Messages

26

Team Avalanche / Re: Midgar City Information

« on: 2015-02-13 23:11:58 »

Please tell me that these are real-time Qgears renders...

27

Team Avalanche / Re: Midgar City Information

« on: 2015-02-13 19:48:06 »

I would think KillerX has been busy, google around for Midgar and minecraft....but he is still alive.
I was a bit annoyed at him for hijacking the first 5 google pages when looking for additional Midgar references....

 

28

Team Avalanche / Re: Midgar City Information

« on: 2015-02-12 21:48:03 »

50 meters high is about right and is about the only solid(?) information you will find, the rest is all pure speculation.
And for reference pictures, that depends on what you are actually looking for.

First of all keep in mind that it's all pure (final) fantasy. Scaling is a real issue throughout the whole world here, scenes don't match up and to be honest the story about Midgar is bigger then Midgar itself.

For references you could base your Midgar upon:

• The original FFVII
• The Midgar from Crisis Core
• The physical Midgar model from SE-hq

Those are three completely different versions.
Personally I've based my version upon FFVII the game.
an early version of this:


To have a bit of a feeling about scale on the plates this is a (again early) view of the most important parts:


and zooming into sector 8 for a sec:


Coming back to thhe scene you're working on with the elevator, I would do it seperately, unless your able to animate the reflections of the elevator itself as well. Looking at how the scene (in FFVII) is build up the layers are clearly seperating the elevator from the background. You would be better of to create the backdrop in 2d rather then building the whole of Midgar for this scene alone.

As for what's wrong with the model, I think the borders are to thick compared to the size of the plate. Also the central train pillar feels of, to thin.

The following is (supposed to be) more or less 50 meters high;


And if you look into the technical bits and bobs of locomotives, it is a real miracle that it will ever get on top. 

But look close at what is available, the background of the dropping above midgar is a source for getting a feel for the width of the pizza, if you set the pilar(s) to 50meter height, you can scale the rest into proportion.

I wonder what your goal is here, is it just to be able to create the scenes in the Q-gears engine? or do you plan on actually rendering the backgrounds for the qhimmed-FFVII? (just wondering).

 

29

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« on: 2015-02-12 20:10:44 »

Now this is an interesting topic, could have used some of these insights while making the signs for midgar, those were a nightmare to decypher... Don't remember quite what I've put on them anymore.
oh well, wonder if anyone will notice those tiny bits.

 

30

Team Avalanche / Re: North Mako Reactor Bridge (Q-Gears)

« on: 2015-02-03 21:33:13 »

If it were still alive I would like to vote for the Luminous engine, the other possible interesting and more feasable option could be UE 4.
These options might need some rework of the currently created code, just a tiny I would guess....

But that would mean for me that I need some better hardware then I currently have...
 

31

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] Mission B Fields, Midgar details

« on: 2015-02-03 21:20:03 »

Thanks for the update 
As for the development lasting only a year, it would raise several questions:
- Are you sure? (I thought it was more around 3 years) For that matter, wasn't the date of 1995 on one of the cutscenes (Jenova's helmet during Nibelheim flashback)?
- If true, did these guys had any sleep during the year of development, or are they even human? The amount of work is too much for a team this small to have been done in a year.

Final Fantasy VII – 1997 Developer Interviews

Hironobu Sakaguchi – Producer
Yoshinori Kitase – Director
Tetsuya Nomura – Character Design, Storyboards, System, Mech Design
Yuusuke Naora – Art Director
Motonori Sakakibara – Movie Director
Akira Fujii – Battle Scene Director
Ken Narita – Main Programmer
Yasui Kentarou – Magic/Summoning Effects
Kenzo Kanzaki – Backgrounds
Nobuo Uematsu – Music

.....


Narita: Yeah, in a certain sense, FF7 is something of a minor miracle. I mean, we only had a year to do everything.

Fujii: It’s the shortest development we’ve had so far.

Narita: Yeah, that it was. And normally you’d start developing your game after you’d learned the new hardware. But we had to learn the hardware and create the game all in the same year. I really couldn’t believe it when I saw the finished product of FF7. It’s amazing that so many people were involved, and that we completed it in so short a time.

Fujii: Time is always the one thing you’re in short supply of. We had to do the battle system after all the field stuff was done, so practically speaking we only had half a year for that. The last dungeon was a real slap-bang, rushed affair.

It's a nice read:
ref:shmuplations

And as for the who is who and who did what on Final Fantasy VII:
ref:metacritic

oh and there is lots of more interesting things around.

