NyLeve Falls Remake

[Ludvik Koutny]

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.

[mike288]

very nice! :-)

[Buzzz]

Awesome!!!

[johan belmans]

well done!!

[Ludvik Koutny]

Thank you :]

[impact design]

Amazing!

[Juraj]

That's super kick-ass and the music ! I thought the tree movements were done nicely, I didn't focus on them to notice it's just partial until I read the f.a.q afterwards.

I got slightly motion sick from the wobble...it does add to naturalness of the camera movement, but for my personal taste it's bit much. I like the perfect cinematic movements a bit more.

[Art15]

Great work Rawalanche!

[Fluss]

I agree with Juraj on the camera movement. I would have opted for completely smooth camera movements with cinemascope aspect ratio for a more cinematic feel (and you would have gained some render time by croping in).

Btw, it's really cool ! Gratz Rawa ! Every points you mentioned are not that noticable if you don't know them. The only thing i could tell is that the brick texture on the small house isn't that good.

And there is one thing i learned, I want to see MORE of your work !

[Ludvik Koutny]

Thanks :)

Yes, I may have overdone it with the camera sway. It's sort of cheesy "chromatic aberration" of camera animation workflows :D I kinda like it as it gives it that "shot from a helicopter feel" but I did not factor in possible motion sickness. I think that the fact it's 25FPS adds a lot to it, since 30FPS is much, much smoother on 60Hz screens (it aligns well with the refresh rate). Will keep that in mind for next projects :)

[arqrenderz]

great work! great feel, the music is perfect.

[JakubCech]

Now thats a very very pleasing to look at - congratulations! :) I especially love the foliage - I think you got it perfect, its very rich, vivid, and totally not CG looking (as many foliage out there is). You also got all the rest looking very natural, overally its super natural.
I would be curious how such animation look in fusion composition? Constructed by each pass? How the passes are used and how the ID maps are used.

[melviso]

Really nice work :-)
The amount of detail you have put in has contributed towards making the scene look very believable. I have never played the game tbh. My main problem is the guy on the ground, he takes away from the photorealistic look of the scene. Something about the pose looks off..can't quite place my finger on it. I really like the trees, shrubs, grass and ground textures. You must have worked a lot on them.
For a project like this, especially by one man there are bound to be areas that look excellent and areas that fall short. Don't sweat it. I have also been trying to learn rigging(not a big fan of this area of cg tbh) so I am learning it at my own pace. Rigging premade models until I get comfortable with it. Without rigging, animation would be a pain. Have you tried using motion capture?

[Ałtaj]

wonderful work! especially greenery and mountains, i need to ask you how were mountains made? How'd it look preparing textures for them?

[Olivier Lugand]

Amazing work !!! A short breakdown maybe ? :)

[Ludvik Koutny]

Thanks everyone!

JakubCech: I actually did not use any id masks or render elements. My fusion comp was mostly super simple. I have outputted only 1 render element! Zdepth pass :D

What's in my comp is mostly just some glows, glare, Dubcats magic photographic LUT, some Fog using Zdepth pass, and then also volumetric clouds in fusion were done just using Zdepth pass for depth masking and FBX-imported camera from 3ds Max scene to match the perspective. If I did some breakdown, it would show pretty much the same render, except you would see some color corrections, little bit of glow, atmospheric fog and clouds popping up :)

Melviso:
Yep, I did just quick and dirty job of rigging and posing the guy, so it doesn't look the best. Will try to improve it next time :) I guess what looks off is that his upper leg is quite high up in the air, implying he is still alive and has tensed muscles. If he was truly dead, the pose would be lot more relaxed with pelvis dropped all the way flat on the ground :) As for motion capture, I've toyed with it a little bit, but always smashed my face against some CAT bug :)

Ałtaj:
The base terrain was done in worldmachine. Then I selected slope polygons and extracted them into more dense meshes. Which were then displaced using procedural mixes of bercon noises, which were then decimated with pro-optimizer to keep the polycount reasonable. It was textured using complex procedural shaders, mostly utilizing Corona Triplanar map :)

[rozpustelnik]

@Rawalanche  How did You manage the camera to be so nicely moving throughout the scene? Aerial cam, ground cam, all with subtle slow shakes; adds a lot to a realism.

[Ludvik Koutny]

@Rawalanche  How did You manage the camera to be so nicely moving throughout the scene? Aerial cam, ground cam, all with subtle slow shakes; adds a lot to a realism.

It's really just noise controller on rotation track of the camera. You animate your camera, then you add rotation list controller on your rotation track, and add noise rotation controller under your rotation animation. Then you just tweak the settings around. XYZ rotation of 10,10,5 and frequency of 0.002 is usually a good starting point for me :)

[klipanos]

Just Beautiful!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Image Box Studios]

Oh my God...What a high level 3d video. Super quality. Camera movement is awesome.

[Tanakov]

Hats off, you are well aware of what can be improved so there is no point to talk about that, but damn this is something amazing.

I would love to see some making off's or that type of layered work post / comp etc.

Im really impressed.

[Fluss]

@Rawalanche just a little question regarding render settings, PT+PT or PT+UHD ?

[Ludvik Koutny]

@Rawalanche just a little question regarding render settings, PT+PT or PT+UHD ?

PT+UHD - Animation mode and precision at 2.0 :)

[Fluss]

That was fast :)

Thanks for the feedback ! UHD cache rendered every frames ?

[Ludvik Koutny]

That was fast :)

Thanks for the feedback ! UHD cache rendered every frames ?

Yup :)

[Fluss]

Great, thanks rawa. That help me a lot, I'll go that way for my project (see here : https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,17079.0.html).

👍👍👍

edit: Can I ask which render farm did you use ?