3D Modeling Thread

[VirusPunk]

The point of this thread is to show off any 3D creation you have made, whether it's a custom background for RE/BH, portfolio work, a game project, personal work, etc. As long as it's 3D and your own work, feel free to show it off whether you're a beginner, amateur, or expert.

Offer constructive criticism when needed, but always be respectful to one's work and never bash or attack someone. We all had to start somewhere. Things such as helpful advise is always a necessity for improving, and shouldn't be taken as offensive or an attack on their work.

I'll start by posting a recent lab corridor I did inspired by Parasite Eve 2 and Resident Evil 1.5's locations, in the style of the classic games (3ds Max):



Oh and also, let others know what 3D modeling software you're using. That way, others will know how to help if necessary.

[biohazard_star]

After a really long hiatus, here's what I've been working on. If you can guess what room it is, then major props to you.

[Lanzagranadas]

Those backgrounds from both you guys are looking great, and really fit into the old school RE style.

I'm personally not good at background modeling, but I do character animation, mostly on Maya since it's a great software for that.

[Gemini]

biohazard_star, I think the style is good, but you made a mistake somewhere with dither settings. You seem to be overusing noise reduction. I assume you're using DepthDither, so when you go for reduction try and use 0% of any method (i.e. flat posterize). If your gradients skip a lot and look too flat, try bumping up either hue or contrast of textures. If your gradients display way too much noise, reduce textures until they are slightly blurry.

[biohazard_star]

@Lanzagranadas

Thanks. I'd love to see some samples of your work. Wouldn't mind seeing some of those old PSX RE models with some new animations.

@Gemini

Yep, you guessed correctly. I followed your advice and blurred the main wall and floor textures a bit. I also set Depth Dither's dithering mode to None. Here's the result, it seems to have helped quite a bit with reducing the amount of noise in the scene:

[Gemini]

I guess I may have noticed two more issues worth to point out:
1) You have one black outline anywhere a wall makes an intersection with another wall, floor, or ceiling. Is that because the mesh isn't connected together or something more subtle like ambient occlusion?
2) Overlay captions seem either floating from a surface or not blending correctly. Are you using floating polygons to attach them on a surface or layered textures? Also, you could add some dirt effect on them to make them blend a little more realistically.

[biohazard_star]

The black outlines along the edges are because of ambient occlusion. I suppose I should turn it off, since the official Capcom renders didn't make use of them. Oh, and I also have the sharpening filter in C4D turned on at 7%. I'm not sure if that's a contributing factor to the noise. Decals/text are just floating polygons layered very closely to the floor. I'll eventually use some procedural noise + layer mask to give it that tattered chipped paint look to make it blend more closely with the floor.

[VirusPunk]

@Lanza; thanks I appreciate it. I'd love to see your work dude. Animation and rigging has never really been my strong point.

@Bio; as stated on Steam, that is by far one of the best looking backgrounds I've seen in a long time. So C4D has ambient occlusion even on it's software renderer? For Max I always had to use Mental Ray to be able to turn on AO. 10/10.

[SonicBlue]

AR3 (now Standard Renderer) supports all the range of features, including Global Illumination.

For the text I would stack another material on top of another, with only the Color and Alpha channels turned on, set the projection to Flat, and turn Tile off. To move it around select the Texture Mode, and press L to have better control on it, remember to turn off the Axis modification mode when you're done since you can't edit your mesh while editing the pivot position.

[biohazard_star]

Well, the room's pretty much more or less finalized. I suppose I'm gonna have to revisit it later to fine-tune the camera angles and add a few more stuff (once I've expanded my library of assets). I hope you guys like it. Constructive criticism is welcome, so I can improve on the style and quality of my renders more.



@SonicBlue

I'll try to mess around with the UV, alpha and procedural noise settings, see what works for the text.
BTW Sonic, did the official Capcom renders make use of Global Illumination? I used it for the above renders. I contemplated on whether I should use it or not, since turning it off produced blacks around the falloffs that were a bit too deep.

[VirusPunk]

AR3 (now Standard Renderer) supports all the range of features, including Global Illumination.

