"Great scott! Its time to travel back to 2014"

There has to be a point where a project finishes - in the case of the ongoing 8-bit project I've worked on for a while now (not constantly, mind you - just a little here and there when I had a moment to spare), I've decided to toy with the camera, lighting and do a final rendered still.


(You can view all my posts on this project here)

Just adding a little dutch bank to the camera, a few texture tweaks...   I ended up with this image.  A classic moment - playing Manic Miner in a dark room, with the sunny day outside being blocked by the bedroom curtains.  Just like it was back in the 1980's...

Done...

Some subtle comping of reflections/spec passes back on top of the image, and then grading the colour and exposure a little (all passes were rendered out as half float in .exr format) after slapping in a bit of lens distortion, glare from the curtains and noise grain...  I'm fairly happy with this.

Mix-n-match

Getting the angle right...

As for the camera - I wasn't really sure just where I was going to go with it.  In my original "finished" render, the camera was pretty much straight on.  It looked ok, but it felt a little too dull and uninteresting.  I decided to just throw on a Golden Spiral guide and used the inward spiral to take the viewer towards the focus of the game itself.

Composition guides can be useful tools

Compared with the last camera angle, I find this much more appealing.  Of course, beauty is always in the eye of the beholder as they say.

Tweaked a few elements...

I did tweak a few small things in here.  Some positioning of elements for one - the data recorder I actually moved forward (and slightly scaled up) to subtly influence the perspective of the shot.  The screen, while its not obvious, has a very fine dark band that dulls the pixels (across that creature/green platform) to create the effect often common with the scan line on TV's when filmed or photographed.

In this image below, I've cranked the effect up to make it more obvious - It was simply a soft black block blended with an Overlay to deepen the image...

The effect - though more exaggerated in this example then the final version

I looked at a few photo's and old videos of CRT sets from this era and found they varied - some were very dense and dark.  Some, as in this case, were very slight - but enough to 'just' notice when it slowly moved down the screen during filming.

I'm done and dusted... Honest... Well...

So, for now I'm signing this project off.  In reality, I'm more then likely to return to this now and again and do more "fiddling" but til then its time to consider new projects.  Such as looking at the real thing - given my brand new stash I recently picked up (as seen below).

Keep with the virtual?  Perhaps just go for the Physical...

For those curious, the large keyboard you see at the bottom is from an old Commodore PET - the person I picked these up from has rewired it to work with the ZX Spectrum...  How - I don't know (I'm no electronics boffin) but its pretty cool...

Until next post...