Misty Odyssey Through Silent Hill 2 - 4K

A personal project that I've been working on in my spare time over the last two years or so. In the early 2000s, I had already played the first Silent Hill on Playstation 1 and I really liked the atmosphere, not only in terms of the story but especially the artistic direction. At the time, it was a real feat to have such a level of graphic style with such limited technological resources.

So, when Silent Hill 2 came out on Playstation 2, I was really looking forward to playing it too. And my level of wonder was even greater. Visually, this game was ten years ahead of anything else that was being done at the time. Even now, it's still really impressive.

Since I'm a bit obsessive sometimes when I want to understand something, I wanted to dig into the textures in detail, digging into the game files. So I started by finding the tools to extract the 3D models and textures. From there, I thought to myself: "Hey, what if I recomposed the entire town of Silent Hill into a single 3D scene?" - Which inevitably led me to the next logical step, which was to take a virtual trip through its streets.

So, to get the best visual results while staying true to the original art direction, I kept the original textures by greatly increasing their resolution (sometimes up to 8 times larger) with Topaz Photo AI, then manually retouching them in Photoshop. For other textures (like some store signs, for example), I redid them entirely manually, using the original texture as a reference.

For the 3D part, I used Cinema 4D entirely. I know it well and it does what I ask it to do. I just learned that it doesn't like my way of generating fog, because it created a lot of visual artifacts. A bit of tinkering later and it was done!

Thank you very much to Team Silent for this video game masterpiece. The artistic direction and your creativity to adapt to the technical limitations of the time have definitely influenced me in my life as an artist.

And thank you for watching this video. I hope to be able to share a kind of "behind the scene" or making-of, in the times to come.