...did these guys had any sleep during the year of development...

please define sleep, does not compute...
 

32

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] Mission B Fields, Midgar details

« on: 2015-02-02 22:12:19 »

Fixed the texts on the side;

弐式五〇八

And with some artistic freedom, the 'KOB' part (which nobody ever notices anyway) I've changed to Kobayashi, which is one of the field designers from the original FF VII team. If I picked the wrong one, then my deepest apologies, and anyone from the original FF VII team, please feel free to correct me.

sorry these things keep annoy me untill I've found out
And as part of the research you tend to find out lots of interesting stuff, like interviews with the developers crew right after release, and did you know that they did the development in just 1 year?

Now only one piece of text left on the outside, but I'll come up with something....

I hope you like it.

 

33

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] Sector 6 Slums

« on: 2015-01-29 21:41:18 »

Such a shame he went awol....So much detail in those renders....

34

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] Startmap Debug Room (Q-Gears)

« on: 2015-01-29 21:20:50 »

uploaded in the repo.
can be found under "Signs and logo's"

 

35

Team Avalanche / Re: North Mako Reactor Bridge (Q-Gears)

« on: 2015-01-29 20:51:41 »

And that's coming from someone who does prefer the meshing aspect of 3d modelling to the texturing side of it. However, the extra care you put into developing materials is what makes the difference.

let me second that

Oh and let's not forget the rendering time....(animation and editing the cutscenes, will not mention audio at all now)
 

36

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] Startmap Debug Room (Q-Gears)

« on: 2015-01-29 19:05:08 »

Would be nice if you could find me a nice FFVII logo with a black/transparent background like the one in:

Can you handle 4k?
Although I don't have the japanes characters in there yet... just "(c) 1997 Qhimm" err "Square" I mean. 
As I need it for the intro.

 

37

Team Avalanche / Re: North Mako Reactor Bridge (Q-Gears)

« on: 2015-01-29 18:36:13 »

I'm trying to avoid UV-unwrapping because I fear it will make future changes to the bridge mesh harder.
From what I have seen from SpooX's models 3ds somehow auto fixes this, he applies a concrete material to everything without issues or having to make corrections.  Is there some way to mimic that in Blender?  The material is supposed to be a placeholder or somewhat of a standard material before I apply the real textures of the bridge that's why I went with a procedural material thinking that it would auto apply itself evenly but that is not the case.

Oh beware, nothing goes automatically in 3ds Max, that would be too easy 

In general I do use UV mapping applied to all objects I've created, also it really depends on the model and the complexity, a box for instance is very easy to aply box mapping, like cylinder mapping on cylinders. However, also those types of mapping need to be configured, otherwise it's not as much the stretching, but the scale that is way off.

Unfortunately most of my objects or a bit more complex, so I have to use UV-unwrap and optimize the maps. That takes a lot of time...
and after that it's of course the creation of the maps itself.

The concrete material you might be talking about is most likely nothing but a dull grey (50%) default material which I by default aply to my models to start with.

Oh and with regards to your chosen field to model, beware that the camera view is quite annoying, especially the field of view which is quite wide-angle.

 

38

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« on: 2015-01-13 21:20:22 »

So there are only issues with the animations when a color cycle is being used? can't we change the script part as a workaround?

 

39

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] Mideel WIP

« on: 2015-01-13 21:17:39 »

Good to see you're still alive Anaho, looking good as usual

 

40

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] Mission B Fields, Midgar details

« on: 2014-12-15 21:23:34 »

Thanks for that update! Very cool that you made such progress on the animation of the train.

Regarding the writing on the train car: I think our best bet would be to look into the remade train model which is used in Crisis Core. I remember I actually appreciated that they cared to detail the train car with the same writings as the original (same number), but I can't remember the kanji writings. I tried to look it up on Youtube but the videos don't have enough quality (let alone that nobody really actively sought a good camera angle to be able to read the writings). I can make an attempt at reviving my dying PSP ans look it up - although if someone else could do it it'd be much appreciated.

By the way, have you modelled the inside of the train car? That'd be several fields made in one go 

I've just disected Crisis Core, and finished approx. 3 hrs of DOC cutscenes.....

DOC has nothing on any train (in the train-grave-yard)...
And as for Crisis Core... there close but not comparable to the original. It's like they did with the head mask of Jenova, where they changed 'Made in Hongkong'.
The part of 'Created by KOB...' has been completely removed and the Hyaku-something has been replaced by 'The Shinra Electrical Company'.

