Separate Ways – Chapter 4 (Part 1)

Here goes another round!

Today I’m showing you the 4th chapter of Separate Ways. Since this chapter has some exclusive areas (or heavily modified areas from Leon’s campaign), I’ve split this chapter’s update into 2 parts. The first part covers rooms 512 and 513 (the destroyed road (first half) and the battleship areas).

I’m leaving the rest of the chapter for next week’s update, but if you pay close attention at the beginning of the video (and if you’ve played this game enough times), you’ll already notice something that will be different in the next area ;). Let’s see if someone figures it out!

2 remarkable upgrades are the “stars” of this post:

• Baked textures: I’ve learned how to bake shadows into new textures and easily apply them onto the stage models. As a result we now have more realistic shadows!
• Improved water effect: The water effect in the battleship area was terribly bad. The GC –>Wii porting team reused the PS2 water effect and it seems they didn’t notice it was way worse than the other areas’ water effects. I’ve ported several effect layers into this room and you can see the results in motion in the video. Remember that the bigger the water surface area, the more difficult it is to obtain good results, but I’d say the improvement is good enough.

Other than this, I’ve applied the usual upgrades:

• Textures: Only a few battleship area textures were exclusive to Ada’s minigame.
• 3D models: I couldn’t reuse Leon’s road models because they weren’t detailed enough. When you play as Leon you can’t see most of the detail at close range (he’s on the truck), which is why I didn’t upgrade some of the surrounding models. But now I’ve been forced to upgrade everything because Ada’s walking on that same road and she can see every single detail. And the battleship area needed hundreds of small (and huge) adjustments, too.
• Lighting: The lighting in Ada’s exclusive areas is quite plain and/or a mess. There are a lot of unjustified inconsistencies, missing lights, lights coming from nowhere, the characters don’t cast shadows on the floor, light pop-in issues, etc…

And that’s it!

Please, take a look and comment on these work-in-progress pictures and video!

Have a nice weekend!

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