Stepping up my game. (How to make "game" renders)
ghastlycomic
Posts: 2,531
I've got an animation project in mind (basically the characters from Ghastly's Ghastly Comic playing an MMO) and I've been trying to make renders that look game-like. And by game-like I mean "I'm running this on an old Windows XP laptop" game-like and not "I've got the best gaming computer known to mankind" game-like.
I've been studying a lot of game models to make sure I get the modelling of the characters right (going to be weird working with such low poly counts after never having really cared about the polygons budget before) and I've been trying to get them to render in a way that makes them look as close as they did to the game they came out of. It seems OpenGL is the engine that gives the results I'm most after, which makes sense since most game engines render in OpenGL or DirectX and it certainly gives me the speed I'm hoping for. But the OpenGL Intermediate gives completely unusable shadows in Daz Studio. Is there a way to make Daz Studio render shadows in OpenGL that will look more like the way an actual game engine renders OpenGL shadows?
I can kind of get the effect I'm after with 3Delight but I find that 3Delight really doesn't like low poly non-subdivided models. These random black lines appear along the edge of the polygons with non subD models in 3Delight.
Iray produces really cute looking renders of low poly models. They look like photos of little paper models, it's absolutely adorable, but definitely not what I'm after.
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Comments
Have you thought of just importing the models into an old game like Quake? If that's the look you're going for, you can't get more authenticate than that.
It would certainly get the look I'm after, but it would make animating it the way I want much more difficult.
Look into Garry's Mod, maybe.
http://www.sourcefilmmaker.com/
Have you looked in to that at all? I thought it looked pretty interesting. There is a place to get a bunch of free models to use for it too.
https://sfmlab.com/
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2B46DEB4157E67C4
That is the basic tutorials made by the company.
From what I understand the problem I will have using SFM is since Daz Studio uses it's own proprietary DAE and FBX formats instead of actually using the standards if I rig my model in Daz Studio it'll be pretty much impossible to use it in anything other than Daz Studio. I'll want to be using all my own models for this project.
What is this "Ghastly comic" you speak of?
My first thought was, the game animation needs to be grainy. Perhaps render it at a smaller size than you need so it scales up and loses detail.
Ah, you might be right about the rigging, not sure. I do remember having lots of issues when I wanted to use g2f in maya. Ended up giving up on that altogether.
Here's the TV Tropes page about the comic, since the actual comic is very NSFW. It was a comic I did back in the early days of webcomics. It was pretty popular for the time with about 175,000 readers each week. I had a mental breakdown in 2006 which pretty much ended the comic (I update it every now and then when the mood takes me instead of a weekly update like when I was doing it regularly). I was thinking it would be kinda fun to mix it with my love of 3D modelling and acting and music composition and bring the old characters together in a different setting.
About games I know nothing, but for better display results of low poly models in D/S an edge line works wonders. Might help?
It's also been really interesting studying the topology of low poly game models, It's certainly given me better ideas on how to model stuff to get the look I'll be after.
It was also neat to see the advancement of what's considered "low poly". The legacy World Of Warcraft gnome female model was a little over 1000 tris, the current WoW gnome is 4 times the number of tris the difference is astounding.
I myself would use iClone but since you would also need 3DXchange that is not cheap
but you will love it once you have it.
Here's the test of the different render engines. OpenGL definitely makes it more old school game looking and has the bonus of being the fastest render.
It's weird that of all the render engines only Iray actually makes the white plane the figure is standing on look white. It looks dark grey in all the other renders for some weird reason.