They basically removed all the artist jokes out of the game in CC.
For the created by, my best bet would be to look at the list with artists, and see if any will match...

And about the inside, yes that has been modelled.
 

41

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] Mission B Fields, Midgar details

« on: 2014-12-11 21:01:12 »

That train animation is awesome 
I wonder how it would be like at full speed. As a rule of thumb, assuming your driving wheel is about 2 m in diameter, if your train goes at 60 km/h then it gets you to 2.65 wheel rotations per second. I doubt the train goes faster than that in any scene from the game (it should have the same speed as a subway train, more or less).

Lol, I just Love the scientific appraoch, while doing this, now I should be even capable in building a real live version due to my research. Amazing what some people are able to build in their attick.

Nice job with that train animation. I would even know where to begin with something like that.

Yes, it's quite a challenge, but if you get the hang of it it's not bad. Unfortunately I had to completely redo the whole thing, as the tutorial I followed (in Polish) had some serious flaws in it, as it uses dummies, and has the starting point that the whole train will remain still and the world will flow around it. So after scaling the whole animation was going completely weird.
Now it's fully rigged (apart from the steering) even the breaks are rigged, and I'm able to drag the train around while providing acurate animation. So letting it follow a track should be a breeze now.

Nice looking! Say, what renderer is it that you are using?
[ ] iRay  [ ] Octane [X] Maxwell

I only use Maxwell, and luckily in the latest release there are some additional features for which I was waiting.
Just a ping and updates are in posts above (before people get annoyed that it's not visible).

 

42

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« 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.

 

43

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« 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 

...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?
 

44

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« on: 2014-09-22 11:38:53 »

Professional deformation

Don't tell me you're into chemistry.... 
 

45

Team Avalanche / Re: Midgar Revival

« on: 2014-08-08 20:20:39 »

oh yes, we can do Lego mode...

but to fit a camera in there would be the challenge...
 

46

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« on: 2014-08-08 20:08:42 »

As far as I'm aware, the chibis were made as a first project, at the same time as the GUI. I believe at the time that HD field files were not even a priority. All this was made before I got on board - maybe SpooX or sl1982 would have a better idea of the history.

errr...
Mayo, don't know how to put it, but did you ever read the TA faq?

Q: Things look great but we want full sized models instead of chibi. Can you make some?

A: Nope, look elsewhere.

Of course in the end evrything might be modular, i.e. from the package you don't install everything, but that is basically the reason that some objects are in fact in 'Chibi-scale'. The annoying part of making everything in exact scale is that those little can as example will be lost in the scene. And furthermore, any field models will look out of place.

just my two cents to keep it in mind, in the end it will be our artistic freedom to do whatever we want...

Oh and if the taste is good, I'm in for a 25+ year old wiskey, now that would be 37 years by now...

I like the details...
 

47

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] WIP Sector 5 slums

« on: 2014-08-06 20:14:30 »

Regarding the trash objects, since they look relatively small, I'll make them more numerous. I wouldn't want to modify the scaling I've come up with.

How does the scale look with chibies running around..?
just wondering
 

48

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] Gallery J....

« on: 2014-07-29 23:27:54 »

This is seriously awesome 
For long term purposes: would you have any clue about how to set such camera animation rig in Blender? I was contemplating doing some Nibelheim scenes next year, and there are many similar camera animations in there (Lifestream flashback, mostly).

Thanks, used the clay preview this time...
I haven't looked into animation for blender yet, it's not as easy as in Max.

But, back to the details for now.
Slowly progressing, and testing another el-cheapo cpu setup for my renderfarm...

At least I will not be bothered by the fan running in full on my laptop 
enjoy.
 

49

Team Avalanche / Re: [HD Remake] Gallery J....

« on: 2014-07-27 18:35:16 »

Just out of curiosity, have you started tinkering with the camera animation to get the corresponding short FMV, like what you did in here?

Like this you mean?

click image to watch the prerender

PS the part from frame 200 is not done yet...
enjoy
 

50

Team Avalanche / Re: Midgar Revival

« on: 2014-07-27 18:05:41 »

Note to Moderators:
Please delete my old Midgar Remake thread.

That's not going to happen, we love history

Hiya Saphire, indeed long time no see, and random appearences...well that seems to be part of me
Oh and for the walkmeshes, I'm working on some improvements of the tool, I need to read out some lgp files and got that covered now.
So it should not be limited to the psx version anymore.
And something else I'm not going to tell about yet, but only available for max-users...