I recently picked up a used PS2 and was blown away at how well it actually looked from what I actually remembered. In my opinion it is one of the most impressive graphical jumps from its previous console ever.
@@garbaj I distinctly remember seeing early screenshots of MGS2 in a gaming magazine before the PS2 was even out yet. I thought it looked like an FMV, like they were just CGI fakes. I didn't believe I would actually see a game looking like that running in real-time. I honestly could not believe it when I got the DVD with the E3 videos and stuff in a magazine later on and saw video of the game running. Then later on I got to play the demo that came with Zone Of the Enders, and I proceeded to spend weeks in that one section of the tanker mission, my jaw agape the whole time. That demo is a fun look into how the game changed before release btw.
This is funny but not true just in case anyone thought so. Virtua fighter had individual 3d moving fingers in a 1993 arcade game. And virtua racer had them in 1992 but I dont think they were fully animated.
Thank you! After I saw your PS1 graphic videos, I went around trying to find stuff on PS2 graphics / early PC game, but had no idea how to define them for the search engine. Amazing if you made another video like this but talking about those early PC games and how some of them were somewhat similar to some of the early consoles and how they were different. 🙏
I try to use what I considered solid games for then. Like kingdomhearts for higher poly models and particle effects Metroid prime trilogy of games for their levels geometry and details Unreal tournament 2003 and 4 for its particles Doom 3 for its dynamic lighting Etc. I try to find specific games I like with the polys ,textures,etc. That were released during early to late 2000s to define what I'm after
2:35 - 3:34 Now THAT'S why I couldn't find much tutorials on making 6th gen graphics. The technological advancements made it very easy to experiment with different art styles. And honestly I appreciate the 6th generation for that. I also like ps2 graphics a lot more than ps1 graphics as well for this reason, and also because they simply look better, breath more life into character designs and are easier to make and experiment with.
hmm. as a 3D artist myself i can tell you making ps2 graphics has a lot more to it then you think. on the surface you may not notice much but thats becasue of how good the games of that era hide their graphics . i would write it all down but honestly its better to just try it yourself. there is alot to check out and my writing skills wont do it justice. for example in the ps2 age shading techniques were very basic so things like reflective surfaces could not use fransel and there was no PBR techniques or screen space effects. reflective surfaces were either made with what is known as "double geometry" or pre rendered cubemaps. some games combined both techniques to create realistic reflections too with real time environment mapping. other games used screen shots of the screen itself as the reflection texture which is how GTA vice city stories had reflective cars on ps2 hardware. what is intresting here is that reflections were the same intensity from all camera angles becasue fransel was not a thing yet and were not specifically a "reflection" effect but rather a diffues color that was added on top of the existing textures as an extra and trasparent layer . other things you may notice are the very very extensive use of particle effects ! PS2 had an amazing particle renderer that could handle millions of triangles so many ps2 games had unusual effects with it. for example all the lens flares in GTA vice city and need for speed UG2 or alot of other games were actually particle effects and sprites. you can actually check for yourself by moving the camera super fast and check how the lens flares try to keep up and glitch out due to the fact that they are made of 3D sprites in the scene that have to try and keep up with the camera. i think one of the crash bandicot games also used particles to create a vollumetric effect for god rays coming out of windows in one of its levels . also a well known fact is that ps2 used SRGB color space instead of the current gen ACES colors which ment that many HDR effects like we see today had to be faked with sprites or bloom. which is something to keep in mind as all modern game engines use filmic and other photoreal dynamic range options. in general color and contrast has less depth and punch to it due to this limitation and how brightness caps out at values between to hard coded values which ment that developers had very little space to have realistic lighting and had to use artistic or creative techniqes to get the visuals they needed rather then simply using the real world llighting values other thing to note is that pretty much the majority of games that were made for the ps2 were using the RenderWare engine which is pretty much a good reason why ps2 games had such a disticnt look to them . you can actually still download renderware for your PC and use it to make new games with ps2 style. it will even export to ps2 if you know how to get it working
Also some ps2 games, like Kingdom Hearts, would have two different character models. One would be smoother and more detailed, and used for more detailed cutscenes, while there would also be simpler models for gameplay and less important cutscenes that would have swappable textures on the faces to allow for easily animated lip flaps
Pretty much every square enix game, this was very apparent. FF10 had it happen a lot, especially in dialogs with less important conversations the models were low detail. Then in the important story dialogs the model detail went up and the lips moved properly, always jarring for me.
Valve games (starting with Half-Life 2) made really aggressive use of premade LOD models. Their model format makes it easy to slot in as many as you want, and even the most basic models tend to have at least one or two. The engine automatically pops between them based on the number of pixels they take up on the screen.
God of war 2 has the best graphics on that generation. Forgot to mention that when GoW2 launched on Ps2, the Ps3 was already out for 6 months at that time but they still launched the sequel on Ps2 so that the people who played the first one could play the sequel as well and because of this, the ps2 was pushed to its limit in the colossus and zeus boss battle.
