.   ::)


Quote
- One thing that is a bit annoying: if the scale of the character models is adjusted for ealin_2, then there is a problem with the animation of Cloud getting up from bed. More particularly, there's a discontinuity between the end of the "getting up" animation and where the character is placed afterwards, as he's walking out of the room. It'd be great if someone could look into it.


If I remember rigth there are used two models of Cloud for this. I think after the 'Out-of-the-bed'-animation a store the current position of the model can solve the problem, if the playable Cloud model will be placed at the saved position.
Keep in mind to change the field scale, too. Or else the movement animations will have a slight sliding look.

Mayo Master

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #439 on: 2014-11-17 05:53:19 »
Progress update (I haven't revised the lighting setup though)...


Salk

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #440 on: 2014-11-19 04:26:32 »
Really really nice! I must congratulate you, Mayo Master. I hope to see more from you.

LeonhartGR

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #441 on: 2014-11-20 22:10:24 »
Lovely lighting!

Mayo Master

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #442 on: 2014-11-21 01:25:04 »
Really really nice! I must congratulate you, Mayo Master. I hope to see more from you.
Thanks! I hope I can keep things going, but mostly I'll need people to join me on this endeavor (600+scenes is way more than I can chew). I have some plans to showcase my works in collaboration with Kaldarasha, so that we could eventually see about attracting people to the project. We'll just have to see how this pans out - it could really go either way. My goal is to be able to put this short "demo" together by early 2015. Come to think of it, it is very similar to what was initially intended with the "Bombing mission" project.
Lovely lighting!
Well... I was meaning to change it quite a bit  :P
Namely, my plans would be to kill the sun light and add indoor lights (as if from light bulbs). The way things are, I don't see it sensible to have Cloud sleeping in a room which gets a direct sun beam.

I'll try to get things going for that scene, despite the work load and the release of Dragon Age Inquisition  :P

KnifeTheSky77

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #443 on: 2014-11-21 05:00:33 »
Dat finished wood look, looks like the real thing. Kind of crazy to think that they even had access to trees to make that banister inside Midgar in the first place.

I'm definitely getting these puppies into qgears when they are ready. Awesome awesome work

SpooX

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #444 on: 2014-11-21 17:47:36 »
...my plans would be to kill the sun light and add indoor lights (as if from light bulbs). The way things are, I don't see it sensible to have Cloud sleeping in a room which gets a direct sun beam.

I'll try to get things going for that scene, despite the work load and the release of Dragon Age Inquisition  :P
:o :o :o
...Kill the sun??? is that our solution against global warming??

Beware with doing that, no on a more serious note, if my mind remembers correctly, the field is faded to black when the team goes to sleep. This in a way can be considered as becomming night. But...
When they wake up, it fades back from black to the normal field. Basically I would consider this to be morning....
So why kill the sun?
 8-)

Mayo Master

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #445 on: 2014-11-21 19:28:40 »
Beware with doing that, no on a more serious note, if my mind remembers correctly, the field is faded to black when the team goes to sleep. This in a way can be considered as becomming night. But...
When they wake up, it fades back from black to the normal field. Basically I would consider this to be morning....
So why kill the sun?
 8-)

Precisely. When I speak of "killing the sun light", I mean to remove the light causing a very bright sunbeam inside the place. If you want to show that Cloud goes to sleep in the evening, and wake up in the morning, the corresponding sunbeam would have to come from nearly opposite directions, which is not possible since the same field images are reloaded. By removing the sun beam, I would retain an illumination from the outside which would correspond to twilight (from the "enviro light", or "sky light"), which could work to describe the place both when Cloud goes to sleep (after sundown) and when he wakes up (before sunrise).

Actually, for some time on the back of my head I have been having the idea of a "day and night cycle" mod. It's obviously not a priority by any means, but I wonder how much interest that would get. I have a few ideas about how it could be implemented (conceptually speaking - I don't have enough insight to see how the code could be altered accordingly), and we'd have to see if/how it could affect gameplay (opening/closing of shops, monster encounter rates, etc.). Maybe I'll open a thread elsewhere to discuss that in details.

SpooX

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #446 on: 2014-11-21 21:38:16 »
Actually, for some time on the back of my head I have been having the idea of a "day and night cycle" mod. It's obviously not a priority by any means, but I wonder how much interest that would get. I have a few ideas about how it could be implemented (conceptually speaking - I don't have enough insight to see how the code could be altered accordingly), and we'd have to see if/how it could affect gameplay (opening/closing of shops, monster encounter rates, etc.). Maybe I'll open a thread elsewhere to discuss that in details.

Technically speaking it would be interesting to have an engine which complies more with FFVII, where it is possible to overlay the walkmesh, and all other 3d objects with movies as background. This should already be a possibility with the current engine, as many of the current mvies already have this (think of the intro, or mkup).

An other possibility would be more in line with the limited way the backgrounds are made, but simply putting more layers in there, one for day and one for night. But then we need to be able to switch the layers. My guess would be that this needs to be done at the scripting level...
just my thoughts anyway. :)

But this is not impossible I would say.

 8-)

anaho

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #447 on: 2014-11-22 15:46:08 »
This basically the primary reason why my output is so low.
You create very intricate renderings but they simply do not match with the rest of the game.
I would like to be able to cast shadows and relections like REMake and Zero does and create nice looking characters that blend with the HD backgrounds.
The way things are now it always seems as if you throw two different games in a blender.
I also want to annouce that I will not do much modeling in the near future and want to focus more on texturing, shading and lighting.
Reason for this is, that I am suffering from severe necrosis in my right hand and moving the mouse a lot, well, simply hurts my wrist more than the pen does.

Mayo Master

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #448 on: 2014-11-22 17:18:44 »
My understanding is that, with the current game engine, the best that can be done for character models is baked bumpmaps and specularity into the diffuse shaders, and then have the characters with very basic drop shadows. If we want something more sophisticated than that, we'll have to look at another game engine (QGears?). 
My approach is to do the best I can with the current tools and engines available, and keep an eye on what else is developed. If we happen to end up one day with an engine that allows for a real time 3D rendering of environments interacting with characters (shadows and reflections), the backgrounds I've made could potentially be integrated in such an environment (now that Cycles does have texture baking...). But that's not my priority - I am patient about seeing how this all pans out.


Mayo Master

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Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums
« Reply #449 on: 2014-11-24 03:54:45 »
By the way, a quick "micro-update" on ealin_2: I finished modelling all the flowers (there are 6 bunches in total). It took quite a bit of time. However, it hasn't changed the overall look of the scene drastically, so I'll just wait for being done with a bit more texture work (vases, beds, etc.) before I show an updated picture.