shack remake remade
Overview
Recently, I got my Blender neurons firing again, and in the last two days I made a bunch of various stuff.
For example, here (bsky post) is a fake ad for a indie game I enjoy a lot called BAIONLENJA
Fully faithful to the game's style and all.
But in other news, the shack render that is currently on the new main page, its a 6 month old (at this point) gmod screenshot. And I wanted to change that.
So I remade the whole thing in blender. The reason I am making this such a big deal, is that I made the dither effect fully native, and made it layered, so if i wanted to insert, lets say a charachter in the middle to walk around or something, i can do so, with or without dithering, or maybe some other effects, who knows!
Tools & Prep
- Blender 5.2.1 (i am not sure how recent the dithering note for the compositor is, but it ain't old)
- Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike Source assets
Step-by-step
First, I by eyeing it, recreate the scene by hand
No crazy complex process there, I take the asset I used in GMod and pull it into the scene and move it until it lines up.
Then, I divided the whole thing into three layers
The reason I want to do this, is future proofing, for now I just have a room, but if in the future I make a charachter model, I can add one right in, and not force them to get the dither effect aswell, or just posterize them instead of dithering.
After that, the hardset step out of this whole thing, were the compositing nodes
The reason is, because I needed the dithering effect to have two colors, but, whenever I did that through color ramp, it would remove the alpha fully. Not a issue for layer 3 and 2 (aka the background and the non dithered layers) but layer 1, the issue was, if i chroma keyed the black out, then its just yellow and everything else is transparent, so kinda defeats the purpose of the layers huh.
So I sat there for god knows how long, but I did it. Using the alpha output of the layers, I couldnt just chroma key the white out for some reason, so it requiered such jank fuckery, source 1 seeems like a polished gift from heaven in comparison.
Troubleshooting & Tips
- Make sure you have the right stuff excluded in your view layers!
- Also before trying to come up with some jank solution, google general info, and look at all your nodes, use the annotation tool to make some notes aswell!
Notes
I hope I can keep the creativity outburst streak going and share more stuff with everyone. This is my first actual blender project I made fully from my own ideas, no parody of anything or following any guides lol.