Yeah, it looked like they had added a pipe to the foreground at the last minute in Photoshop by scaling up a background one.

If you go on the site Video Game Atlas and look at some of the maps from Oddysee spliced together, you will see how the same backgrounds are slapped on the same areas just two or three screens apart, and sometimes mirrored or flipped an appalling amount of times. Zulag 4 is a great example, and the secret area in Stockyard Escape. I never noticed this before but it really does take some of the beauty away from the game.

I'm all for re-using ideas that the general public wouldn't notice but this certainly does come across as plain lazy.

I wonder what the rendering time was? I think it took 1 week per screen for Resident Evil 2. I imagine it might have been longer for AO.

Its likely part of the reason for the re-use.

Really? RE2 was much more complicated.

"these environments were created with a software program called O2, and each background took two to three weeks to render."

From ye old wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil_2

I would have thought AE/AO have more complex scenes than RE2 due to the expansive backgrounds?

Weren't the backgrounds just paintings though? RE2's were Pre-rendered too, but 3D, and like Isaid AO/E just had simple paintings.

All fully 3D Maya stuff I believe.

I believe there was a fair bit of post-processing done on the bitmaps as well.

Sounds about right.

Wow, there is is some similarity in .cams
Never knew that. O.o

I happen to think that was a great CAM. It really helped transition from RF to the Stockyards. Although i will admit it could have been a bit better. But the "No Mudakons" painting was a nice touch and the background color was nice. Unfortunately the pit with the bombs at the bottom felt like a cheap addition - we already knew how to jump at that stage.

Can someone explain to me what "rendering time" is? I have actually used Adobe Premiere and Photoshop before and I know what rendering is, but in Photoshop it's usually like 3 seconds. Why would it take so long to render these CAMs.

??? I don't remember that? Example ?

Also, this has probably been explained before, but why are the raw CAM files so wide and squashed down?

Basically when creating pre-rendered 3D graphics, you have to render them to get the final image or movie. And if you’re making high-quality images, that can take a lot of resources and/or a long time.

Pixar for example has an entire farm of computers dedicated to rendering their movies.

So basically for Abe’s Oddysee, those backgruond graphics were created as a mixture of matte paintings and high resolution 3D models, and were then compressed down to fit the game’s resolution. And those models had to be rendered, in high resolution, with computers from 1997.

What sort of computer do you have? What specs does it have? Now imagine rendering your Photoshop stuff on a computer with mid-1990's specs. Next, imagine rendering stuff on a computer with mid-1990's specs, except that stuff has been developed in Maya and has all sorts of complicated shit going on.

That shit takes time.

The AO/AE scenes would probably take a while to render if it were made today too you know :3 (using modern texture resolutions, polycounts and lighting techniques, rendered at least at 1080p)

Hopefully not too long, seeing as JAW have promised similar levels of detail, but rendered in realtime.

They will look as good, they won't actually be as good. What I mean is that if AO were to be made prerendered today it would probably be Pixar levels of quality in the images. Films like Brave take AGES to render, and thats the sort of thing I mean :3

It has very little to do with computing power now and then, ray tracing a 3D scene is more complex in a few orders of magnitudes than applying a Photoshop filter. Even in mid 90s specs the Photoshop filter would be fairly quick, a few seconds maximum, where 3D rendering an AO cam, even in today's specs, would take a minimum of a few hours.

You're right, of course. That's why I mentioned the 'complicated shit' at the end of the paragraph. I just don't know the terminology that you do. :p