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Team Avalanche / Re: Field Scene Screens (non bombing mission) Gallery
« on: 2012-09-22 14:58:17 »I'm back from my trip to Europe and can resume this discussion at last.It's secureROM'd so this is not going to happen without some questionable operations. I have no idea if the new data is remotely similar. Currently people are just wanting to use the new engine so it works on there newer PCs. It appears it is mostly a rework of the graphics engine so it can run better on newer systems.
Before I get back to the points you guys mentioned, I would like to point out two things:
- I am totally unaware of how things are implemented/programmed/computed within the game (and how the game handles assets, objects, and scenes). Besides, I have no insight into that because the versions of FF7 I own are only the PlayStation ones (so no mods for me to play with, at least so far. Anyone knows if the recently released PC version is mod-compatible?)
- The particular scene I am trying to model is actually full of inconsistencies. Among other things: The wooden supports of the trophy shelf have wrong perspectives (which is why they cannot be modelled in 3D like in the original picture), the bed is too small compared with many items (such as cans and cigs - if the bed is 2m long, the cans are 25 cm tall), the lighting doesn't add up (the actual lighting devices should be casting blue-shaded or white light, but the scene shows warm colours). Thus some aspects of modelling are difficult to choose.
Well as I was saying earlier there are many paths to get to where you want to go. It would be good to use the actual engine to do so apart from just making it a higher resolution. The original scene makers drew something and it was scanned in (very much how Anime is done by drawing certain amounts of a scene and overlaying sections etc). The person who ran the FF7 project was a film major so they used a more movie like method. It wasn't designed to be realistic (in any fashion).
I will make an effort to make things "dirtier" with textures (though I did apply some in my previous render). As for the lighting, I am still unsure: the original scene actually does not look very dark. The TV does show a brightly overexposed area in its vicinity. Anyway, I'll play around with the lights some more. So far I tried to be consistent with the lighting as should be given by the TV, lamps, and such, more than with the resulting colours of the scene. I have 3 lights: the TV, a daylight neon tube in the ceiling of the "pipe", and an outside light coming from the surrounding market plaza (which looks blueish).FF7 has no scene lighting instead it has cameras and 'modulation tiles', these tiles brighten sections of the background. Did you notice they never had spot lights ANYWHERE in the game except if they were fixed or in a movie?
Then, I know you can apply a video as a texture on a mesh in Blender, but we'll have to see how things can be implemented within the game indeed.
See further on about my thoughts. It doesn't HAVE to be a major challenge although I suppose one could make it difficult (LOL).
If I get it right, do you mean to make an initial render with the 3d modelling software (i.e. Blender in my case) and then we can add extra layers accounting for changes in light, suspended dust, and such, with an image processor such as Photoshop or Paintshop? Or rather make several renders with different lighting conditions (namely the one from the TV) and have them "loop" within the game to create an "animated light"? Or use both techniques?The scene is made up of a complex tile scheme that handles the background, foreground, and animation, all of which are controlled by the field script. They use this to add moving fountains water flowing (repeated sequences). Tiles can have transparent pixels. I believe FF7's engine Added those on top of the existing color image. So essentially it increase scene brightness doing that. The physical tiles exist in a MIM file so those need to be generated as well.
Anyway, I already have a bunch of things to try in order to improve the scene.
It is too bad one cannot use a battle scene instead of the field scene data. Unfortunately the engine does not allow flexibility to move inside a battle scene. I suppose to open doors leave etc one could just make the objects enemies and 'attack' them. Still it would not be the same.
Anyhow FF7 field screens consist of a background (everything is in front of it), sprites (player can walk behind or in front) and animated sprites (like the pitcher plants in the ancient forest or the water scene in the city of the ancients). So when you are making a re-render keep these elements in mind. The animated sprites can be transparent (so you could have slowly moving dust and light overlaying everyone in the scene). They can also be turned on and off (doors closing et al). It does add up if you aren't careful however (consumes more tile space).
The PSX builds scenes (see this image to clue yourself in) from data in the PSX VRAM. The PC information is here.
I'm working on releasing the project's files so that if anyone wants to continue it or use the resources they can.