This is bothering me for years, and Iām still donāt get it fully. I once read on a game magazine that Final Fantasy VIII scenery was āpre-renderedā. But how that can be possible? The textures yes, but how they apply it in a interactive way in a 3D environment?
I want to know and understand how this technique is created, how it works and how to apply it on Blender.
Iām taking by example Final Fantasy IX, which has really beautiful graphics and scenery. Here a LOT of screenshots so you guys can understand better what i mean. And here a specific screenshot, showing Zidane (the guy with yellow hair) sitting down on a bench, but the bench is just like all the scenery, which really looks like rendered textures, but applied in what?? It doesnāt show any sign of meshes or even alias, except for movable parts. Also, there are collision points and triggers on this kind of scenery, which bugs me even more. I imagine that they just place the collision and triggers with invisible meshesā¦ but then, where the textures are applied??
The characters are obviously 3D meshes with applied textures, you can easily notice that, but the scenery is another storyā¦ also, some scenery has not just animations, but loop animations, like steam pipes shaking, but they look like painted textures, not textures applied on meshes (?!)
How it are created, what technique is that? Someone knows? It is possible to create/reproduce on Blender? Someone knows of some example of similar work done on Blender?
So, we just apply textures to plane meshes with some alphas, then use parallaxing to build the scene and input the 3D characters, make some triggers, collision points and animations (sprites) for moveable and interactive parts and voilĆ”? Thatās it?
Yep that would be how to do that. Notice that FF9 does not allow you to rotate the camera. This makes it easy to acheive this effect. Itās called a sprite based games (sprites are basicly 2D game objects). In blender I would suggest making planes with the textures on them and then instead of setting up constraints just make alot of invisible walls.
If your working on a project with this method, good luck. Iāve never seen someone do this with blender.
I actually played through FF IX earlier this summer and was thinking how awesome (and possible) it would be to replicate this style in the BGE. I think a Parasite Eve type game would be really sweet in Blender. I guess what you could do is set up the background scene, render it, then delete everything but the floor plane (make it invisible) for your character to walk on, and be rendered real-time.
The only weird thing about this style on the Playstaiton was that the characters would have terrible jaggies compared to the perfect pre-rendered scenery. With modern hardware, though, this wouldnāt be an issue
Nice tip man, thanks
Now i know what the magazine meant by āpre-renderedā scenery!
Yeah, nowdays the itegration between the pre-rendered scenery and the 3D characters would be more smooth. Imagine it, the whole scenery would be just a few raster images, we could use high poly characters! We could use similar materials and textures for both scenery and high poly characters, resulting in a more smooth integration between the two.
