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Guide for replicating old school Capcom esque RE backgrounds (For 3ds Max)

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  • Guide for replicating old school Capcom esque RE backgrounds (For 3ds Max)

    This is a short and simple guide for replicating the early Capcom esque background style as seen in Resident Evil 1, 1.5, 2, and 3, and although the guide is written for 3ds Max in mind, the information provided here can be used for any 3D application including Maya, SoftImage, Cinema 4D, etc. Max is highly recommended though for use. I’ll start off the guide by listing various do’s and don’t’s.

    The Do’s and Don’t’s:

    Do’s:
    1. + Use the default software renderer (for 3ds Max this is called scanline).
    2. + Stick to primitive low poly objects and assets, use only minimal chamfering only when necessary. For round objects such as pipes or electrical wires, use smoothing groups only.
    3. + Stick with default omni point lights and place them at the center of the rooms/hallways.
    4. + Always use a lighting falloff (this will be further explained in detail below), in Max’s case this is the Far Attenuation settings.
    5. + Use simple UV mapping for texturing majority of the objects.
    6. + This coincides with the above, use composite/mix materials to blend various textures or add noise to your maps.
    7. + Make sure your GAMMA/LUT settings are correct.
    8. + Always post produce your work in Photoshop. Duplicate your background as a new layer and add a sharpen filter with an opacity of about 15-25%.
    9. + Build your scene in the correct size and scale of RE by using a RE character model as a reference point.
    10. + Although you can get away with guessing on how the various props in the scene should look, always use a reference to what you’re modeling.
    11. + Pick the correct textures, perhaps even use official stock textures that Capcom used.
    12. + Only stick with industry standard applications. 3ds Max, Maya, SoftImage, Cinema 4D, Blender, etc.



    Don’t’s:
    1. - Do not use mental ray or vray or anything equivalent. Although MR/VR may look better, the idea is to achieve backgrounds that look identical to Capcom’s for the time, and for the time those backgrounds were made they did not use MR/VR. REmake/Zero is a different story, but those games are irrelevant for our goal here.
    2. - Do not model everything in high poly and utilize the turbosmooth/meshsmooth, this is a big waste of time. Not only will this crank up render times dramatically, but it won’t even be noticeable in such a low aspect ratio.
    3. - Do not use any sort of advanced lighting and do not stick the lights directly in-front of the light source. If you study closely at the official backgrounds the lights are setup within the centers of the rooms/hallways.
    4. - Just do not neglect this step as it’s the most important to achieving that old school Capcom look.
    5. - Do not waste your time unwrapping every single object in your scene, most detail can be achieved by adding a simple UV map modifier. Although for certain objects that have labels such as a cardboard box or paint can is the only exception in which you unwrap it and create the texture in Photoshop. Alpha maps can be used as an alternative, however.
    6. - Do not stick with just bare simple textures, mix and blend textures and use noise filters to achieve that primitive dirty look (like grime you see on walls, etc).
    7. - In-fact, turn off GAMMA/LUT correction completely. If you force a specify gamma setting it can produce ugly reddish artifacts when converting your background to 16-bit for game ready use.
    8. - While you might be able to get a perfect result from the renderer itself, it’s always best to post produce your work in Photoshop.
    9. - There is nothing like spending hours building a nice detailed scene only to find it doesn’t match at all with the proper scaling of RE. Always use a reference before modeling anything!
    10. - Don’t guess, always use a reference! If you’re modeling say a metal door from RE, extract the texture used for the door sequence for that door and use it as a reference for modeling. Do the same for practically every object you plan to include in your background. Not everything can be referenced so easily so try your best to model the object as accurately as possible.
    11. - Don’t make your concrete solid red and the floors purple, this looks ugly. Stick with a color palette and don’t mix too many multi-colored textures. Use official Capcom renders as references for picking the correct textures, or hell use the textures that Capcom themselves used.
    12. - Don’t use level editors from other games and engines like Source, Doom, UDK, Unity, etc. They cannot produce the same result as a pipeline 3D renderer can. Taking screencaps of a real time engine will just look bad for this purpose.