PS2 have so many games with impressive graphics, give a try games like Splinter Cell 3&4, RE4, Flatout 2, Burnout series, Black, Peter Jackson's King Kong, Primal, Ghost Hunter, Tomb Raider series, Mafia, The Godfather, The Getaway, 007 Quantum of Solace, Cold Fear, The Hitman 3&4, Stolen, True Crime NYC, PSI-OPS, Time Spliters 3, Scarface, Alone in the Dark 5, Silent Hill 3&4, Onimusha 3&4, Shadow of Rome, Darkwatch, Cold Winter, Brother's in Arms, GT4, Tourist Trophy, Batman Begin, Catwoman, CoD 3, RE Outbreak 1&2, Eragon, Fahrenheit, Haunting Ground, Forbidden Siren 1&2, Genji, MGS 3, Okami, Tekken 4&5, Soul Calibur 3, Mortal Kombat Armageddon, Def Jam fight for NY
My first job in the game industry was working on PS2 characters and rigs. The way we layed out UVs in particular was very different to how we do it today with auto-unwrappers and auto-layout algos. Because of the aliasing on a low res texture map, you had to layout the UVs in a way that you didn't have any diagonal lines or you would get terrible aliasing on things like a solid stripe of color. The bilinear filtering helped, but you still had to be very particular with your UV usage and prioritizing things like the face/head to have more texture pixel space than something like a boot(often the entire texture budget of one character was a single 1024x1024 map). We would also do things like overlap half of the face with the other half, but still leave the jaw and mouth area non-mirrored so we could get some asymmetry in the texture paint. I often would also do a texture paint pass in Photoshop, then set up some lights in Maya and bake-to-texture some light into the diffuse map itself. For rigging, I had to use tables to make sure that all vertex weight values didn't have a number with more than 3 digits past the decimle points. For example, a vert that had a skinning value of .456 had to be rounded out to .46 or something. On the modeling side, we modeled "mitten" hands by the time the PS2 was out which was a step up from box hands on the PS1. This still wasn't a full 5-digit articulated hand, but it was a thumb, an index finger, and the rest were consolidated into one giant finger set. Depending on the game and how many characaters needed to be on screen at once, sometimes we only had the thumb and mitten. Finger cylinders themselves were usually 4-sided or at most, 6-sided(later PS2 games had 6-sided fingers with one of the flat faces at the top and bottom for the best volume fake) There was a very common modeling technique used by many character artists at the time called "cylindrical modeling" which was a variation of box modeling. It allowed for tight management of polycount.
I want to really learn to make games with the aesthethics of Resident Evil and Silent Hill of the PS2 era. There is something about how those game looked that I loooove.
I've been looking for info on the ps2 era, this came in handy! Thanks! People are sleeping on the ps2 era, thinking it's forgettable and not as visually impressive as the psx era but they forgot games like FFXII, Okami, God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, Onimusha 3 (etc) were made in that period of time.
Silent hill 3 is still one of the best looking games of all time. There are still games that don't look nearly as good in motion as SH3 does. It's amazing how much animation quality and lighting determine "graphic quality"
This really needs a follow up. I think modeling/going through the process of some of the darker themed heavy texture based games would go a long way. Shadow of Colossus, Metal Gear(s), Onimusha, DMC, FF-X, Resident Evil, etc. etc. You're absolutely right. There is a huge hole in Blender tutorials for this era of gaming and that would be the best place to start, IMO.
@@VicerFxI love the bloom, it’s such a important part of the atmosphere. Twilight princess, SotC, etc, all use it well to create that magical, ethereal atmosphere. But i just played through the prince of persia trilogy, and MY GOD it’s such a beautiful trilogy of games! The combat is abysmal but the environments are some of the most gorgeous ones i’ve ever seen in any media, ever. The bloom issuch an integral part of the dreamlike atmosphere, it’s amazing.
Thanks for this, really enjoyed the insight. There's an artistic project I'd love to do where you essentially make a PS2/XBOX era licensed tie-in video game...for a movie that doesn't exist. So you as a player have to decipher the plot of what this thing was supposed to be solely from this piece of ancillary material, and there'd be all these things that show up as padding that you as a player have to assume are presumably from additional ancillary media (i.e., cartoons, toylines, comic books, etc )...that, again, do not really exist. And to top it off, you'd get actors who were actually famous around 2002-2005 (i.e., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seth Green) to give intentionally flat, phoned-in performances. And there's all these digitally compressed extras like a music video and artwork. All of the game would be an effort to capture the quintessential vibe of one of those "rushed-to-meet-a-release-date" movie tie-in games, since that's an aesthetic I feel has been unexplored but was a huge part of my generation's childhood, and has now been sort of lost as the landscape of film and video games have both shifted drastically.
