Upon further pondering and studying some of the backgrounds, I do think it was modelled in 3d after all (at the same studio that did make the spirits within).
Final Fantasy VII was the first game in the series to use developers on both sides of the Pacific. The main game engine was developed at the Japanese offices of Squaresoft, supervised by Hironobu Sakaguchi, while the impressive video sequences were created at the new and expensive offices of Square USA in Honolulu, Hawaii. Squaresoft fully took advantage of the many talented and experienced computer animators and powerful computers this side of the Pacific.
Not really based upon reading some old articles, although...
There were a huge number of people we had never worked with before. Up until that point Squaresoft’s teams had only ever dealt with the traditional 2D medium. All of a sudden we had new people coming in working with software like Power Animator and SoftImage that we had never heard of before. From an industry point of view, it was unbelievable what we were trying to achieve. That is why we all had this strong feeling; this great enthusiasm.
but....
All the scenes which use FMV's are made in 3d, otherwise the camera line up would be very difficult to achieve.
furthermore, upon investigating NMKIN_2 for instance, when you take the pipes which go around the central tower, they have rendered reflections (that's why the corners are very hard to distinguish) same as with the left wall, you can see a mirror image from the stairs...
(take a close look at the original backgrounds)
Aside from the reflections, there's another hint in the way the materials are used, the pipe top left of the exit seems to have the same material as the wall behind, however it is really stretched.
But that's just my humble opinion
Refs:
The Making Of: Final Fantasy VII, Edge, June 9, 2009The making of Final Fantasy VII and how Squaresoft conquered the RPG market, Gek Siong Low, 2001Now back to the subject at hand, I don't think it is that difficult to find the postion of the lights based on the highlights and shadows in the scenes, that should be doable.
Honestly I think this stuff would look incredible in POVray
I haven't seen impressing renders out of POVray (that doesn't mean there aren't, but I haven't seen any (haven't searched either
)
just googled some, and well I've seen a few. As my experince is much better with 3d Max as with any other 3d program, and looking at the way POV works, I think it will take too much time for me to spend some energy in doing so. The renderer(s) I use are pretty capable of making extreme realistic renderers, depending on the settings, materials and lighting, so I'll stick to those. The exeption I'm willing to make is the Gears engine (Ogre), but for that I have to optimize most of the models, otherwise you get a lot of artifacts on-screen. And with earlier discussion with Akari in mind (going for FFVII RT-3D
).
Do you know if it would be possible, from this data, to extract and/or extrapolate enough information to create "real" light sources in field?
Well, the coordinates of the walk mesh are known, my models are based upon the walkmesh, so technically speeking, the lights I use do have coordinates and can be exported, they only have to be transformed into FFVII coordinates, but that shouldn't be too hard.
Well that's all from me, sorry no pictures this time...
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