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Pre-rendered background technical question
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The unique framing certainly helps as there have been fixed or isometric camera experiments by modders in more modern games(Resident Evil 2 and Fallout 4 come most immediately to mind) and to me they still have much of the vibe intact even without 90s CGI. As does an actual modern game that uses them, Pillars of Eternity.
I've been thinking the same thing.
In general, it would be great for some JRPG developers to do projects on the scale of Pillars of Eternity, Divinity Original Sin, and Wasteland 2.
As someone who likes recreating old-school 90's RE-style backgrounds as a hobby, I think the "look" has a lot to do with the limitations they had at the time. The blend of low-poly objects, low-res textures and simplistic lighting is what gives the backgrounds that 90's look. Also, at least with the PSX-era RE games, the backgrounds were rendered in a measly 320x240 resolution and had color dithering and compression artifacts, so I guess that also plays a part in giving them their characteristic look. You can get pretty close to emulating the look with current 3D modelling software:
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Bravely Default (and its sequel) did something interesting by laying down painting style textures over simple polygons.
The result was stunning for 3DS.
OP
OP
I don't know if they had any painting for FFVII, but the FFIX art team had Hollywood-grade international artists from the US and from Europe, who also worked on The Spirits Within and who continue to have a career in American films to this day. The FFVII art team on the other hand were "simply" Japanese video game artists.
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As people have mentioned, the "look" mainly comes from the quality of CG rendering avaible during the 90's/early 2000s, generally from basic scanline renderers or Pixar's REYES-based Renderman engine at the high end. Lots of basic phong shading, low res textures and lighting with ultra sharp shadows and no indirect illumination. In a way, it wasn't too dissimilar from the sort of techniques games were using in the 2000's, just with the rendering being a lot sharper and the models smoothed out with Nurbs or subdivision.
Look at some CG animated films at the time and you can see they share much the same look:
(Toy Story)
(A Bugs Life)
(Antz)
And these are some of the highest end examples from that period - most games back then would be working with considerably smaller budgets, which is obviously going to have huge knock-on effect to the CG.
Look at some CG animated films at the time and you can see they share much the same look:
(Toy Story)
(A Bugs Life)
(Antz)
And these are some of the highest end examples from that period - most games back then would be working with considerably smaller budgets, which is obviously going to have huge knock-on effect to the CG.
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I'm pretty sure it's the opposite. 90s 3D models are mostly done with NURBS which doesn't handle creases very well. Not to mention NURBS is designed for CAD, it's hard to model anything complex. SubD modeling really started to become a thing since 2000s.
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OP
Might be the considerably more realistic lighting, but these look way different to me.As people have mentioned, the "look" mainly comes from the quality of CG rendering avaible during the 90's/early 2000s, generally from basic scanline renderers or Pixar's REYES-based Renderman engine at the high end. Lots of basic phong shading, low res textures and lighting with ultra sharp shadows and no indirect illumination. In a way, it wasn't too dissimilar from the sort of techniques games were using in the 2000's, just with the rendering being a lot sharper and the models smoothed out with Nurbs or subdivision.
Look at some CG animated films at the time and you can see they share much the same look:
(Toy Story)
(A Bugs Life)
(Antz)
And these are some of the highest end examples from that period - most games back then would be working with considerably smaller budgets, which is obviously going to have huge knock-on effect to the CG.