Capcom has recreated particular rooms in Resident Evil Remake using polygons

Capcom has remade certain rooms in next year’s Resident Evil remaster using polygons to take advantage of the improved lighting tech available on current and last-gen consoles, producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi has revealed.

Discussing the enhancement process in a new video, Hirabayashi explained that “there’s a specific room that has very, very dynamic lighting which presented a bit of a challenge to us,” referring to an area underneath the mansion’s graveyard.

“So in the original game, this part was handled as a video file basically that played in the background. We realised this is a good opportunity on current and next-gen systems to do something more special than that. Lighting itself has advanced so much in the interim that it was kind of wasteful to just play a movie when we could do something cooler.

“We wanted to do something really neat with the lighting in here and we thought, you know what, rather than just put some fancy lighting on top of a 2D background we decided for this particular room – and once again this is kind of a rare case – we decided to go whole hog. We basically recreated this entire area here entirely in polygons to make this work the way we wanted.”

While you’ll only see entirely recreated rooms “a few times in the game”, Hirabayashi says that Capcom chose the underground area in particular “because the lighting here was so dynamic, [so] we saw this as a really good chance to do some cool shadows and some cool lighting suitable for current and next-gen systems while still respecting the original source material.”

But if it’s able to remake some rooms using polygons, why didn’t Capcom recreate the entire game in 3D?

“You know, it’s something we had thought about,” Hirabayashi continues. “But ultimately if our main goal here is to recreate the game with the exact same tone with the exact same atmosphere as the original, we thought it wouldn’t be appropriate to recreate the entire thing like that. It would come off looking a little different, maybe a little soulless.

“So we went on a completely case-by-case basis: each room, each camera angle, what would be the best way to make this look good and refined and remastered without treading on what has come before and make sure that we’re maintaining that atmosphere and tone.”

The Resident Evil remaster lands on PS4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox 360 and PC in early 2015.

Source: Capcom Unity | Enhancing Resident Evil – Producer walkthrough 2