Rollercoaster Tycoon Rendering

[==] Rollercoaster Tycoon rendering information (3D Studio Max) [==]
Provided by Drippy Cat. Artist for the original RCT1 and RCT2 games:

# Youtube Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UKKaTGwIqc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6Fci7NWYUo

For RCT 1 I used Lightwave for the modelling and Raydream Studio (now called Carrara) for the animation and rendering. For RCT 2 I used Lightwave for the modelling and 3d Studio Max for the rendering.

Use the same lighting rig for all your work. Set up a set of lights for your main light direction but also use filler lights to catch details in the shadows. The camera was something like rotated 45 degrees on the vertical axis and pointing down by 30 degrees. Make sure it's set to orthographic. Draw out an (eg) 64 by 64 by 64 meter cube and do a series of tests with the zoom to make sure you have 1 meter  = 1 pixel horizontally. It'll be less vertically so stretch your cube up & down until you get to a point when you can say 'Ah! so if I have a height of (for example) .578 meters It'll render out as half a pixel tall. Keep the size of your final render the same for everything and crop out of the middle using the techniques described in this video. I used the default scanline renderer and there's an option somewhere to disable render antia alias against the background. Make sure you check it and keep it checked so you get crisp edges with no anti aliasing against whatever colour your background is. The default scanline renderer doesn't do global illumination, hence the need for experimenting with the lights to get some detail in the shadow areas - the default fill light (can't remember how that's exactly called) for the scene makes terrible shadow effects.

I used a scale of 1 meter = 1 pixel horizontally. It made for easier working out things when I was asked to raise/lower something by 1 or 2 pixels.

I rendered all the trees in Lightwave using this technique by Dave Gerrard - http://www.animationartist.com/2000/Tutorials/LWTrees/lwtrees.html .I'm sure some of it, at least, can be adapted to Max. For the different sizes I just scaled the trees up & rendered in 4 different 90 degree angles for each, For the density of the foliage I adjusted how much if each polygon that made up the leaves got rendered.

One thing I would say is that I couldn't exclude the background colour from the renders in Lightwave, I found that rendering against black gave me too dark an edge to the images. Rendering against a green or magenta background gave horrible anti aliasing fringing problems. In the end I settled on red 57, green 59, blue 57 for my RGB values. The green 59 was there so that when I magic wanded away the background to transparent, I didn't also lift out any pure grey values of 57/57/57.

Even after all this time I have to be very cautious about displaying old renders. Actually I don't even have Lightwave or Max on my system any more. If I were to do the same thing again I'd start with Modo and see how far that took me. Chances are it would also be full colour rather than an indexed palette of 256 colours, so I'd be using alpha masks to lift my images from the background. Oh, and one last thing. When dithering down from full colour to a 256 colour indexed palette I think I used DeBabelizer Pro (now defunct) for RCT1 and either Paintshop Pro or Photoshop for RCT2. I used several variations of the master palette. If there were any colours I wanted to not include in a particular image I'd make those colours on my indexed palette magenta. That way the chances of them ever being selected for dithering down to a natural looking image like a tree were remote. To do any editing when they were down to 256 colours I's use Pro Motion, which I'd still use today.

# Email
All I can remember is that I used 3d Studio max for RCT 2. I used the primitive default scanline renderer with – I think – a Box(?) anti aliasing algorithm set very low, something like 1.4 pixels. I also made sure that the objects were set to not anti alias against the background so they had a crisp edge to them. I used a series of point lights arranged in a dome like structure around the object with a single directional light to provide the directional lighting. Ambient lighting was switched off or set extremely low because it flattened anything in shadow.