That's incredible, and it's somewhat similar to an idea I'd like to work on some day. I remember catching episodes of Stargate SG-1 on analog TV back in the day and having absolutely no context for anything that happens in the plot. They were enjoyable on their own, but part of what made it fun was trying to piece the plot together - what exactly was the backstory here, who are these characters, why are they going to this planet or that ship, and what makes the bad guys the bad guys? With that bit of nostalgia in mind, I'd love to make a game that's the final game in a trilogy that doesn't actually exist, or maybe the mid-trilogy turning point like Empire Strikes Back. You don't know who these characters are or why they care about each other, but it definitely seems like they have a lot of history. Maybe a friend betrays the group, and you have to convey to the player the hurt that the protagonists feel without the context of having experienced the events leading to the friendship in the first place. Maybe there's a big reveal from the villains, and the player doesn't really understand its significance. Maybe an old ally from the "first game" makes a "return" to help out. It's got a lot of interesting things to play with in pursuit of giving you that feeling of jumping into a game series a couple games in and trying to catch up, or playing the only game in a series to get localized. I just like the idea of seeing a game box for "Eloquent Malediction 3: The Starknights Reborn - The Anniversary Remastered Edition" and being unable to find any information about the series.
What a absolutely amazing time to be alive for gaming graphics. I often feel shitty about the world im currently in but I have to remember how phenomenal it is that I was alive along side some of the biggest jumps in technology that the world has seen since. Many alive today or even in the last 20 years can't completely appreciate that jump. I was there.
The PS2 has 32 MiB of main RDRAM for the Emotion Engine (the brains). PS2 has 4 MiB of eDRAM for the Graphics Synthesizer, the graphics processor chip. There is 1.6 GB/sec of bandwidth between the EE and the GS, which allows for texture streaming between the 32 MiB RDRAM pool and the 4 MiB eDRAM pool. The maximum pixel fillrate is theoretically over 1 gigapixel per second and the maximum texel fillrate is over 1 gigatexel per second, although assuming a native resolution of 640x480 at 60 FPS, the final rendered pixel fillrate will be about 12 million pixels per second fully rendered; and, assuming 3 megapixels of uncompressed 32-bit RGBA textures, updated at 60 FPS, the texel fillrate for a fully rendered output will be about 90 megatexels per second. If we assume a baseline of 12 MiB of texture data (this is enough to store 12 uncompressed, 32-bit RGBA, 512*512 resolution textures), and a framerate target of 60 FPS, this would take at least 720 MiB/sec of the 1,600 MB of available GIF bus bandwidth between the EE & GS. Geometry data requires at least 40 bytes per triangle, and the PS2 has a maximum of 75 million triangular transforms per second for unrendered geometry, and 20 million per second for fully rendered geometry across the GS's 16 pixel processing pipelines. Assuming 300,000 triangles for a given scene, at least 12 MB of RAM is required for geometry data, which at a 60 FPS framerate target, translates to 720 MB/sec of memory bus bandwidth required, and a geometry transform fillrate of 18 million fully rendered, transformed, lit, shaded triangles per second; 90% of the theoretical maximum. 12 MiB of geometry data plus 12 MB of texture data, updated at 60 times per second, requires over 1,440 MB/sec out of the available 1,600 MB/sec GIF EE-to-GS bus bandwidth for geometry and texture data streaming, between the 32 MiB RDRAM and 4 MiB eDRAM pools. The eDRAM stores up to 4 MiB at any time, of that combined 24 MiB texture-geometry data, and the remaining 20 MiB is left in the 32 MiB of RDRAM, which has 12 MiB leftover to work on the main engine threads, including streaming data from the DVD or HDD or memory card storage, sound, phyics, AI, and feeding the rest of the system with data. The PS2 has about 6 MB/sec of DVD read bandwidth, and the storage disk is about ten times that at best. Memory card bandwidth is even higher.
Regarding the lighting, I recall Silent Hill 2 having an interesting situation. The original release used Gouraud (aka per vertex) lighting. However, when the game was ported to Xbox and PC, they were able to implement Phong (per pixel) lighting. The PS2 Greatest Hits release of the game (the one with the Maria side-campaign) was able to backport this lighting method for that release of the game. This was especially noticeable with the flashlight.
I came here because as much as I'm tired of the industry pushing graphics far beyond what a top-end rig can do nowadays, I want to make a game that takes a lot of inspiration from Kingdom Hearts, not just for its gameplay, but also its graphics. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is one of the best example of that, by staying as close as possible to the original material (DreamCast) and that game runs smooth AF!