    Lighting:

    The most crucial and important aspect of getting that old school Capcom look (even Square Enix used this for Parasite Eve 2) is to have a lighting falloff for every light you have set up in your scene (it’s best to just duplicate multiple instances of the same Omni and have them centered in the room or hallway). For Max users this setting is the Far Attenuation setting. The lighting falloff is the solid black areas (not shadows) showing outside each light’s radius, every Capcom render has this if you look closely, and some areas are less noticeable than others. Under the Far Attenuation, use a small “Start” value and a midranged “End” value. I find that having a value of 58 for the End value works pretty well, but you may have to play with it depending on how many light instances you have in your scene and how big the room you’re building is. In the example room I provided below, I only used one Omni light in the center of the room with a Start value of 10 and an End value of 58. For shadows themselves, lower the shadow intensity value to about 0.5 or 0.6, as having shadows at 1.0 will produce very harsh results. If your scene has merely one light, leave the light intensity at about 0.8-1.0 (1.0 being default), although if your scene has multiple instances of the same Omni you’ll have to lower the intensity as so your scene doesn’t appear too brightly lit. Although it might look cool or otherwise creepy (in a good way), refrain from having your intensity values too low as so the scene doesn’t appear too dark, this will in the end wind up looking pretty awful once you convert it to 16-bit (as too much black areas appear very muddy in that bit depth). The official Capcom renders are in-fact fairly bright, despite being a horror theme game. The lighting falloff however gives it that creepy/cool looking atmosphere. Remember, Capcom renders are not necessarily realistic, but more or less aimed at looking artistic. Compare it to looking at a photograph of a real life scene to a painting of that very same scene, the painting may look “realistic” from an artistic perspective, but you can still tell that it’s a painting. For producing REmake/Zero quality background is a whole different ball game, but I will not get into that for this guide as the main purpose covers the old school early look and approach.



    Apart from using standard Omni point lights, Capcom also used spotlights for certain occasions. Most notable is the “crow” painting puzzle hallway in RE1. These are more or less put in place for aesthetic effects only, so even if your lights are meant to produce a spot in a certain direction, you should still set up the scene with omni point lights as the main sources of lighting in your room as well and regardless of the spotlights.

    Omni point light setup in Max:


    Final post produced render:


    Modeling:

    Not much can really be said about how to model each individual object as you really only need a basic understanding of how to model objects in the 3D application to begin with. There are plenty of tutorials out there to get you started on modeling, so I won’t go over every single step to modeling individual props, that is up to you to learn on your own. However, I will give advise and suggest ways to model your objects with the creation of RE backgrounds in mind. Use minimal chamfering and only when necessary. RE backgrounds are native in 320x240, 16-bit, but upscaled to 640x480 when ran in game, which produces a dithered “blown up” scaled effect. Chamfering the edges of say a table will only be noticeable if the object is closer to the camera and not further away from it. Don’t waste your time with extremely high subdivision objects (turbosmooth), Capcom used an early version of SoftImage which was only capable of producing NURBS models and standard primitives, they did not have access to subdivision modeling at this time, and even if they did the effects would hardly be noticeable, if at all. For rounded objects such as pipes, use smoothing groups. You can produce a pipe with only 8, 16-24 subdivisions, apply a smoothing group and it’ll look adequate enough for what we’re going for here. For pipes and wires, splines are your friend here. For objects with engraved shapes, booleans are your best friend. The emphasis here is to stay as primitive as possible. With every object in your scene (provided you model a ton of props) your overall scene polycount should total at roughly 10,000 - 50,000, 100,000 for the very big scenes with a ton of props at the most. We live in an age where polycount is pretty irrelevant and most modern PC’s can render the multi millions, but your way of thinking has to switch to year 1997 mode, pretend you’re in 1997 and you’re limited to what PC’s of those days could barely handle. PC’s back then would choke and crash even rendering 250,000 polys, which by todays standards is not that big a deal. At the same time, you don’t want to go too low poly, since we’re not developing for a real time game engine, you can get away with things higher than normal for the time due to being pre-rendered as opposed to something you’d find for a real time game engine. Remember, in 1997 each background took roughly two weeks to render according to Capcom sources, and keep in mind these scenes were more than likely less than 100,000 polys. Thankfully, most modern PC’s should render them in less than a minute. Use both images of specific props found on Google and the official backgrounds themselves as references for modeling your props. It’s not that hard to load up a background and place it on a plane to use as a reference for modeling. Although CGTextures is mainly for textures, it has a wide arrange of various man-made object references as well.

