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.