VIVI'S TANGENT ROOM (The process thus far)

Welcome to another installment of me making a 3D thing and potentially use it in a future video. So last article I finished off designing another Vivi, her 8th look, and eventually I forgot to update that and made a room for a skit for the first episode for Lost Legends Season 2. Now, after finishing that room, I decide to make another one that's not only 100x better than using premade assets, but also add more life to it.

PART ONE - THE ROUGH

The isometric floorplans.

Starting off the project is making the floorplans. I actually have one drawn on grid paper, but this one reflects the grid paper design, albeit with some added changes and being isometric. note the boxes that vaguely resemble furniture and the MS Paint doodles that not only label on what they're supposed to be, but visualize what's going to be on there. Each square on the grid floor represents 1 meter, and that will probably change soon.

The floorplans realized, featuring Vib.

Alt angle.

A first look of the models that would eventually become the Tangent Room. You see that girl sitting on that sofa? That is Vib, and I'm using her as a scaled reference. I added the essentials: TV with stand, accent table with a portrait, the shelf, couch, 3 arcade machines, and a weapon rack. Don't ask what's that for. A curious bit is what's next to the shelf... That's going to be the fanart wall.

Google Maps of a random street in Vancouver as the street reference.

Checkered buildings.

One thing to definitely add is to add a backdrop. Not them skyboxes, but more 3D space outside of a room. The buildings are quite easy to make: Just make stupidly massive cubes... And find textures for it. The "hard part" is to make the primitive street mesh.

PART TWO - THE TEXTUREWORK

Next after making the textures for the floor, walls, ceiling, and some wood textures are the arcade machines. I could cheap out and copy-paste any arcade side panels, but due to it's shape, it won't work.

Arcade texture plans.

I decide to head to the Spriter's Resource and just rip some sprites to use as arcade art. I split the machines into 3 categories: Fighers (fighting games & beat em' ups), 2P Megamix (a mix of various multiplayer games + some with trackball support), and single player (just 1-player games). Each sprites represent the machines used. The screens are their own  high-rez textures, mainly the ones I grabbed screenshots from my little MAME collection. Lot of them are Taito games.

Since they're arcade screens, I made emission materials for them to light up the dark room. For giggles, I render this scene with 2 different rendering engines: Cycles & Eevee. Cycles is the most accurate render since the lighting is more natural like God intended. Eevee is much quicker, utilize ray-tracing, but the cardinal sin is that if the light source is out of the camera's sight, there's no light. Also note the window from the Eevee render which is much darker, it shouldn't be like that since there's world lighting. Also the portrait is all black.

This render in Cycles

That render in Eevee

Also for funsies, I added one more render, but adjusted Vib's pose, remove the headgear & jetpack, and add a screen for the TV.

"Step aside please. We have white privelege."

You may also noticed that lava lamp on the table, yeah, I wanted to add that so the table wouldn't look like a pointless addition. The lamp also animates, but the lighting need some work. The portrait is also another inclusion where I post any random video game character on there for laughs, but for now I added Mutahar with his "I just came" face.

The lamp animates feat. Mutahar.

The shelf in the previous room is barren, so for this one, each shelf had something. The first set I added are books, because it's a bookshelf. I mixed real & fake books. Real being the Magi mangas, that one Keanu Reeves book, and Francis of the Filth (yes, it's a Filthy Frank book). The fake ones are blatantly obvious if you look at the textures. For the lulz, I made a thicker book which "novelizes" the 6-hour Down The Rabbit Hole video about EVE Online.

Plus, I got the fanart wall done. Actually, half of them are commissions, but still.

The Shelf & some Vivi art.

A closer & clearer look at the books.

The background also had textures, along with emission layers. The ground level looked plain, but this is intentional because you won't be able to see the streets up close. The skyboxes are free assets from PolyHaven.

The buildings now have emission.

Next are a few more additions to the room: Posters, replace the screenshot for the TV, more stuff at the bottom shelf, the Wedge Jr, and a skateboard. I have modelled a skateboard before, but I made one from scratch (save for the reused custom deck for Bomb Rush Cyberfunk). 

The posters share the same specular texture page, resembling crumpled up paper.

The bottom shelf items.

I forgot the additional metal posters I dubbed Displates. I finished off texturing the arcade machines, & added an emission layer for the marquee & coin slots.

Cozy night, watching Freddy Got Fingered.

PART THREE - CHUNKY PIXELS

The next part is painstakingly make the textures chunky. There's actually a way for that, but first I need to add stuff under the TV like this PS2.

The PS2 & DVD collection.

The process to make them blocky is simple: Head to the Shader Editor, find the image texture, and change the label that says "linear" to "closest." That's the texture interpolation tab, and I had to do that process for every single material...

The bilinear filter glow from a pixelated PS2 controller.

HOWEVER, I found a new way to make some creative uses exploiting the texture interpolation, which is making some fake glowing effects for emission textures. Don't make the backgrounds for those transparent, it doesn't look right, set them to solid black. The pic above is a striking example on making an effective glow without wasting resources.

After the TV shelf is done + added one EmuBox & replace the screenshot, the room looks complete... ish.

Added a fake console known as the EmuBox. It's a compact PC.

PART FOUR - LEARN SOME NEW THINGS

Having a premade skybox is cool n' all, but what limits the whole thing is that it's literally a sky and nothing else. After the few buildings, there's nothing. So I went online and learn how to make my own panoramic skybox. I have made skyboxes before in Re-Volt, but that process is me setting the camera FOV to 90 degrees with a 1:1 aspect ratio and take pics in 6 directions... Literally a skybox.

I opened up a new document just to create those, and with a use of one premade silhouette, I had a city background... But that looked a little boring, so I added pyramids & an opportunity to make a Bass Pro Shops joke. I'm gonna give it to you straight: This ain't Memphis.

I had the opportunity to put the BPS sign in.

Next thing to add is some LIFE in the backgrounds. I envisioned a monorail down the street, and that's exactly what I did.

Oh look, train.

Y'know what else that needs to be added? Weapons on the rack and items on the top shelf. I went to the Models Resource for those, but also included some of my original pieces, too.

The weapon rack, featuring the Postal chainsaw shovel, Sexy Panther from Dark Cloud 2, the super soaker from Monster house, and the Bigoron Sword.

Top Shelf items added.

The last pic (for now) is a billboard, and that was one of the harder ones to rig. No, it's not that, it's just the tedious shifting around on each panel to offset. I used youtube thumbnails as a placeholder, but later I get "proper ads" on there.

Billboard, mid-transition.

 To be continued.