PS2 era feels like a golden age. Because there wasn't so much put into physically based rendering, everything had to be so artist driven and on top of that it's just so performant. (of course most of PS3 gen didn't have physically based rendering either) I don't think games these days have to be so pressured to use so much physical rendering. Specifically, Switch games too often look worse than PS2 graphics because their target is on Vfx that are just too heavy for the machine to make good use of. (Deadly Premonition, No More Heroes 3, and Beyonetta 3, all suffered some flat/dull/janky looking worlds mixed with rough performance)
One old game on the GameCube that still looks fantastic is Luigi's Mansion. I always loved to use the first person view to admire the environments. The lighting still looks great, and the environments are detailed. I'm amazed that Nintendo could make something look so good with the hardware they were working with, and with the game being rushed all to hell like all Nintendo GameCube games. Honestly, I think it's one of those games that would look objectively worse without filtered textures. The other game I think just looks wrong without texture filtering is Half Life.
I prefer unfiltered textures for Half-Life 1, Quake 1, Quake 2, and even Quake 3. They have PS1-quality textures and tend to have evenly sized texels. Except for Quake III, they were designed with software rendering in mind (Quake 1 and Half-Life 1 were actually designed for the software renderer first and foremost), and the sharp subjectively more visually pleasing, as it makes the games look more detailed and less muddy.
Great vid, very insightful and well ahead of the art style popularity curve. Given time, the community will name and use various PS2 art/graphic styles, and you will look very prophetic.
THANK YOU SO MUCH! Not kidding, I've been thinking about this for at least a month, and I've been learning code so I can make a PS2 style game, but I had no idea how to make PS2 graphics. The timing of this video coming out is flippin perfect. Thanks mate :]
@@uppishcub1617 because of the reach. I mean, as much as I would love to just make a ps2 game, not nearly as many peoe would play it as if I just put it on steam. Plus, hopefully it's a big game. Maybe not graphically intensive, but I plan on doing something with it, and the PS2 hardware might not work with it. And in general, it would be a lot more work for the long-term, learning how to work around the ps2 for one game and then learning how to make a game for wider PC users.
@@XEPHOURIA for your first point, PS2 emulators have been working for over ten years now. Anyone with a decently modern or at least moderately capable PC can run them. People would definitely be able to play the game if they wanted to. However I will concede the second point. That is a lot of work for only one game. Maybe you could just make your game theoretically capable of being ported to a PS2. Like make it capable of running on a similarly powerful PC. Whatever you do, I'd advise that you avoid unity, unreal, Godot, and the other public game engines. Using a modern engine means you'll always be fighting with it to make sure it doesn't look modern. If you use your own engine, not only will it allow you to have a very authentic look, but it will also make the game stand out and have more personality. Plus, engine programming is a very transferrable skill.
@@uppishcub1617 it's not about who 'can' play it, it's about who will. Or, like, who's willing to? And also, it's already hard to market my game unless some big content creator makes it popular, and it would be way harder if it's not, like, on a convenient steam page that anyone can see anytime completely randomly. And I already plan on doing that! It's going to be easier to do physics my way, and mix the power of modern stuff with the style of semi-retro games, plus, it might help other creators if they have a similar niche that they need filled. But yeah, since I'm a super PS2 freak, I'm like, almost definitely at least going to commission people to port my game to ps2 when it eventually comes out. I want to be able to hold the disk and put it in the little tray and listen to that iconic death screech play before I get to the tasty game. My goal is to make something that combines the awe and joy of looking at games like the original PS2, and the standards of today's games. With my own personal touches blasted into it, of course. But I miss the vibe of old PS2 games and I wanna being it back :]
Retro graphics seem to get renewed interest eventually while the more recently abandoned graphical trend gets seen as ugly. I remember being in high school when there was a big 8/16-bit revival and it was kind of a consensus that early 3d games were ugly and hard to look at. Now I'm seeing more and more PS1 style indie games and a nostalgia of Nintendo 64 aesthetics. What seems ugly now is the early 360/PS3 graphics, where color seemed to have been washed away. But I expect people to make purposely "PS3" styled games eventually
There's 2 main reasons behind it imo. The first is that all the AAA games are chasing realism above anything else, and realism doesn't have a particularly identifiable personality or style beyond looking like reality, so all games end up looking basically the same beyond some slight differences in colouration. Creativity and beauty are less important than looking realistic, so most beauty in modern gaming is relegated to indie titles. The other issue is one of limitations - or more importantly the lack of them. Modern consoles and computers can create pretty much any aesthetic or game you want. The biggest hurdle remaining is fully real-time ray-tracing in 4K, which means we can't do real-time mirror reflections or fully photorealistic lighting and shadows. Pretty much everything else is achievable given enough time and effort. You might think this would lead to an explosion in creativity, but it has caused the opposite. The problem with having no boundaries is that you also have no guidance - no walls to define your project against - and so it's difficult to even know where to start. Think of it like this: you have 2 painters, and you tell one of them to paint the most beautiful thing they can find on a single broken wall, and you tell the other to paint the most beautiful thing they can find in the whole of New York City. The first painter will be able to fully examine the wall within hours and start work immediately after, painting a beautiful and extremely detailed picture of a single crack in the wall. The second painter will either spend days endlessly wandering the city looking for something ever more beautiful and never even start, or they will go "I don't want to spend days wandering aimlessly. The Statue of Liberty is beautiful so I will paint that.", and you end up with yet another painting of the Statue of Liberty. It's still beautiful, but you've seen it a million times already so it feels hollow. Developers used to operate within extremely strict hardware and software limitations, so they were always looking to push as close as they could to those limitations, and you ended up with extremely focused and inspired games. Nowadays there are no boundaries, so there is no drive to push them, and you end up with shallow, derivative games that are trying to be everything at once, and as such do nothing particularly well.
