This is a super scuffed tutorial that I just felt the need to upload since I did a lot of PSX renders, if you have any questions feel free to ask away, I'm gonna go back to animating more silly things for you great great goobers 😱 Edit: I did NOT expect this video to get so much attention, I promise I will respond to any questions you guys have even despite the viewcount, I like this stuff fr
never been too interested in this style besides for every time blender crashes anything high res. Super cool seeing a tutorial on a smaller topic that i always hear people saying they wish existed
A lot of PS1 games kind of circumvented the problem of deforming by just doing action figure like segmented models. For example, the arms and head of Solid Snake were their own geometries that clipped into each other. Using clothing as guides is probably a good approach. And you still need to keep a an eye out for surplus polygons. Like, bottom of the neck, never gonna see it. So why waste polygons on it. And flat image planes with alpha textures means you can do a fairly detailed knife blade of one or two polygons. Another popular trick is to use a flat plane with a circular texture, if you always orient it towards the camera, you get a perfect pixellated sphere with just two triangles. If the hardware can remap the texture coordinates on the fly, you can fake a highlight, glare and shadow on that "sphere". And, I guess they could also write some compensating code that moves the edge loops during deformation to preserve volume. Another approach, I guess, would be to detach the vertices of the back of the knee at high deformation animations, so the leg bits can keep their volume and just clip into each other. But. If you know there's gonna be a lot of knee bending, it might be worth the extra polys to just get one extra edge loop at the knee. Especially if you can fake geometry somewhere else on the model to compensate. There are a lot of very clever ways these modelers and animators used to fake geometry and details for low spec hardware.
There's a fair number of tricks you could do with textures aswell, Megaman legends had plenty of face textures made just to "cheat" out more angles out of simpler charcter model structures. Also the way ND made crash bandicoot look as good as it did is an interesting dive for this sort of thing, but definetly out of the scope of most folks trying to emulate ps1 graphics.
So a lot of old software engines would store the vertex locations for each vertex in a model for each frame and just lerp between them by looking at the ms difference between the two frames and the time elapsed. That's how a lot of older engines did it (and a lot of the games that used non-segmented models on the PS1-era consoles), but by the early 2000s it started becoming much more efficient to just do the skeletal animation as part of your engine's animation system. It tended to look better and the mesh densities were getting to a point where it was a major resource inefficiency to store the positions for each vert individually and instead just do the math compared to the skeletal deformation. You just store the skeletal info and maybe some vertex animation to tweak things. There are some later-era PS1 games that actually do a really good job of making every frame of vertex animation count on the PS1, like Soul Reaver, the Spyro games, etc. I always preferred that method of animation for lowpoly, but it's one of those techniques that's so outdated that doing it today is actually kinda difficult cause the tools don't really support it that easily anymore. Like, "Why would you want to do it that way!?" sort of thing. But then you lose a lot of the ability that you have with skeletal, like being able to do procedural or physics-based animation, re-using animations over multiple models (and modular models) etc. Our tools are generally better now, but unless you tweak lowpoly animations a lot, they will tend to look way worse in motion today than they used to.
the last time i tried to use blender i couldn't figure out how to make a texture for 8 hours. but your voice is incredible so i'm watching the full video anyways
You know what you're doing, period. Links in the description including one to gimp, never expected that, and just an awesome rewatchable video. Thank YOU.
very nice. i have been doing these graphics for a year now but still learnt something. i always wanted to mimic the vertex shadows so thanks for showing that so clearly. i would also give a shout out for the dripspsx add-on, its really good value for 18 bucks. cheers
That's insane! You explained the baked lighting super well. Are you going to cover how they animated the characters next? I saw you explained how the model deformed incorrectly but I am very much interested in how you could animate such a low poly model properly.
I haven't actually looked too hard into animation, the scene I created was animated like i'd animate anything else. If I had to guess though, I'm assuming they probably animate the least axes of rotation as possible. So if you needed a character to raise their arms, instead of animating the intricate shoulder movement and maybe the torso stretching, you'd just animate the arms rotating straight up on the Z axis. If it was up to me though, I'd just animate like I normally do! It's more fun ;)
I swear to got the fucking vertex lighting thing, i have been looking for that for a while and never got a straight answer as to how to do it, i love you
I have to start getting into shading and modeling and I loved this vid, im kinda scared about everything I have to learn but this video made me feel more interested in it. Congrats, keep it up!
for the deformation on bending legs and such, a lot of times legs and arms and such are separated in different parts, so when one moves, it doesn't actually bend, it just moves a piece, like an articulated toy
this is such a sick tutorial!!!! I've been wanting to know how to vertex paint for so long, so thanks for breaking it down in such a fantastic way :D you are a legend
SO GLAD this found me, i love these old graphics so much especially when their used for horror and im trying to learn modeling to recreate these :D is that yume nikki ost in the bg?
the way I researched of making the vertices wobble was to add a displacement modifier set to minimal strenght (texture set to disorted noise: cell noise, make the size big) and make the object coordinates controlled by the camera
also if you don't have after effects a really really time consuming way to add dithering for free is just add all the frames in to gimp and dither them there
just in case someone else runs into this problem before you can do the indexed color conversion you gotta change your color precision mode to 8-bit integer. Indexing will be greyed out otherwise
I love everything about this video, thank you! It actually gave me the motivation to carry on with the donut, gotta take the baby steps. I promise myself to comeback to this video! :D
5:32 if you select all of the faces in edit mode, instead of unwrapping each face individually, you can just click "reset" at the bottom of the menu, and it will do the same thing.
vertex colors can be- and are still going strong with game development today. You can do wonders with them like using them as a mask to blend different textures on a wall
Amazing Tutorial! learned about vertex painting, dithering, and the model resource. So helpful I just have an issue with alphas, does this method not let you include your alpha channel in your textures? Deleting the principle node in the shader editor takes out the alpha input so Im not sure if it's possible with this method but I wanted to ask as Im trying this out for my own model.
Thank you for the lesson! Guys, can someone tell me how to create such an effect on a static picture? That is, the background for example. I perfectly created a rotating object with this effect, but the background turns out static and is a little out of place
2:12 don't PS1 games have no rigs? I thought individual bodyparts were individual models so that they could be bent without artifacts. Or was it N64 that did this thing?
Both the ps1 and n64 used skeleton rigs. It was just up to the developer whether they used the rigs or not. Skelton rigs where already used for deformation around 1991, almost 5 years before the n64 would launch
@@SunnyIsOnlineomg thank you!! makes sense i forgot it cause i've tried to avoid listening to the omori OST since i'm about to play it LOL also I wrote that comment in the middle of watching and thank you so much for this guide! lots of pretty useful insights i haven't thought of before :D
i tried adding seams on every side like you did at 5:36, but every time i finally add the texture through the shader and connect it to the cube it doesn't have the texture apply to each face. i don't understand what i'm doing wrong.
psx snap breaks my objects. when adding the modifier, it creates a weird axis arrow thing at the world origin, and whenever i try t move the object in object mode, it just moves the arrows, not the object. its not in the object tree.
Hi i tried to find this in the comments but i couldn't. When i render out an animation it turns like blurry after a few seconds. I don't know how to fix this and its driving me a little insane. I'm rendering it out at a lower resolution so i dont know why its doing this I also have the filter size set low aswell. PLEASE HELP
i might be late but instead of scale - pixelate - scale nodes do transform -pixelate-transform both transforms set as nearest and change the scale in them
