What about... Rendered Graphics + Oldschool Perpective (5days)?

[goldensox]

Working on a new rendering style to make adventure games quicker... It's beautiful, It's quick, you can make hi-res games that looks wonderfull..

Here, the Kitchen of 5days a Strange, using that new techic... Tried to stay 1:1 as far as I could.

Comments are appreciated.

[Anian]

1st of all - doors shouldn't go all the way to the ceiling, also the door on the right doesn't have a frame and the door on the left is too narrow.

2nd (and hoping this is cause of the wip status) there's nothing outside of the windows

3rd of all -this actually is concerning me, cause I plan to use 3d also, how do you plan to implement sprites (characters especially)? This bothers me cause I don't know how to shade (and on that note place their shadows) them to corespond with each room if I use 3d sprites; on the other hand if I draw them, they'll probably not blend with the background that well

This looks pretty cool/acurate as the room in the game.
I myself plan on using GoogleSketch for backgrounds and probably TrueSpace for the charcters.

[Khris]

Yeah, you should avoid those strong drop shadows. They'll make the characters look out of place.

I'd use one soft light source and move it above the center of the floor and way up.

[goldensox]

Ok, lets see...

Fixed them doors, and added a frame on the one by the right.

The windows have a plain white background, Maybe if I expand this to the complete mansion, I will add the grassy background it sould have.

Actually I'm using renders, not the realtime 3d archive. I can use both 2d sprites or rendered ones, It depends on the result I'm heading to.

Sketchup is THE tool to make prerend adventures, It's like... So simple and quick, also, with Vray, you can render itens, menu, interfaces... everthing.

About the shadows, I tried to make them a bit more... A bit less STRONG, but It was this strong or none at all (I mean, the smallest bluring possible simply got rid of almost all shadows.

[Buckethead]

As you are rendering in 3d you should totally make advantage of it. The cool thing about rendering is that you don't have to optimize. So go crazy with big texture maps and dirty unwraps. You should really try to get a bit more detail in your texturing. There is hardly any material defination. It might also be nice to use ambient occlusion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_occlusion

It just makes things looks less artificial.

[Hudders]

Can you not optimise your images a bit better, or link to them rather than put them in the thread? It's already taking an age to load this page and it's only going to get worse if you keep adding your updates.

The images are good but everything looks small and as if it's made of plasticine. I keep expecting Postman Pat to walk through the door.

[Anian]

VRay is professional, golden, but there's another renderer, that's free and has some cool materials that you can download (at least I found some cool stuff I need for artdeco style of interiors), it's called Kerkythea. I found this cool blog that shows how to instal it:
http://www.alexschreyer.net/cad/rendering-sketchup-models-with-kerkythea/

And yeah, might try putting a picture that's a bit more compressed, cause this takes ages to load here (and no, I don't have a slow connection).

[goldensox]

I'm going to try a more realistic style... I was going for something more Video-Game looking cause I think that, with all games appealing to realism without content, without style, they're losing the point in games. Will try to conceal both things.

I'm turning the first post into a Gallery, using Linkage to make it faster and connection friendly. I'm going to overhaul the pictures with textures, effects and such... Remembering that those are only for exhibition, I don't plan on doing a remake for 5days, I just want to settle down my style.

Also, I don't know why, but I laughed for like 3 minutes nonstop at the Postman Pat comment x3

I'm giving up on vray, I mean, it's really good, the results are superb but... It's too technical, too professional for a indie gamedev.
I've worked before with Kerkythea, It sure is an awesome renderer, but it's WAY slower, also It effs up my textures when I load my SU models in it.

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In addendum, will post other pictures using the hybrid method I'm experimenting... You guys should take a look at the new picture, it shows how well the rendered graphics fit with 5days style...

[Ali]

These look nice, but I wanted to pick up on one point:

It might also be nice to use ambient occlusion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_occlusion

It just makes things looks less artificial.

I agree, but ambient occlusion is more effective for exteriors (where there is a small amoutn of ambient light coming from all angles. For lighting interiors I think you'd be better off looking at the way sets are lit in (good) film and television, then try to recreate it virtually. For instance, try placing a cutout of a window with blinds off screen and shine alight through it.