I've been asking for the very same thing at the bottom of the Editing Cutscenes thread but that was the wrong place to post about this. What I'm trying to do with a simple project which I hope to be developing after the completion of one of my college courses (for the next college course) involves designing a reimagined portion of Raccoon City. For the project, the player merely has to take a key item from Kendo's gunshop, exit the gunshop from the door he entered, and open the shutter that c2keo created in the alleyway leading to Kendo's gunshop. That's all I have to do.



The project would be using the alleyway already set up by c2keo but as you can see, the entire area hadn't been defined just yet which leaves room for creativity. What I'd like to see is since no two people think alike, I'd like to see how everyone else imagines the street and surrounding areas that the player walk around in or see in the distance. By the way, the rest of the alleyway as designed by c2keo can be seen on the second page of The Mortician's Custom RE2 BG Renders thread.

My own interpretation can be seen in the map below in addition to a map of the original city below that for comparison.

Map of Region
Detailed Map

For me, I saw there being a waterfront and docking area for aquatic vehicles where central station and the trolley from RE3 would be. In addition, I had to remove the gas station as it conflicted with the waterfront and imagined a canal travelling under what I saw to be a bridge that could be seen in the above screenshot. It could also be a tunnel entrance or underpass with the area above accessable to the player via the staircase beside the shutter. Instead, I imagined a bridge over a canal and that is but one possibility.

I greatly encourage everyone else to share thier own interpretations of the locations as again, no two minds think exactly the same and I'm curious to see what everyone can come up with. Don't think of it as helping me as that's working against each other and this is not a competition. The way I see it, we might just combine our ideas into a completely new scenario in due time. The sooner we identify different interperetations of c2keo's work, the sooner we have new areas to branch into new scenarios and in the end, that's what I'll be after in the long run. The project I'll be doing in Modding II is merely proving that I'm capable of creating new scenarios as such so it's more or less my "hello world" into RE2 scenario modding.

I'm not entirely sure, but I believe that everyone who's gathered enough knowledge to be able to change backgrounds and create some new or portions of them on their own won't be inclined to build up someone else's work, but rather create something completely new, as that is only one last step in a long row of reading tutorials, going through severe trial-and-error stages and so on.
It's as if someone's enormously adept in sculpturing and could therefore create a perfect copy of Michelangelo's David in hundreds of hours, but then chooses to use this precious time to create something that is equal in terms of quality but shows one's very own originality.
Same here: c2keo's achievement was to create a very own style and apply it to Resident Evil 2's environmental areas, so did The Mortician, DXP and everyone else who created their own backgrounds.
Just my two pesos.

@Resiyoyoyo

Perhaps; but when one takes sight of a corner that he cannot turn, it drives him to madness. There is a certain hunger in scouting new terrain and anyone who felt the need to escape the bounds of a map before has experienced this. In a similar case to the need to explore curiosity is the need to finish incomplete work. Why is it that people are still aching about not being able to play 1.5, 3.5, or any other beta after it meets their eyes? This is why I'm inclined to finish the work of C2keo or at least if I can.

But I'm not making a complete game out of this; only adding in a few background alterations such as the streets and gunshop. The true purpose of this small project is to inspire others to do just as I did and fill in their own imagination through modification. If everyone does this, we might actually see an entire game in due time as the progress of many people stretch across those bounds of a thousand modified rooms all based upon one original work. I'd call it the game of the people.

Of course, these are expectations and hopes if I actually succeed in my goal of modifying the room(s). I'm only studying the modification of backgrounds as of yet. Two resources:

http://z4.invisionfree.com/Resident_Evil_1...?showtopic=1330
http://z4.invisionfree.com/Resident_Evil_1...p?showtopic=773

I'm already getting an idea of what I can do with the chain of shops; I said that it's possible to turn the chain into a single structure and there's a building at my college campus which inspired the design of it. Oh, and the map I made is only for me to follow; it gives me a better idea of what it is that I want to do. How other people interperet these things is up to them and I encourage it.