    Textures:

    Having the correct textures is also crucial in achieving a Capcom esque RE style background. You should in-fact even go as far as using some of the official stock textures that Capcom themselves used for producing their scenes, in which a few of these textures have been discovered and made available to download. Your alternative is to use the various free textures found on CGTextures.com or some of the material libraries that come with your copy of 3ds Max. If you go with the latter option, some necessary “touch up” work in Photoshop may be required, or you can alternatively use composite maps within Max itself to blend and color correct your textures together. Bump maps were rarely used in Capcom’s renders, if at all, and even if you do use them use as low of values as possible. For materials, use only standard materials and bitmaps (between anisotropic, blinn, and phong) with midranged specularity and gloss. I suggest you learn more about materials in Max to get a better understanding of what material type to use for the different objects (concrete, metals, glass, plastic, etc).

    Here’s a couple examples of textures used for the official Capcom backgrounds:





    Here’s a URL to download even more textures (not all of the official textures were found, we can only hope they someday pop up):
    It will be a dream come true modders remake backgrounds like in re4hdproject. Look their page re4hd.com and enjoy


    For certain objects that have labels like a cardboard box, can of paint or an oil barrel, you might need to UV unwrap the object and produce the necessary texture in Photoshop. I would advise to only use this as a last approach as unwrapping objects can be very time consuming depending on the object and how many polys it has. The alternative is to use alpha maps with a transparent texture, but often doing it this way can lead to producing white artifacts along the edges between the texture and the transparency if there is too much anti-aliasing/blending along the edges between the texture and the transparency part. I only recommend the latter for creating things such as posters hanging on walls on planar objects only.

    Be Creative & Have a Blueprint:

    Although the emphasis of this guide is to replicate Capcom backgrounds, adding your own creativity can go a long way. We have enough replications and reproductions as it is, if you do reproduce an existing background, try to add your own creative ideas and not just copy it completely. Team IGAS’s backgrounds are a good example of recreated RE 1.5 backgrounds with their own unique ideas and creativity added to it while staying true to the old Capcom style production methods. It would be otherwise pointless if they merely recreated the backgrounds exactly and identical to the way the official Capcom ones look when they’re already readily available to us. Stay true to the style and methods but add your own plot twists. Furthermore, having a plan and concept in mind beforehand can help in the long run. If you just randomly start working on a scene without putting thought into it you might get lost and find yourself unable to continue. Have a plan and a blueprint and ask yourself: Why does this particular area exist? What/where does it connect to? What purpose does it serve, is it a utility room, a power room, an Umbrella lab? How does it add up to the rest of the scenes and how does it connect to the story/plot? It might even help to draw out a very rough concept before you begin building the scene, even if you aren’t particularly good at drawing, having your idea and thoughts on paper can prevent you from forgetting if say you work on the scene between various days and/or intervals.

    Pace yourself. There is no need to rush and finish a scene in an entire day. If you model a simple bathroom and it takes 4-5 days to complete it, so be it. It’s better to have a complete background in two weeks than it is a bland and boring incomplete one in just a day. I’ve made the mistake several times of rushing to finish in a few hours and show it off only to come back to it the next day and spot a ton of mistakes or just things that overall don’t fit or could be improved upon. Work on it until you are absolutely 100% sure the background is complete.

    For starters, download Leo2236's RE2RDTE, as it comes with a free .Max example scene with a Leon model loaded up, build your scene props and stuff around the Leon model:
    http://www.datafilehost.com/d/790df7f8 ** Uncheck use our download manager **

  • #2
    I think you forgot one important detail about textures: CAPCOM used to have them in really low resolutions. Why this? Because it removes noise and creates better gradients when you reduce pictures to 15 bits. I suggested this for 1.5 and the current reduced backgrounds look way better and definitively integrate with the original style.

    A couple examples of noise-free BGs:

    Resident Evil: Behind the Mask twitter
    , also in Facebookian flavor for great justice.

    Comment


    • #3
      That's some low resolution you got there, wow...

      The camera angle of the Communications Room is a big improvement over the old Preview version's!
      Last edited by Enigmatism415; 07-11-2015, 02:30 PM.

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