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For design I didn't draw it or anything, I just looked at different Bombs and designed my own, I'm pretty sure the Nose is unique to mine :D
Sculpting it is actually the easiest part
I did it in Zbrush, you work on it on a simulated 3D Window that it's similar to working with Clay, you're basically free to sculpt whatever you want and you're not limited by Polygon count or bad geometry, you just go at it with the tools like working in Clay, took me a couple of hours.
The problem comes when you need to turn it into a real time 3D model. Computers and game engines have limited resources so you can't have a multi million polygon model animated and running round in real time (Even if it's just a spinning camera like mine) because it's just too big and complex so you have to rebuild the topology into a much smaller/simple 3D model, this is called Retopology (Retopo for short). This step could take a bit of time maybe a day or two.
Then you have a small 3D model but like you probably guessed, you loose most of the details. So now you have to create texture maps so you can bake the high poly detail into the low poly model, this doesn't take long, but to do it you need to UV map the model. This is to cut and divide the model into 2D maps so you can wrap the textures around the model like a gift wrapper. This takes a couple of hours too.
Then texture painting and applying the maps, Normal Map (High details), Ambient Occlusion (A type of shadows), Emission (This emits light), Alpha (Transparency) etc. etc. this could take a day or so depending on how complex the textures are.
After that you would have to rig it and weight painting, this is like a skeleton used for animating (I haven't done that since I'm not good at animating yet.) and after that comes animation.
This is a super simplified explanation, the answer is it depends, I've seen people take a whole year in one super photo realistic piece to a couple of hours in a simple low poly model. If I did this Bomb today I could do it in 2-3 days more or less but notice this is a simple character that doesn't even have legs. A nice high detail character around the level of Over Watch with clothes, hair and props would probably take me like a Month.
Sorry for the wall of text, hope that helps :D
The real issue is the 2D backgrounds. Back when Square made the game, the original backgrounds were actually art assets made by outside artists. Those were compiled, cropped and compressed to fit on the PSX. The mistake came when Square chose to delete those original HD art pieces - they no longer exist with the exception of a very few examples that were saved by their artists.
Since the game is predominately 2D assets, recreating those backgrounds would be labor intensive and expensive. The only real option would be to have an AI upscaler do the work, and that comes with its own problems. For whatever reason, SE chose not to upscale.
But the 2D assets are screenshots of 3D assets lol. So they where originally made in 3D then put in an isometric angle, screen capped and cropped. My argument is that you could make the assets again and remake the 2D backgrounds with 2D renderings. It's not hard and a noob like me could do it so it makes me angry SE doesn't even try! The easiest way would be to just to clean up the original 2D images like modders do, but they just didn't do anything AT ALL. :(
They could remake the backgrounds, but like I said it'd be labor intensive and expensive to recreate every background from scratch. They'd be remaking 80-90% of the game, requiring a hefty budget. That's likely too much of a commitment for SE to justify for a 20-year-old game. Judging by how little they did in this release, I'm very confident that's the case.
I, too, wish they had at least tried an AI upscale. Even if there were the odd artifact, it'd still be a massive improvement over the pixel-blur filter they have now.
This will happen if/when they give FF8 the same makeover FF7 is currently getting.
Everything will depend on the sales of FF7 though. If it flops, count on never getting another release even close to that.
I dont even have a PS4, so depending how good it is, I will have to invest in a new machine to even play it.
I'm not saying they need to remake the entire game from Scratch, but they shouldn't call it an HD remaster if they didn't do anything at ALL. Also, you say this is expensive but remember this is a BILLION dollar company not an indy dev. Also Final Fantasy put Square in the Map in the first place I think it's disrespectful to not even try.
Another thing is that graphics now are not what they where 20 years ago. 20 years ago making a 3D rendered background would have taken hundreds of man hours and cost a lot of money but I'm telling you this graphics today are NOTHING. I'm litreally saying I could do the entire Balamb Garden in a couple of weeks and I'm a nobody with free software. Imagine what SE could do! They could do all areas in no time at all!
Well but FF7 is being remade as an entirely new game with modern day graphics. That's millions of dollars and years of work, all they had to do for this game is low polygon graphics that take no time or effort and would be a massive improvement over 20 year old backgrounds.
The problem is you're Still expecting them to recreate everything from scratch and have it 100% match (guess work) despite not having the original artists or original copys left to reference.... people are going to complain even more if they did that.. Heck they are already using Dissida models which already have people in a mood
I don't think it can get much worse than "Overly Negative"
Also if you say it's a remaster and charge 20$ then I would like to see some better looking graphics not something you can get for free in an Emulator with Dissidia models pasted in.
What I'm saying is they didn't even try.
no i think its more people are over expecting what they can do with a game thats this old. its not like they can recode it without starting from scratch (they even stated that had to paste the changes over the 2013 steam edition just to be able to make any changes at all. its called limitations and no matter how you or anyone may see it, it is still the original ported coding from 2000.
Don't get me wrong i would much rather they skipped the remaster completely and do a remake but this is also the first time the've even shown ff8's existence in along time with PC improvements I'll take what i can get frankly
Then you're good and can move on but a lot of us are angry because this is not just some basement coder with a game, this is a billion dollar company with hundreds of employees and you're telling me they can't do a better job than some modders? Sorry but I can't believe that. This is a lazy port and it's disrespectful to their legacy and their fans.
For example FF7 IS a remake and not a remaster : they changed everything in the game.
As much as I love what you did, I'm going to have to agree with some of the people in this thread.. These models are amazing but would look horribly out of place in a remaster.. Probably something way more for a full-fledged remake.
Good luck with your 3D though, it's looking pretty damn good.
They are a billion dollar corporation, publicly traded, and beholden to shareholders. As such, they carefully consider the cost-to-profit ratio of any projects they undertake - and somehow they must have determined either a high risk situation or a high profit opportunity, and they chose to spend as little as possible on this game's remastering. It's not that they aren't capable of doing more or don't have the resources - they CHOSE not to do more, because it would be expensive and time-consuming (from their limited point of view).
To be clear, I was not saying what they did is ok - far from it. Their PSX remasters leave much to be desired. I'm only giving insight as to why.
I heard a similar story about another game a company wanted to remake/remaster . I do not remember which as it was just a random thing I saw on TV but the company had deleted all of the game assets and they were only able to make the remake by tracking down an ex employee who had kept a copy of the files as it was his own work.
Also in computing, changing code to fix something simple can have unforseen consequences such as breaking other parts of coding. This is mainly for maths based calculations or logic functions that hit a loop. If a random event in game triggers a not a number (NAN) result then NAN results can cascade through the code causing crashes or other faults. It can be very hard to find out what exactly caused the fault and code may look fine.
Computing is wierd in that operations that are the same may have different answers if they are coded back to front. Eg. A*B=6 but B*A may equal a NAN error.
I cannot find the article that explains it all technically but it did make me see things in a new light.