I would love for you to do a video discussing the graphical limitations of the PS1 and the PS2 in terms of maximum polygons at once maximum objects highest texture possible and then go over you know the most common uses to get a better idea of how to go about creating graphics that resemble each respective console
the fact that the ps2 era was a transitional period between two console generations with more defined aesthetics, the ps1 (known for a more explicitly low-poly aesthetic) and the ps3 (known for a more muted/desaturated look with glossy & light bloom-heavy finish; see ThorHighHeels' video on "Mysterious PS3 Games"), makes the discussion on a "PS2 aesthetic" more frustrating in comparison. additionally, I wonder how the discussion for a PS4 and PS5 aesthetic in the future would be as well
I think the thing that lets ps2 and even ps3 graphics down nowadays is playing them back on HD monitors make them look worse because they weren't designed for them, with good upscaling they really do still hold up a lot of the time
another thing with PS2 visuals is just changing the display type; component fixes a lot of the issues with graphics relative to the display. This is an explicit thing due to everyone using the basic AV composite cables that came with the PS2 which hold most of the display issues. You can find videos of this stuff with 'component v composite PS2' here on youtube
One of the things I don't understand and don't even know how to really put to words is that even thought the Dreamcast and PS2 don't really have one obvious dominating style, the visual difference looking at the two is pretty consistent. Like, somehow PS2 games tend to have more detailed textures, better dynamic lighting effects like glares and glows, but overall darker and less saturated colors. Dreamcast games tend to have more vibrant colors in a way that works fantastically with cartoonier games. And while I'm not _sure_ of it, it seems like Dreamcast games tend to have a softer feel.
I remember when this video was titled [We Need To Talk About "PS2" Graphics....and PS1 Graphics Too]. I kinda liked that title better? Seems more accurate to the content as well. But I know the algorithm stuff is weird, you do what you gotta do.
The jump from the fifth generation to the sixth generation was almost as big the jump from the fourth to the fifth. I'm a Dreamcast fan, and despite it being the weakest console of the sixth generation, still looks great today. The colors are vivid and clear, the lighting is dynamic, and the VGA output looks quite good, even on large screens. It is a lot like the PS2 in that it had a huge variety of artistic styles. From Sonic, to Shenmue, to Jet Set Radio, to Soulcalibur, and so on.
You should do a video on how to do the old type of motion blur that older games did especially in the n64 and ps2 eras. Or other types of basic post processing from around that era, adding little touches like that can definitely add more authenticity
low poly and pixel games test creators to push the boundaries of creativity and craft in this style, the best thing about it is it has low budget for talented indie devs, and it just take very low processing power for budget gamers, i can play a great full fledge creative original 2d or 3d game made in low poly or pixel with my weak pc and probably in my mobile device, this trends needs to be keep popularizing more and more
There has been this thing that bugs me how the jump form ps 1 to 2 feels like a huge leap but as we progress ps 3 to 4 to 5 it all feels like it is on paper but practically feels the same. People as been talking about future being this and that in next 20 years but the truth is imo that no we probably won't reach the technological singularity and it will get harder and harder to further process the tech itself.
i love modern adaptation of low poly graphics of ps1 n64, but we need more mid poly graphics style of ps2 gamecube wii also, and their are so much variety in it low mid, mid, high mid
More or less. It's definitely vertex-based, because I can see distinct diagonal lines across certain shadows. But the actual lighting data is block-based rather than vertex-based, so I'm not sure how they gather the vertex data, nor how corners get darkened. One other thing it does, though, is darken different faces depending on orientation to make edges more prominent. The top side of any block is the lightest, followed by the north/south sides, then east/west, and finally the bottom. This happens regardless of light level.
While I like old school, low poly, pixelated games, I'll never understand why someone would want to reimplement wobbly affine texture mapping. To me, that never looked good, even back then.