Concept of waterfront structure

Very true.
As long as there isn't an editor available that reads your mind and automatically creates the thought of content for Resident Evil 2, this concept you mentioned would work perfectly well because people need to rely on each other's special skills to create a full-fledged MOD for any of the classic Resident Evil games (or have years of time at their hand which in almost all cases isn't the case).
The ultimate goal as spoken of in many other threads would be to create a completely new and self-written environment, an own Resident Evil engine so-to-say, because only then we would have customizable freedom in creating thousands of rooms as you mentioned. E.g. there's a total maximum of enemies in the game so you would end up with only 1/10 of the rooms filled with enemies because the given engine by Crapcom doesn't allow for more than that, but it's still something.
And no one has yet been able to push himself into writing an own engine, a project like this would be ridiculously difficult for various reasons. Long story short: If we don't have a member win in some kind of lottery and thus have enough money to pay some professional coder to write that said engine we will have to mostly stick with what we've got. But working together and/or building upon somebody else's work and/or spreading as much info as possible can optimize these efforts.

New conflicts involve the tanker that had been chasing Leon. Something you may not have noticed was Leon's police cruiser crashed into the traffic signal in-game during the very first prerendered background and that in itself is an issue.

New Map
Old Map

Not sure what the name of the street is as it's not recorded even on the full map but we can see that there is an entire road that Leon travels down before crashing into a traffic signal at the corner of Flower Street. The point that I am trying to make is that the entire street had been replaced with the waterfront in the newer map which conflicts with the game's initial cutscene. For logical reasons, I might have to replace the tanker and crashed police cruiser with some other form of barricade.

As for the waterfront structure replacing the chain of shops seen in the first few prerendered backgrounds and conflicting with central station, I'm planning on turning this building into a train station; perhaps leading underground.

Alright, I've begun work by laying down a basic foundation by the use of a method that involves counting how many Leons it takes to reach the end of the road; thus I find the dimensions of the room and can work on a more accurate representation of it. It seems as though the road itself will be expanded to devour previous sidewalks while a new sidewalk lies beyond. White wireframe are areas that the player can go while black outlines signify what is out of grasp. Below is my progress so far:

I also noticed something about the camera called "stock lens" which allows me to view objects as if they were closer. The lower the millimeter of the lens, the farther away an object appears. Seeing as my alleyway appeared to be too small, I can just use a low millimeter stock lens and get the desired result. Here are examples at 15mm, 24mm, and 35mm.

It was extremely tedious and after about 32 renders I've actually come close to matching c2keo's alleyway render. To think that I still have many more is maddening. Modelling is easy; matching camera angles with absolute precision is dreadful. I almost deserve to give myself a Claire for this one.

Aha, I don't know why I didn't try this before but I have two viewports. One viewport is what the camera can see and the other can switch between front, left, top, and perspective. On the camera viewport I have a transparent render of the alleyway in front of it but following everywhere that the camera moves. Why didn't I think of this a few hours ago?

I also think I get what c2keo was tring to do. He wasn't creating a bridge or tunnel, but an overpass; part of a highway that replaces the central raccoon line that the cable car follows; an interesting concept. However, those who stare into the ambiguos black draw their own conclusions and I saw a waterfront and a truss bridge that proceeds towards Ellis Street while a canal flows below. I may have made some rennovations of the city's part but what I saw was definitely creative.

Seeing all this makes me realize how different max is to maya.

Maya you only have one camera lens but you can change the number setting to whatever is needed to get distance rather than changing between different camera lens's.

And welcome to the world of trying to get a render to match up with whatever your modeling :D its a pain in the ass doing it but it all pays off in the end.

have a Claire
:cd

Wow... this is getting interesting.

AAAAAAAAAAWWWWWW YYYYYYEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAA Any closer than this and the fire would be too hot. Basicly I cheated if you'd say that and reverted the camera to a 28mm lens; assembling the level over the render rather than try and focus in on an angle which would never happen and thus the result is finer than a diamond ring. It was relatively easy, too. I'm not going to say that I wasted my time, though. I learned a valuable lesson and that was never to ever do what I tried to do ever again.

