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Gallery / NyLeve Falls Remake
« on: 2017-06-28, 11:43:02 »
Hey,
so for a past few months, I've been working on a personal project. I guess those of you who have played the first Unreal game will recognize the place a bit. It's the NyLeve Falls level. I love the game to this day for its amazing atmosphere and soundtrack, but these days, graphics are a bit dated. Back in the day, just those few polygons, textures and soundtrack were enough for my brain to draw all the details into the world, so I tried to re-create how the level looked in my imagination when I first played the game. There's quite a few things I am not happy with, but I had to just call it done at some point.
Here's some preemptive FAQ:
It's noisy/flickery af at some place:
Yes, it is. It was 3450 frames of fullCG animation of scene covered in foliage. I've pumped over 1400EUR out of my own money into a renderfarm for a personal project, and I just could not afford any more. So for all the money I got quite noisy frames, and what you are looking at is actually heavily denoised output. It's not very good, but I take it over not finishing the project at all :)
It's blurry af:
Yep, it again comes to not being able to afford more rendering resources. I had to render at 720p and upscale to 1080. I'm just too poor to renderfarm. I had something around 15 minutes of rendertime per frame. I find that a testament of how fast Corona is :) The scene had about 92 billion of instanced polygons.
Waterfall looks crap:
Yep, I did not plan to set the time aside for figuring out a good waterfall simulation, and Corona does not support many fluid sims anyway, so it's the best I could do at the time. I will make it better next time, I hope :)
There are no animals or nali:
Yup, I learned the hard way it's not possible to learn to become a character sculptor, modeler, texturing artist, rigger and animator at once on a level sufficient enough for it to look acceptable in a middle of a large, challenging project. I tried, I got somewhere but I ultimately failed. If I want to learn these skills, I will have to try on a much smaller and easier project first.
How did you render those volumetric clouds in Corona?
I didn't. It's volumeFog tool in Blackmagic Fusion, comped in :)
Trees move but branches and leaves don't
Yes, I am not very happy about that. I wanted the scene to feel a bit windy and dynamic, and I had tree leaves and branches animated and ready, but Corona 1.6 does not yet work very well with many instances with animated deformation. It is already fixed in 1.7 daily, and hopefully it will remain fixed until official 1.7 release. But unfortunately, commercial renderfarms don't do daily builds.
Do you have lowpoly version of the scene to prove you've made it?
No.
You must have used V-Ray, Mari and ptex to achieve that.
No.
So here it is :)
EDIT: Forgot to mention it was rendered in Ranch Renderfarm, their tech support is really great.
so for a past few months, I've been working on a personal project. I guess those of you who have played the first Unreal game will recognize the place a bit. It's the NyLeve Falls level. I love the game to this day for its amazing atmosphere and soundtrack, but these days, graphics are a bit dated. Back in the day, just those few polygons, textures and soundtrack were enough for my brain to draw all the details into the world, so I tried to re-create how the level looked in my imagination when I first played the game. There's quite a few things I am not happy with, but I had to just call it done at some point.
Here's some preemptive FAQ:
It's noisy/flickery af at some place:
Yes, it is. It was 3450 frames of fullCG animation of scene covered in foliage. I've pumped over 1400EUR out of my own money into a renderfarm for a personal project, and I just could not afford any more. So for all the money I got quite noisy frames, and what you are looking at is actually heavily denoised output. It's not very good, but I take it over not finishing the project at all :)
It's blurry af:
Yep, it again comes to not being able to afford more rendering resources. I had to render at 720p and upscale to 1080. I'm just too poor to renderfarm. I had something around 15 minutes of rendertime per frame. I find that a testament of how fast Corona is :) The scene had about 92 billion of instanced polygons.
Waterfall looks crap:
Yep, I did not plan to set the time aside for figuring out a good waterfall simulation, and Corona does not support many fluid sims anyway, so it's the best I could do at the time. I will make it better next time, I hope :)
There are no animals or nali:
Yup, I learned the hard way it's not possible to learn to become a character sculptor, modeler, texturing artist, rigger and animator at once on a level sufficient enough for it to look acceptable in a middle of a large, challenging project. I tried, I got somewhere but I ultimately failed. If I want to learn these skills, I will have to try on a much smaller and easier project first.
How did you render those volumetric clouds in Corona?
I didn't. It's volumeFog tool in Blackmagic Fusion, comped in :)
Trees move but branches and leaves don't
Yes, I am not very happy about that. I wanted the scene to feel a bit windy and dynamic, and I had tree leaves and branches animated and ready, but Corona 1.6 does not yet work very well with many instances with animated deformation. It is already fixed in 1.7 daily, and hopefully it will remain fixed until official 1.7 release. But unfortunately, commercial renderfarms don't do daily builds.
Do you have lowpoly version of the scene to prove you've made it?
No.
You must have used V-Ray, Mari and ptex to achieve that.
No.
So here it is :)
EDIT: Forgot to mention it was rendered in Ranch Renderfarm, their tech support is really great.