For the text I would stack another material on top of another, with only the Color and Alpha channels turned on, set the projection to Flat, and turn Tile off. To move it around select the Texture Mode, and press L to have better control on it, remember to turn off the Axis modification mode when you're done since you can't edit your mesh while editing the pivot position.

The question is, did Capcom even have access to or use GI back then? Max's software renderer doesn't even support GI, only MR and V-ray do, and those are completely unnecessary for producing those '97 looks. I was always under the impression that GI is meant for realistic lighting, not the atmospheric lighting that the early Capcom renders go for. GI tends to scatter the reflections, and this was never seen in any of the early Capcom renders that I'm aware of.

But bio's background looks very solid as is, very impressive.

[SonicBlue]

Mental Ray 2.x doesn't support Global Illumination, last year version had a hybrid GI+Final Gather, only the latest Mental Ray has a "decent" GI algorithm, that's why you don't see it used in Arch Viz.
For this kind of stuff, GI is a total waste of render time.

Just for comparison:

Cinema 4D Physical render:



Maya 2016 Mental Ray:



(I must say that I'm not very familiar with it, but it's complicated that I couldn't get rid of that noisy shadows)

Reference picture:



Anyway, CAPCOM probably used Mental Ray since the beginning.



The effect on the light is something only Mental Ray is capable of (in SOFTIMAGE|3D), via special shaders on the camera. There is not visual differences between SI|3D software renderer and MR (except for particular stuff done with specific shaders, like glass), they differ only in options available, for example MR can use Network Render, so that you can use multiple machines to render the frame, it also features more AA options and windowed render preview.


I would use UVs only in specific cases, the standard automatic projections do a good job and it's also quicker to setup.

[VirusPunk]

I was thinking of that too. It's surprising that Capcom would use MR as far back as RE1 though, render times must have been atrocious back then. I was telling Bio on Steam earlier that I recommend making the lights on his render glow, but you can achieve that effect even in Photoshop post processing. 3ds Max's software renderer has the capabilities of adding a lens glow effect, only it's not as effective as MR's, and that picture does look like something MR's self illumination shaders / camera shaders would produce perhaps.

I never had that problem in MR in Max, even rendering with default settings seems to produce adequate results. However, in V-ray I've had noisy shadows, and the solution was to (using Photometric lighting) set the shadow bias to a very low value (0.001) and shadow resolution cranked up above 256 or so. Then you have your renderer noise filter settings (cranks up time to render, but well worth it).

The C4D render looks very realistic, good job on that.

[SonicBlue]

Surprisingly render times are almost identical to the SI|3D's software renderer. The only difference is just on the features available, MR has more to offer.



This is a scraped picture from the GC version of REbirth, that question mark texture is SI|3D's "texture is missing" picture. So as you can see, you can achieve a wide range of quality from the same renderer, what changes are the attention to details, texture quality, mesh definition and post processing.
So rather than concentrating in the tools to use, it's better to look on how to achieve the desired look while keeping to process manageable.

The problem with shadows in Maya's MR is that Maya Lights are the least user friendly I ever seen, leaving you with very few options to work with, not knowing the software also played a role in that result. MR needs too much efford to obtain a decent result, compared to what you can easily achieve with VRay, Arnold or Octane, if you then consider the extreme slowness, it's not worth the investment on studying it.

[Lanzagranadas]

@ biohazard_star, VirusPunk: Ok, here's the video (just added to my signature too):

As I mention in the video description, characters models with their skeletons came all from REUC and REDC, and they were extracted by Grotesque from the TR Forums, weapons were extracted by DamianHandy, whose models can be seen on his DeviantArt gallery.

So what did I do? I turned the base skeletons into actually workable rigs for keyframing animation (added control curves, IK chains, rest positions, and other stuff to get proper control on bones).

Then I finally did the animations, that was the whole point . Since this was mainly for testing purposes, some of the animations aren't on a final stage and need polishing. I carefully worked on the rigs with a self-made script in order to allow me to copy animations between characters, this script made animation transfer work so far with every REUC/REDC human and zombie character, so as for human characters only one male and one female needed to be animated.