Author Topic: NyLeve Falls Remake  (Read 12658 times)

2017-06-28, 11:43:02

Ludvik Koutny

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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.
« Last Edit: 2017-06-29, 10:49:38 by Rawalanche »

2017-06-28, 12:03:23
Reply #1

mike288

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very nice! :-)
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2017-06-28, 12:23:40
Reply #2

Buzzz

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Awesome!!!

2017-06-28, 13:40:31
Reply #3

johan belmans

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2017-06-28, 13:42:03
Reply #4

Ludvik Koutny

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2017-06-28, 13:49:05
Reply #5

impact design

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Amazing!
For our Regular updates Please visit our web
www.impactdesign.co.in

2017-06-28, 14:12:19
Reply #6

Juraj

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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.
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2017-06-28, 14:45:08
Reply #7

Art15

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Great work Rawalanche!
The world is a work in progress

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2017-06-28, 14:49:18
Reply #8

Fluss

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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 !

2017-06-28, 15:14:29
Reply #9

Ludvik Koutny

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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 :)


2017-06-28, 16:34:13
Reply #10

arqrenderz

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great work! great feel, the music is perfect.

2017-06-28, 18:09:59
Reply #11

JakubCech

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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.

2017-06-28, 18:42:50
Reply #12

melviso

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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?

2017-06-28, 19:30:02
Reply #13

Ałtaj

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

2017-06-29, 11:58:29
Reply #14

Olivier Lugand

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