Yeah I agree with that but maybe if the are using wobbly ln background object and in the order to save performance I don't see eny other reason For example my game is fps game and technically almost every object is 3D in my seen however meny off my object wean is far the billboard off the object instead in the order to save performance I mean if my game don't follow the doom aesthetics the still use billboard for far away objects My point is it may be a way to use those old techniques without looking terrible
@@watercat1248 wobly texture mapping and vertexes are cause by VERY low precision vertex rendering arrays and for the fact that ps1 does not have perspective correct texture mapping. making things wobble won't save on performance. although if you make a game like an ass, you might still get it in very large open worlds. halo infinite has it. it could not have it, but 343 is a terrible and amateurish studio and their engine absolutely sucks, so the weapon model wobbles like crazy as soon as you get out in the open world.
In general, I just don't like how the average game looked after the PS2/GCN/Xbox era. IMO, that was the last era where games could hit that butter zone of being able to look good without having a ginormous budget to hire huge teams of artists. A single material was just a single texture, making it quicker to apply them and there were no surprises to the artist about how it would look when lighting is applied. If you are creating a texture, you can tell if it looks right just by looking at it. But once they started adding normal maps and specular highlights you had to really understand how these different things would come together, and with modern PBR models that fact has increased tenfold. Sure, the best and most talented creators can make masterpieces, but the average and common teams have to spend way longer just to hit par. I'd love to see more titles aim to replicate that style of graphics, but I get why it's such a hard sell. You need a very discerning eye to identify the visual effects that separated that generation from the next, so if you made such a game many people would think it just has bad graphics instead of being a stylistic choice.
Don't forget that the PS2 games also had their own unique aesthetic - minimal HUDs and simple, but beautiful level design - complete opposite of the mess in modern games!
One thing a lot of ps2 games used was some kind of big smear effect that I recognize immediately upon seeing it. I think of it as the "you just beat a boss in Kingdom Hearts 1" effect, but it's used in a bunch of other places, in that game and in others. Did the ps2 have premade effects like that built in? Or did a bunch of games all coincidentally use a similar looking effect?
I see where you are coming from and agree with alot of stuff, but I think the interest in PS1 and N64 graphic comes not just from nostalgia but, like you said, also from the limitations that come with it, PS2 like you said uses alot of "modern" rendering techniques like filtering and lighting, and because of the higher poly models and higher textures, you quickly can lose the "retro" aesthetic, with PS1 style rendering you will always know what its supposed to be, even if you bump up the resolution, it's still an extremely low poly model with pixelated textures, but render a PS2 game in FullHD or 4K and suddenly you lose the lofi feel of it, models look clean, maybe the textures lack in some detail, but it's just not as identifiable/iconic
don't take what he says on face value. lighting on ps2 is absolutely NOTHING like lighting today. it's okay to watch for entertainment but if you want to watch his videos for education i suggest you look somewhere else, otherwise you'll end up with a vast amount misconceptions. seriously, there's some in every single one of his videos. he's is obviously self-taught and young, so he wasn't there for most of these developments, and is just "figuring out" (read, guessing) most of the stuff he says on his own.
@@GraveUypo the videos are completely fine as surface-level introductions, of course they won't be 100% accurate and in-depth, but that's just not a possibility for videos that lasts around 3 minutes, it's pretty clear that his intentions are just to get people interested in a subject by giving a simplified explanation in layman's terms, not actually serve as the ultimate course on the subject
I think PS2 itself does not have a "look" but the sixth generation of gaming as a look. You know just by look that if game does not looks blocky or too blurry but also does not look high def enough that is definitely a 6th gen game
I'm one step ahead of you! I've already figured out the secret to getting that ps3/Xbox360 look! Step 1: Install post processing. Step 2: Enable every setting and max every slider.
Your videos are great, but can you not use such clickbait-y titles? How do I find your videos in the future if they're all named something vague like "why do all game devs do this?" "I can't believe this" "I can't unsee this". Thanks
I see a term being thrown around a lot in the PS1Graphics subreddit "ps1.5" which I imagine is supposed to be like this is better than what you'd see on the ps1, but not as good as what you'd see on the ps2, and a lot of those models still look really interesting. I'd really enjoy it if people started making models that would almost bridge the gap between the N64, and Gamecube
@@uppishcub1617 I don't believe it's really as clear cut as that the dreamcast was actually better than the ps2 in a lot of ways, such as better anti-aliasing, better textures, higher native resolutions The ps2 was mostly just really good at volumetric stuff like fog, as well as being a beast at rendering polygons from my understanding
Dude I've waited for a video on this topic for SO LONG. Too bad that as I suspected, it's just that the PS2 did not have any consistent style except for what you mentioned + polygon limitations
![KSI - Dirty [Official Visualiser]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/VoDh1h1dPUE/mqdefault.jpg)
I recently picked up a used PS2 and was blown away at how well it actually looked from what I actually remembered. In my opinion it is one of the most impressive graphical jumps from its previous console ever.
Most people think PS1 when they say something looks PS2. And then they think early early PS1 when they say something looks PS1.
