There's a section in almost every single Yakuza game where you're forced to go to a literal underground fighting place so aptly named the Underground Coliseum. To get access to the fighting arena, you have to talk to the receptionist, which forces your camera to a certain angle. Yakuza 4 kept things fresh by adding a single extremely crunchy texture with the advertisement of in-universe energy drink called Staminan, so it's in your view every time you talk to the receptionist. As that advertisement is one of the hardest going images known to man, I thought it might be neat to have a clean higher resolution version of it for potentially printing it
After checking the usual font sources in such cases (mostly libraries of Morisawa, Fontworks and Dynacomware) and seeing if anything matches, I got lucky and saw a match that looked acceptably close enough in my opinion. It might not be the exact font used in the original texture as there are a couple of differences here and there for sure, but in general the text typed with it matches the original really well.
Current state of the recreation with all of the text figured out, at least as close as I could get it without having any actual knowledge of the language. There are a couple of visual differences, but looking these up online as words and partial sentences it seems to be correct as far as I can tell?
After looking into textures for the bottles, the best I was able to find in game files were 128x128 for pre-Dragon Engine games and 256x256 for Dragon Engine games, and even then DE games had item designs changed in both subtle (dropped original logotypes for both Staminan and Tauriner and replaced with more generic plain fonts) and not so subtle (completely different, like with Spark here) ways, and they're not highres enough anyways, so I thought that the best way here will be to recreate actual bottles in 3D. The only issue here is that I don't actually actively do any 3D stuff and my Blender experience is doing what's the freshest video tutorial once every two or three years.
So, uh, now it's a year and a half later. The thought of getting it out before Cohost is dead motivated me, at least for today, and maybe having a public progress thread thing will help me stay motivated.
Felt like actually starting Blender and just doing it yesterday, so as of the time of writing 3/4 Staminans are somewhat done, at least as a first-ish pass. Not happy with the glass and the fact that you can only barely see liquid inside, but couldn't figure out the combo of glass thickness and shader parameters and whatnot, will probably have to tweak it more later.
Raw renders from Blender without any graphical editing except for putting them on a single sheet