Good news everyone; now that I finally managed to accomplish what I was after, my computer went to crap... doesn't work anymore; sent it off to get fixed and hopefully i don't lose all of the saved information. I also don't know when I'll be getting my computer back so don't expect anything from me for quite a while.

It happened oddly enough while deleting something from photobucket the moment after I made my most recent post depicting progress. Suddenly my computer freezes; I reboot it; computer never gets to the login screen. Right now I'm communicating from a computer at school so again, don't expect much.

The irony...

Ah crap... even though you have sent it off to be fixed I would suggest nabbing a copy of ubuntu since its free and I ran into a problem where windows would not work in the same way as yours, so I popped in ubuntu and managed to get access to both my hard drives on my laptop, which allowed me to then back up everything this included my whole art portfolio and everything else, then after that well... had to re-install windows and lost everything on the drives but since I backed all important things up it didn't matter. =( hope you get it back soon since your making some fine damn progress.

Agreed. Bad timing for sure. :(

I'll have to keep that in mind so next time I don't have to pay $200 and wait two weeks for someone to fix it. Give it until next Friday and I'll have my computer back. I'll have access to this site from school on Tuesday and Thursday. Just to think of an entire weekend with nothing to do is killing me. With week days, at least I have class to look forward to but on weekends, my schedule's dry. I actually enjoyed working on the scene while I had been and it was a good way to spend my time.

How much does ubuntu cost, BTW?

Ubuntu is freeeeeeeeeeeeee!

That's what i do to when my windows does what he knows best. Don't even need to install ubuntu just run it from the cd, backup what you want, and done.

As Ricardo said its free, all you need to do is download an iso burn it to disc, insert it and run it no need to install or anything that's what makes it a great way to recover things if something buggers up.

link:
Ubuntu download page

I'll keep that in mind.

Anyway what I've discovered about matching camera angles is you'll want to build and arrange the scene around a reference of the angle that you're looking to recapture. The reference should be a plane with the original render you're recapturing as a texture; plus a gray opacity mask so that the reference is visible but not so much that you can't see through it.

Arranging the scene while the camera looks through the reference is unusual because the scene might come out good awkward if done wrong. One wall could be at one angle and the adjacent wall be at another. To avoid this, have the lens at the default and simply rotate the entire scene; not the camera or reference into place.

A small amount of moving objects around should be necessary but this method is a helluva lot easier than spending eight hours rotating the camera around the scene. It's kind of like rigging a custom work environment.

Also, Anonymous OS is built upon Ubuntu ;)

Alright, I just got my computer back today and have acquired internet access. I'm going to have to straighten out an entire list of installed software that was uninstalled after reformating the operating system before I can begin my work again; 3Ds Max for instance is gone. Even so, it's good to be back and I hope to resume progress as soon as possible.

Ah Sweet glad to see your back DarkSpyda can't wait to see you continue work on this, and luckily max is a lot easier to install than what maya is (Hate every new computer or laptop I get I have to re-install it =_=)

Aye I remember reading that up somewhere think it might have being gizmodo might be wrong though >.<

So far I've been able to:

Adobe Photoshop CS4
Visual Basic C++ 2010
Create four virtual CD Drives thanks to MagicDisc (MagicISO) which can mount and create virtual drives.
-Install IZarc which can unzip .rar, .zip, and many other files of choice.
-Reinstall Autodesk 3Ds Max 2011
-Camstudio for video/audio capture



Have yet to:

-Setup Camstudio for optimum capture
-Mount RE2 LEON and CLAIRE to virtual drives
-Download tools involved in RE2 modding

Oh just bloody fantastic. RE2 thinks it's installed and yet it is not and nor can I "uninstall" it. Try to uninstall; I get "Error:CreateProcess Uninstall.exe". I try to reinstall, all of the boxes are checked. I click OK, it says "Installed successfully" immediately without process; nothing changes.

