Hyrule Lost Woods - Full 4k CGI Fan made

[Romuald]

Hello everyone.

2 years ago, something like this, I posted on this forum a sort of teaser video on a project around the Zelda license.
Hyrule Lost Woods is a CGi Fan made I started to create 3 years ago.
At the beginning of the project I was only supposed to make one image, then several, and finally it turned into a 2 minute short film.
It took me a lot of time, probably way too much, but I can now show you the final result.

All the project is calculated with Corona renderer.
Most of the video shots are calculated in UHD, but some were calculated in 2k then upscaled on Topaz.
I really hope you enjoy watching.
If so, don't hesitate to follow this project on my Behance page, I would really appreciate it: https://www.behance.net/gallery/181968841/Hyrule-Lost-Woods-CGi-Sort-film

Thank you!
Cheers.
Romuald

Follow me below:
Web: https://romualdchaigneau.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/romuald-chaigneau-11a76296
Behance: https://www.behance.net/romualdchaigneau
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/romualdchaigneau/

[3Dmitri]

Wow, that's really awesome

[maru]

Do I remember correctly that you used some pretty low-end hardware for rendering with clever tricks to make it render faster? :) Or maybe you managed to get more computing in the process?
In any case, the final result is amazing!

[lollolo]

Wow, amazing, very well done! I would love to see more!

[Свет]

Well done man!!! Just incredible :)

[Lawson]

extraordinary, fantastic, sublime. well done

[Romuald]

Firstable, Thank you all of you ! :) I'm glad you like it.

@maru
yes you are right. 2 year ago I had a i7 with 32go, something like that.
At 2 thirds of the project, I upgraded my computer with a ryzen 5950x and 128go. This actually made the task easier for me. I still continued to render certain shots in several passes, when possible.
However, on certain shots where rendering times exceed 1 hour, I preferred to render in 2k then upscaled to 4k on topaz. And to be honest the result is sometimes better.

[Juraj]

Super beautiful, I wish you billion views for this! Hah funny reading the upscaled parts often looking better :- ). Did you upscale individual frames in Topaz image or the video itself? if the frames, did they still match in fluidness? Looks to be so.. very smooth video.

There are so many nicely animated elements, flowers, etc.. I would love to read about the process.

[Romuald]

Thank you Juraj!
Haha billions of views are going to be very complicated to achieve.

About upscal, I only used this process on a few shots, the last with the sword in the forest for example.
To have an acceptable rendering time, it was impossible for me to have 4k without noise. I didn't want to have times of 2 hours per frame.
So I preferred to render a clean 2k, then upscal. The result is better in this particular case.
The process is simple. I render exr in 2k in Max. I do my compositing in 2k in After effects. Then I export the result as a 2k PNG sequence.
I go into Topaz Video and upscale to 4K and I also export in PNG sequence.
I just have to import my 4K sequence into my montage.

[marchik]

All that remains is to wait until the marketing department of Chaos Czech establishes a special award with a substantial payment in euros:
“For popularizing an engine in the field of animation. Gone through suffering.”

Truly great work! Watched it several times, everything is very smooth, I was especially surprised by the almost clean bright bokeh without flickering.
Even the fact that you managed to grow so much plants with GrowFX and didn’t quit halfway through is already worthy of respect :D

The only thing that caught my eye is that it is possible to improve the particle simulation of raindrops at the very beginning, splashes are too slow and do not leave marks on the shot with stair steps and, in my opinion, and are too active and "contain too much water" on the closeup shot with the single plant

Extraordinary work, I wish you success, may this project still get at least a million views!

[Romuald]

@marchik Thank you so much!

About Bokeh, I think it's because I didn't calculate the depth blur in 3d. It was much too heavy in terms of calculation time, and complicated to animate if I wanted to come back to it.
So I opted for frischluft in after effects. In addition, I was able to calculate shots separately and with different noise limits. For a background, I could therefore leave some grain to save calculation time, then in composition I blur with frischluft.
About raindrops and splashes, you are totally right! This is really the part where I struggled the most.
It's not perfect and I'll try to improve on that. These shots were made 2 years ago, I think I could do better today.
But because I calculate everything on one  computer, I didn't want to recalculate there shots.
The real goal of this project was to make a 2-minute video to improve my production skills, organization, artistic direction and sound design.

Thank you everyone :)

[efren.alej]

Wow, amazing work man, how did you create the rain?

[Romuald]

@efren.alej
Hi. Thank you!
I created rain with tyflow. It's not perfect. And I used some rain footage in postprod.