It helps when you make a console that’s actually designed for 3d graphics.
Playing metal gear solid 2 and seeing those graphics for the first time was something special
@@garbaj I distinctly remember seeing early screenshots of MGS2 in a gaming magazine before the PS2 was even out yet. I thought it looked like an FMV, like they were just CGI fakes. I didn't believe I would actually see a game looking like that running in real-time. I honestly could not believe it when I got the DVD with the E3 videos and stuff in a magazine later on and saw video of the game running. Then later on I got to play the demo that came with Zone Of the Enders, and I proceeded to spend weeks in that one section of the tanker mission, my jaw agape the whole time. That demo is a fun look into how the game changed before release btw.
my first ps2 games where killzone and grand turismo4, my 12 year old mind was blown away.
the ps2 aesthetic is so underrated. definitely my favorite style
Graphic. Not aesthetics. The ps2 was home to countless aesthetics.
aesthetic graphics with vertex lighting.
Fun fact: Wallace and gromit was the first game to feature fingers on characters
Yeah so they could pick up the C H E E S E
Remarkable!
truly a pioneering moment in gaming
This is funny but not true just in case anyone thought so. Virtua fighter had individual 3d moving fingers in a 1993 arcade game. And virtua racer had them in 1992 but I dont think they were fully animated.
Good tier
I think we can all agree that MGS3, even on PS2 graphics, looked fucking amazing.
Thank you!
After I saw your PS1 graphic videos, I went around trying to find stuff on PS2 graphics / early PC game, but had no idea how to define them for the search engine.
Amazing if you made another video like this but talking about those early PC games and how some of them were somewhat similar to some of the early consoles and how they were different. 🙏
"early PC game"
Ow, that hurts! My face can't take that much palm!
I try to use what I considered solid games for then.
Like kingdomhearts for higher poly models and particle effects
Metroid prime trilogy of games for their levels geometry and details
Unreal tournament 2003 and 4 for its particles
Doom 3 for its dynamic lighting
Etc.
I try to find specific games I like with the polys ,textures,etc. That were released during early to late 2000s to define what I'm after
2:35 - 3:34 Now THAT'S why I couldn't find much tutorials on making 6th gen graphics. The technological advancements made it very easy to experiment with different art styles. And honestly I appreciate the 6th generation for that. I also like ps2 graphics a lot more than ps1 graphics as well for this reason, and also because they simply look better, breath more life into character designs and are easier to make and experiment with.
It's definitely going to come down to to which game's style you're wanting to emulate graphics wise
I’ve been trying to look into ps2 graphics but people don’t seem to really make videos about them. Thanks for this !
hmm. as a 3D artist myself i can tell you making ps2 graphics has a lot more to it then you think. on the surface you may not notice much but thats becasue of how good the games of that era hide their graphics . i would write it all down but honestly its better to just try it yourself. there is alot to check out and my writing skills wont do it justice.
for example in the ps2 age shading techniques were very basic so things like reflective surfaces could not use fransel and there was no PBR techniques or screen space effects. reflective surfaces were either made with what is known as "double geometry" or pre rendered cubemaps. some games combined both techniques to create realistic reflections too with real time environment mapping. other games used screen shots of the screen itself as the reflection texture which is how GTA vice city stories had reflective cars on ps2 hardware. what is intresting here is that reflections were the same intensity from all camera angles becasue fransel was not a thing yet and were not specifically a "reflection" effect but rather a diffues color that was added on top of the existing textures as an extra and trasparent layer .
other things you may notice are the very very extensive use of particle effects ! PS2 had an amazing particle renderer that could handle millions of triangles so many ps2 games had unusual effects with it. for example all the lens flares in GTA vice city and need for speed UG2 or alot of other games were actually particle effects and sprites. you can actually check for yourself by moving the camera super fast and check how the lens flares try to keep up and glitch out due to the fact that they are made of 3D sprites in the scene that have to try and keep up with the camera. i think one of the crash bandicot games also used particles to create a vollumetric effect for god rays coming out of windows in one of its levels .
also a well known fact is that ps2 used SRGB color space instead of the current gen ACES colors which ment that many HDR effects like we see today had to be faked with sprites or bloom. which is something to keep in mind as all modern game engines use filmic and other photoreal dynamic range options. in general color and contrast has less depth and punch to it due to this limitation and how brightness caps out at values between to hard coded values which ment that developers had very little space to have realistic lighting and had to use artistic or creative techniqes to get the visuals they needed rather then simply using the real world llighting values
other thing to note is that pretty much the majority of games that were made for the ps2 were using the RenderWare engine which is pretty much a good reason why ps2 games had such a disticnt look to them .
you can actually still download renderware for your PC and use it to make new games with ps2 style. it will even export to ps2 if you know how to get it working
Do you know where one could get the renderware editor?