Tried add/removed; tried un/remounting - useless. Restart PC? Tried it; no use. I imagine it's because I tried installing it in a custom folder since it decided to try and install it in my savegame folder and now it doesn't even realize that it's not installed. Or could it be because I'm using windows 7?

Have you tried running it in windows 95/98 compatibility mode when installing? Had the same sort of problem telling me it had installed it but it hadn't after running it like that though it actually worked. Its windows and its crappy compatibility with old pc games.

Such a simple solution but I didn't think it would actually work; it did. I tried tricking the installer by extracting the files and putting them into the folder and that didn't work. Simply extracting the installer however from the ISO and running it in Windows95 compatibility mode did, however. I just learned something new. Good thing, too because I could sleep without worrying about how I wouldn't be able to mod RE2 anymore. I thought I'd have to pull some strings and make this a mod for RE3 or perhaps install on another computer. Little did I think logging onto my computer at 2:44AM would relieve my worries.

I have some school work in game production that I forgot about, though. Know I haven't worked on the scene for the RE2 mod in quite a while but it's worse to blow off scholars in team-based game production. I have some artwork to do as it's a 2D sidescroller in development which uses UDK as a base. I'm the one responsible for designing the backgrounds; drawing, painting, even creating some flipbooks here and there. The gameplay as of yet is a compilation of code that gets a sidescrolling camera to follow the player along a single axis and that the player can only move forward and back with the 'A' and 'D' keys.

After hours on end of rotating the scene around the camera, I've reached a valid checkpoint for another camera angle. Given up on rotating the scene into place, I edited the render reference; painted the two white lines to follow to the end of their perspective and rotated, scaled, and moved a 3D reference into place between them. Now that I had a reasonable 3D reference, I rotated, scaled, and moved the scene into place figuring it'd give me an accurate result. Nope...

The best part is that if I try to move anything into place for Camera 0007, I'll lose the accuracy that Camera 0008 captures. A 3D reference following the two perspective lines is how I managed to overcome Camera 0008 because I had the freedom to move objects into place afterwards. Again, I cannot do that with Camera 0007 because it will affect Camera 0008. This means that either I fiddle with Camera 0007 until it's in place or I seek out other means.


EDIT 6:14 PM 4/1/12

Indeed I can get one camera to match its render without flaw but when it comes to two cameras, I wonder if it's even possible. It's basicly telling me that unless I have ALL 3D objects including the cameras and scene in the right place, one render can match up but two or more cannot. It's not a thing of the cameras being in the wrong position; it's EVERYTHING.

I tried and tried and tried but no matter how much care I take before alligning two scenes into one, only one of the two cameras displays the scene as is strived for. There is only one way and one way only that this project can be accomplished and that is if each, and every render is it's own scene. This means that I will be unable to explore the concatenation of my project as one large 3D scene in the end but it also means that the project will be made possible. With that said, I can continue my work and without frustration.

Below are four screenshots

1) A guide that follows the render's perspective. The translucent render is a 2D plane in front of the camera with texture taken from one of c2keo's renders and a gray opacity map for partial invisibility. The red X serves no true purpose but displays where the focal point of the camera should be.
2) The result of one camera alligned to perspective concatenated with another. My hopes were that by doing this, I could effectively find the correct position of each camera in the scene but...
3) Edit of the scene captured by Camera 0007 to be more true to c2keo's render.
4) The effect that the edit of the scene through Camera 0007 had on the scene as seen through camera 0008.

@DarkSpyda04... I don't know if you still interesting in what you was doing here but I've create a simple app that will allow you or anyone else to import RE2 camera\s to 3dsmax without any problem with an easy way and I think it may help you, here is an example of what I'm talking about>>>



As you can see the camera fits perfectly or almost perfectly, to use RE2CE.exe simply drop an RE2 RDT file over it and the tool will produce *.CAM file which then you can import into 3dsmax through RDTES.ms script that is inside RE2CE.zip also theres the scene that I'm showing above inside that zip...

