Thread 723824076

Why did this style die out? It was peacefully coexisting with full-3D games all the way up to the PS3 era, so it’s not like the rise of polygonal graphics edged it out. Not only are the pre-rendered backgrounds great for creating an unparalleled, rich, embellished atmosphere, but the developers and narrators also get to TELL a really interesting story with how the shots are staged, camera placement, etc.

Games like Gamecube’s REmake and RE0 showed just how cool games with high quality pre-rendered backgrounds can look. The more processing power/storage becomes available with time, the more layers and effects you can add, creating a truly unique visual presentation running with only a fraction of the computing power required of modern AAA releases. Imagine 4k pre-rendered backgrounds with ray tracing and complex parallax scrolling; we could have had so many amazing looking games.

>>723824076 (OP)
>Why did this style die out?
Why do you think fucking retard

>>723824141
We don't sign our posts here.

How do I get my game to look like this?

>>723824565
Become Japanese.

>>723824076 (OP)
Unironically because Capcom, one of the pioneers of the style, switched to 3rd person 3D shooter games in 2005, with RE4.

In general, the 7th gen was all about chasing the "wider audiences" dollars, which often resulted games being turned into Call Of Halo knockoffs; brain-off action games that handhold the players through the experience.

This coincided with the early general-purpose 3D game engines such as Unreal 3 flooding the market, which were mostly made for FPS games. Alongside with the linear designs and regenerating health, you could now shit out a new cinematic first- or third-person action game in record time, and not think about stuff like cinematography, puzzles, or general balance.

The common half-truth argument is that "you no longer NEED to do games this way", referring to both pre-rendered BGs and changing camera-angles, but especially latter essentially trivializes entire GENRES and alternative play-styles out of existence.

Indies are however bringing the style back as we speak.

>>723824565
Read books about art-design, cinematography, and other oldschool artistic theories.
You want to maximize the effect and clarity of your scene composition; framing, lighting, color- and shape-coding...

Games of the early 00s were mostly modeled and animated in older 3D applications, such as Softimage and 3DS Max. Pre-rendered scenes were slooowly Forward-rendered into an image file or a sequence (video).

There either was NO Global Illumination / Light Bounce, or it was Radiosity based.

"Materials" were often primitive Texture (colormap) + Bumpmap (Normalmap) + an optional Specularmap (shininess; often missing in older games, resulting the plasticy looks). Textures did most of the heavy lifting, bump was used to quickly add micro details that react to lights.

Shading was mostly Phong, lights simple spotlights + ambient light.
Post processing was nonexistent, including no tone mapping to even speak of; the colors in renders were linear.

>>723825807
>Indies are however bringing the style back as we speak.
lmao no, indieslop is cancer

hmm

>>723826373
On the contrary.

>>723827828
like I said

>>723828401
You are missing out on kino.

>>723828596
nah

>>723824076 (OP)
Real time visuals have completely surpassed old pre-rendered stuff in fidelity.

>>723829307
lol. lmao even.

>>723829307
BWAHAHAHAHA
dumb zoomer

>>723824076 (OP)
modern slop can't compare to SOVL

>>723828596
>>723827828
Phase Zero does actually seem pretty good from the demo they released.
You tried Ground Zero?

>>723825807
>>723824076 (OP)
>muh wider audiences
>capcom
Ah yes, Capcom, the niche developer.
Pre-rendered died out because it became much easier to make 3D games and also camera controls.
The reason why pre-rendered looks so good is because of the cinematography or whatever it's called.
Each scene in the game is basically another painting or photograph.

>>723824076 (OP)
Did you upscale RE0? This looks much crisper than OG vanilla

>>723824076 (OP)
because you can do a lot more with full 3d than you can pre-rendered backgrounds. Keep in mind that originally pre-rendered backgrounds were originally a thing because of technical limitations while also trying to adapt the dev's artistic vision. only later did it become an artistic statement.

>>723829307
No? Not at all. A pre-render can do workstation visuals and push out some pretty crazy stuff with unique details per every single room, and without having to put a GB of data into that room by itself. Real time raytracing? Still noisy, blurry with artifacts, and an absolute GPU powerhog that requires DLSS to operate, which itself isn't as sharp as the visuals could be otherwise. You think pre-render is a compromise, but the reality is it lets you do some pretty crazy stuff with very little downsides but player controls depending on the sort of experience you're trying to create.
Not even the fixed camera mod + pathtracing for RE2R quite captures what a Remake 1 or Zero pre-render farm can accomplish.

>>723824076 (OP)
Its a lost art. When level designers know every player will see a particular area from the same fixed perspective, it allows them to create really memorable and evocative set pieces. Like, this room might stick with players long after having played the game; it being seen from an over the shoulder camera? it would be nothing notable.