Final Fantasy 9 camera

[Lein]

I have started to work on recreating the first room in the game, the one with the candle. I have got a rough outline of the room and I want to take it into blender to start add tons of detail to it. Problem is I don't have the original camera from the game, or how wide the lens on the camera was. I don't know how people did it with the FF7 backgrounds. Is there some way to get the camera information into blender so I can render it out so it matches the original background?

[jmp434]

Photo mathing

[Lein]

Try to place the camera and figure out the proper lens by hand, that's a pain.

[Lein]

I gave it another try, it's not practical and probably not even possible to try to match the camera location by hand. Location, rotation, width of the lens, too much stuff to get right. Maybe it's possible to export the camera from sketchup but I don't know how to do that, I guess I'll put this on hold until some other person who's into this kind of stuff gets around to messing around with it, I know you're out there geekily geeks.

[Tetraspore]

Have you tried setting the original image on a plane and positioning the objects and camera in a way that line up with that plane? You know, like how you'd model a character or anything.

[Lein]

You usually don't model characters that way but yeah I loaded a background image in blender and tried to align it with the geometry but it's pretty much impossible. It has to be at the right location have the right rotation and have the right focal length on the camera. If I knew the lens of the camera they used to render the original picture with lining up the background image would be easier. While trying to do this it seems like they rendered the image at at about 20-40 degrees. So you put the camera where you think it roughly is supposed to be, then you rotate it so it looks down at the picture about how it looks in the picture. That's the camera at 20 degrees, now let's try 21 degrees and then you've got to do the whole thing over again and try to spot which of the 20 or so different focal lengths on the camera looks accurate. For each degree you've got to modify the location of the camera and possible the rotation. It's not practical and I doubt people went through this process when they redid the Final Fantasy 7 backgrounds in that other forum section.

However the photo match tool in sketchup, I think what it does is that it creates a camera and you align the perspective lines with the photo to create the accurate focal length on the camera. If there's a way to see the width of the camera in sketchfab or maybe export the camera and take it into blender. That would fix the problem, not sure how to do that. Then creating this background image would be easy.

[DanTsukasa]

Blender has a tool called BLAM that helps you line up the camera, its much better than doing it in sketchfab.

https://github.com/stuffmatic/blam

Try it out from there.

Exporting cameras from 3D Software either requires a custom plugin or it'll require FBX or DAE formats, something like OBJ can't contain anything other than a static mesh, so that'd be out of the question.

[Lein]

So you can have a camera match a background in blender instead, ill try blam ut, thanks.

[Lein]

I think I got the right fov on the camera, 30.2 mm/55,829 degrees. The problem now is to put the camera in the right location and have it's rotation be accurate, I attempted to match it to the background but when I started to block it out I noticed that the rotation of the camera was a bit off. I don't know if other modders had the camera to work from but whatever the case this probably isn't a good idea. This image might look like it's a good start but the camera is supposed to look down more at the picture, this is important otherwise when the characters walks through the scene he'll seem like he's running into the floor. I'll put this on hold until someone figures out a good way to do this or omes out with a program that can rip the camera from the game.

[Fraggoso]

Did you asked the team behind the new field scenes from FFVII how they're doing it?

[Kaldarasha]

There is a tool to import the fields walkmesh into blender, but it was only shared between the members of team Avalanche, as far as I know. I dunno if you could use this for ff9.

[Lein]

Fraggoso if they've read this thread I've asked them, anyway I'm a model creator not an expert at ripping cameras and walk meshes from the final fantasy games. Photo matching is intuitive enough but aligning the camera in blender and matching everything perfectly is not my cup of tea. If someone is good at this stuff and wanna cooperate on some improved backgrounds for the game let me know.

[Tetraspore]

Very good work! I'm still waiting on my new rig, but I want to work on this stuff as well. The FFIX maps really need this treatment.

[DanTsukasa]

Little sad to see this go on hold, I was curious how this'd turn out.

Seems you've largely matched up the camera but its a little off, its difficult to perfect, and doing it by eye for over 410 backgrounds is a bit much though, can understand why that'd be a turn off.

[Lein]

Thanks, yeah it would be cool to see a new version of it. Here's the original background, the ps1 background was 320x240 this background is 960x640. That's an image that contains three times as much detail and they just pasted the low res background onto it and applied some filter on it in an attempt to clean it up a bit. A new version of the backgrounds rendered at the 960x640 resolution would look really crisp. While it's possible to recreate the scene with little effort getting the camera to match the location/angle of the original camera is difficult and unless it's something that could be done automatically by ripping the camera and maybe the walk mesh from the game I'm not going to bother with it. The walkmesh you could just line up with the floor and you would get an accurate guide to go by.

[Fraggoso]

The psx backgrounds are exactly 50% smaller.
The room you see above is not 320x240 but 480x320 instead.

[Lein]

Yeah you're right, 50% smaller are the original backgrounds. You would probably notice it if you added 50% of that detail back to the pictures, a lot of pixels. Modern rendering is also better, the backgrounds would look photorealistic, this can be good or bad because they might look too good for the cartoon characters. But who knows maybe they'll match.