Edit: It seems that c2keo's background's not match 100% to the RE2 original look the second image but the other two seems to match, I guess thats why you was having a problem matching two cameras? :unsure:>>>





Download: RE2CE.zip - 302kb
http://www.datafilehost.com/download-77078a5f.html

Impressive!

@Leo2236

Which is why I've abbandoned the thread. With this new tool perhaps I can continue work. Modding has seriously improved since I first joined these forums. We couldn't even import models to 3Ds Max back then but now everything seems to be so much easier. We even have a script editor. Regardless I do have another project I'm working on; the Academy Evil project that JOSHUAKANE started. I'll try this tool out when I have time and see if I can't get to work.

The things are changing aren't they!?... Once you'll have some free time report to me if everythings is match will you!? ;)...

Wow that is crazy; beautiful. Not only can I get the exact camera positions but I can change the viewport background, too. Previously for the viewport background I'd just make a 2D plane with a transparent texture and put it in front of the camera but I like not having to deal with them anymore and enjoy the ability to change the background texture with the plus or minus of the frame. Yeah, I can definetly make progress using this tool from what I'm experiencing; love it. I'm also looking into how to make IFL image files in case I might want to work on any other rooms. Hm... open a notepad file and list the name of each file I'd like to use; save with .ifl file extension. I'm going to test this out by creating an ifl file with c2keo's backgrounds. Done.



Now the only problem with me using the camera editor is not being able to get BIOFAT to work with my new computer to extract any necessary RDT files. Luckily Room1000 was already provided. Also is there a tool like RE2CE for RE1 and RE3 as well?

UPDATE:



The cameras aren't 100% accurate to c2keo's work but I'll do my best to match them as the scene develops.

For RE1 cameras you can use RDTExplorer as about RE3 I don't know, I haven't write anything like that for it...

Edit: It seems that RE2CE.EXE work fine with RE3 RDT files too >>>


Edit2: Also to extract any BG from RE2 that stored in ROOMCUT.BIN you can use RE2BM.

So I see you've manage to fit cameras, what next?

The alleyway is beginning the look squished so it's happening again. Even with the correct camera placement I still don't know the correct sizing and placement of objects since you could just as easily have a pot of tea directly in front of the camera and make it look distant. If this is going to look correct I might have to expand the scene and move out the cameras. Hopefully I won't run into too many complications because that's exactly the reason why I gave up the first time.

Also I am aware that I deleted the windows and that when I expand it should be not towards the street but in the opposite direction as it will conflict with the street cameras.

Relevant

I still have alot of work ahead of me. The planters, light posts, tv's, inward extrusions along the walls, minor tweaks here and there, work on the bridge, the entire street, Kendo's gunshop redone in an appeal similar to the boutique in RE3, and of course the plumbing running up and down the buildings. Kendo's jeep I'll probably just edit into the renders although I'll need high-res images of the jeep from inside the gunshop which at the moment I don't have. Fortunately I'll only need images with the glass broken because the mod will have Kendo dead before you arrive. You're only entering the gunshop for ammo and a key to unlock the shutter nearest the bridge. The only door to the gunshop will be the one you enter with; removing the back-alley exit door.

Anybody know where I can get the textures for the billboard and tv image?

Not bad, I can't wait to see it textured.

I probably should've said this earlier but I'm just going to relax for today. Quite frankly I've been working on this scene all week and I need it. Tomorrow I'll be up extra early and continue building the scene. I'll edit this post when I make progess.

EDIT 1/16/13 @ 11:59PM



I also finally edited my time settings because it was bothering me that I posted this fourty minutes from now when the original post was last night. Honestly how can I edit a post before it's even been created? It made no sense and it was bothering me so I fixed it. In any case I'm done editing the alleyway after what - three weeks of nonstop work? And they say Capcom only took two weeks to render a room. I can either work on the street, the truss bridge, or the gunshop from here.