(UDK) Banjo-Kazooie: Banjo's House
polycounter lvl 10
CURRENT PROGRESS:
[vv]49536231[/vv]
ORIGINAL POST BELOW
Hi all.
After my last project I decided to do something a bit different and remake an area from my favourite game of all time - Rare's Banjo-Kazooie on the N64.
I figured the first place you start would be the best place to start - Banjo's House. An indoor, small-scale environment.
Unlike my last project, I'm hoping to get Polycounters involved from an early stage, so I've literally just started over the past few days.
Below is the initial block-out made with the in-game assets from the original:
I've already started putting in things like the floorboards and the odd placeholder texture to get those colours in.
Any thoughts this early on?
I was going to go for a stylised photo-realism, unless anyone can argue the case for hand-painted textures.
[vv]49536231[/vv]
ORIGINAL POST BELOW
Hi all.
After my last project I decided to do something a bit different and remake an area from my favourite game of all time - Rare's Banjo-Kazooie on the N64.
I figured the first place you start would be the best place to start - Banjo's House. An indoor, small-scale environment.
Unlike my last project, I'm hoping to get Polycounters involved from an early stage, so I've literally just started over the past few days.
Below is the initial block-out made with the in-game assets from the original:
I've already started putting in things like the floorboards and the odd placeholder texture to get those colours in.
Any thoughts this early on?
I was going to go for a stylised photo-realism, unless anyone can argue the case for hand-painted textures.
Replies
I really like your start. I think you should go for stylised photo-realism as you said
But jokes aside, nice progress so far, looking forward to the revamped room from my childhood!
You should stick to a style from the begining to avoid a messy final picture.
now that you show a closeup of the rug it looks a little weird.. as if the normals of the wood are on the carpet since its going with the grain.
the other thing is the texel density of things in that shot dont match up at all.
The normal map is from a fabric material that I had ready for Banjo's mattress.
I just finished texturing the three first books that share the same texture atlas:
You're right actually.
The planks were the first thing that I made for the scene and they just don't seem to work.
I always intended on having a 3-dimensional floor, rather than a texture so I think I'll head back to ZBrush at some point and start afresh with some harder edges and straighter planks. You say that, but I think Banjo had quite a realistic style for the time (if you ignore the anthropomorphic woodland animals). The shapes were stylised, but the texture work was quite realistic - much like Pixar movies, I suppose.
At this stage, I think it would be wise for me to draw out an action plan of what assets I'm going to be creating and in what order - as I'm just making whatever takes my fancy at the moment, without any sort of structure to the place past the initial blockout.
Totalling at 428 triangles.
Hopefully if I get some free time this next week, I'll be able to crack on sorting out the walls and re-doing the floorboards.
It appears that I'm flying in the face of pretty much everything that everyone has said to me thus far about hand-painted textures
I've decided on realistic texturing on top of more stylised meshes (not that I have made any of said stylised meshes yet).
I haven't had much time to myself the past few weeks, so progress has been slow.
Most time I do get though, is spent in Photoshop due to it being installed on my PC at work.
Regardless, I thought I would post up my texturing/materials work so far:
And here is the current scene with the assets arranged in no particularly finished fashion:
I thought I'd re-design the floorboards and re-texture them from scratch to meet the sort of detail present in my other textures.
If I get enough hate for the texture style, I can always make a copy of the scene when I'm done and make hand-painted materials
I want to make my own interpretation of the world and hopefully it will be something that you could picture the duo inhabiting
I wasn't suggesting that you imitate the style, just use it as a jumping off point. I would just say, whatever way you're going with the style, make sure it is consistent. I'm really excited to see what you come up with.
Prop update for today. You have to guess which one is mine and which one is the original:
I'm also half way through making the house walls/door/shelves which I'm creating together to make sure everything lines up properly.
A lot of companies (including Rare) use Maya and it can only improve my job prospects if I learn how to use it as well as having my experience with 3DS Max.
I haven't updated this for a while as I've been working on a huge gap in my portfolio - namely man-made environments and hard surfaces.
So if I still have the enthusiasm for this project afterwards, I'll come back and completely overhaul the textures to tie closer together in style.
It's really odd looking at some assets though, as I could make some of them in seconds now, where they took me a little while to create at the time!
Edit: And I'd go about creating the entire scene completely differently now. For starters, I'd create the whole environment in Maya, completing all the models in a single scene before moving to UDK and mass importing them as .fbx files.
Keep it up! looking great so far
couldnt put it better, so much memories hehe
keep it up, looking forward
I wasn't going to post anything until it was in a more presentable state, but seeing as you posted - this is what the scene looks like as of this morning:
I took a lot of the advice in this thread to heart and have now completely gone in the direction of hand-painted textures.
As well as this, I started the entire scene's modelling from scratch using Maya with only the odd asset surviving the jump.
The material on most objects for the moment is a basic Diffuse with that Multiplied by 0.5 into the Emissive.
I was actually going to ask Polycount for some assistance in determining a good shader for the environment. I really like the style that Baolong used in their Legend of Sealed Book scene.
The lighting hasn't been built yet as there are no lightmap UVs on objects as of yet.
Critique away and tear this to shreds guys!
I have altered the texture colours to more closely mimic the original scene.
As well as this, I wasn't happy with the way that the wallpaper met the ceiling, so I modelled the ceiling separately and extracted the wallpaper as a copy of the wall mesh. With this I added some peeling effects to make it a bit more realistic.
I also put hot emmissive texture effects on the fireplace and the stove using texture painting in addition to reworking the fabric texture on the chairs.
Here is the scene with a single point light in the ceiling and the lighting built as a basic test - ie. I'll be adding lights for the fireplace and a lamp by the door.
Some UVs need sorting, such as the chairs, as well as the general scale of lightmaps upped a bit later.
Every time I think about Banjo-Kazooie and Tooie I get a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.
They have to still be my favourite games even today ^_^
Earlier, I created a reading lamp for a second source of light and in a minute I shall be making a sprite sheet for the fire and accompanying smoke effects.
Aside from the obvious changes, I also added a very subtle variation on the sobel edge detection around objects. Essentially making the lines just a slightly darker hue of the colour behind it.
It just makes things 'pop' a bit more and i think it suites the haindpainted style.
There is also a Mario Galaxy style effect on objects where they have a soft fresnel outline.
Crits?
Don't say I never give you guys anything :P
The two on the right have an accompanying displacement/height map for use with DX11 Tessellation.
I'll be sorting out a short fly-through for this at some point just to show off the corners and hidden details a bit more.
http://meimi132.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/viva-pinata-e3-2006-pic14.jpg
very cool work, you could comsider turning off shadow/ao casting of the rug, the black destroys it a bit.
I did turn off shadow casting for it, which looked much nicer but gave the impression that it was floating.
Now that I have Ambient Occlusion on it should work better come to think of it.
I'm also going to change the fire from a static light to a nice dynamic flickering one with sharp shadows.
That should look much nicer as a scene overall.
Best platformer ever. Nintendo never forgave Rare that they made a better license than mario.
Nicely done !