Metroid Prime - Ruined Fountain

I’ve remade one of the rooms from an all-time favorite game of mine, Metroid Prime. I chose the ruined fountain because it’s an incredibly distinctive area (for example) while still being small enough to be manageable. Even all these years
later, the artwork in Metroid Prime holds up amazingly well. I am always blown away by what they managed to accomplish with so little in the way of rendering power. I hope I was able to do it justice.




For reference, here’s some shots of the original game:

http://i.imgur.com/l4El7qQ.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/VYIWaD4.jpg

I love that game! You did it justice! It looks very nice and just like the I remember it (just better). :slight_smile:

Very nice job, the detail is amazing.

Just out of curiosity, how did you achieve the lens flair with the lights?

Oh boy.

The halo was hand-drawn, I just drew some circles and triangles in Photoshop and blurred them. I used the lens distortion node in the final comp to give them a bit of color shift, then I just added them on top of the comp. I rendered the plazmites (the light insect creatures) on a separate layer, and used the sunbeams node on the emission pass to generate the rays. In order to make it look like the rays were surrounding the plazmites, I added the rays to the main image first, then blended the plazmites back on top at ~50% opacity. So the order went: main image > rays (add) > plazmites (over@50%) > halo (add).

To give some general shine, I also used the glare node’s streaks and fog glow modes. I always use mix=1 on the glare node then add it to the main image rather than using the built in mix function, I feel it gives better results and its easier to tune and stack different glares. Finally, for the lens dirt and glare, plus stuff like the vertical spike in the main image, I used the awesome GLFlares2 kit: http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/76172

Screenshot of the plazmite section of the comp (sorry for the readability, it was hard to fit everything on screen)


Here’s my bloom node group exploded open. (I have a similar one using the glare node set to streaks=2 to do the faux-anamorphic horizontal flares)