@@jlewwis1995 it’s no longer available
@@ahhhhhhhh8228 you can still find unofficial copies dude
Also some ps2 games, like Kingdom Hearts, would have two different character models. One would be smoother and more detailed, and used for more detailed cutscenes, while there would also be simpler models for gameplay and less important cutscenes that would have swappable textures on the faces to allow for easily animated lip flaps
Lod
@Belle ♪ this video is fucked up bruh
I had no idea! The game just looks great all around
Pretty much every square enix game, this was very apparent.
FF10 had it happen a lot, especially in dialogs with less important conversations the models were low detail.
Then in the important story dialogs the model detail went up and the lips moved properly, always jarring for me.
Valve games (starting with Half-Life 2) made really aggressive use of premade LOD models. Their model format makes it easy to slot in as many as you want, and even the most basic models tend to have at least one or two. The engine automatically pops between them based on the number of pixels they take up on the screen.
God of war 2 has the best graphics on that generation. Forgot to mention that when GoW2 launched on Ps2, the Ps3 was already out for 6 months at that time but they still launched the sequel on Ps2 so that the people who played the first one could play the sequel as well and because of this, the ps2 was pushed to its limit in the colossus and zeus boss battle.
Also PS2 had sold so well, games were still made for it long into the PS3, which had a much smaller user base
the ps2 was very esay to develop for or so I've heard. thats why there where so many titles( to be fair alot of ps2 games where shovelware)
i think gt4 has the best graphics in ps2.
@@phillcampora6451 this is not true, PS2 was very difficult to code because of the bizarre architecture of the CPU Emotion Engine
PS2 have so many games with impressive graphics, give a try games like Splinter Cell 3&4, RE4, Flatout 2, Burnout series, Black, Peter Jackson's King Kong, Primal, Ghost Hunter, Tomb Raider series, Mafia, The Godfather, The Getaway, 007 Quantum of Solace, Cold Fear, The Hitman 3&4, Stolen, True Crime NYC, PSI-OPS, Time Spliters 3, Scarface, Alone in the Dark 5, Silent Hill 3&4, Onimusha 3&4, Shadow of Rome, Darkwatch, Cold Winter, Brother's in Arms, GT4, Tourist Trophy, Batman Begin, Catwoman, CoD 3, RE Outbreak 1&2, Eragon, Fahrenheit, Haunting Ground, Forbidden Siren 1&2, Genji, MGS 3, Okami, Tekken 4&5, Soul Calibur 3, Mortal Kombat Armageddon, Def Jam fight for NY
My first job in the game industry was working on PS2 characters and rigs. The way we layed out UVs in particular was very different to how we do it today with auto-unwrappers and auto-layout algos. Because of the aliasing on a low res texture map, you had to layout the UVs in a way that you didn't have any diagonal lines or you would get terrible aliasing on things like a solid stripe of color. The bilinear filtering helped, but you still had to be very particular with your UV usage and prioritizing things like the face/head to have more texture pixel space than something like a boot(often the entire texture budget of one character was a single 1024x1024 map). We would also do things like overlap half of the face with the other half, but still leave the jaw and mouth area non-mirrored so we could get some asymmetry in the texture paint. I often would also do a texture paint pass in Photoshop, then set up some lights in Maya and bake-to-texture some light into the diffuse map itself.
For rigging, I had to use tables to make sure that all vertex weight values didn't have a number with more than 3 digits past the decimle points. For example, a vert that had a skinning value of .456 had to be rounded out to .46 or something.
On the modeling side, we modeled "mitten" hands by the time the PS2 was out which was a step up from box hands on the PS1. This still wasn't a full 5-digit articulated hand, but it was a thumb, an index finger, and the rest were consolidated into one giant finger set. Depending on the game and how many characaters needed to be on screen at once, sometimes we only had the thumb and mitten. Finger cylinders themselves were usually 4-sided or at most, 6-sided(later PS2 games had 6-sided fingers with one of the flat faces at the top and bottom for the best volume fake)
There was a very common modeling technique used by many character artists at the time called "cylindrical modeling" which was a variation of box modeling. It allowed for tight management of polycount.
I want to really learn to make games with the aesthethics of Resident Evil and Silent Hill of the PS2 era. There is something about how those game looked that I loooove.
Lol, Me too! How is your progress?
@@AqueleLyz I'm getting there, haven't had much time due to looking for work and working on some comics but I've done some concept art for it.
I've been looking for info on the ps2 era, this came in handy! Thanks! People are sleeping on the ps2 era, thinking it's forgettable and not as visually impressive as the psx era but they forgot games like FFXII, Okami, God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, Onimusha 3 (etc) were made in that period of time.
Silent hill 3 is still one of the best looking games of all time. There are still games that don't look nearly as good in motion as SH3 does. It's amazing how much animation quality and lighting determine "graphic quality"
This really needs a follow up. I think modeling/going through the process of some of the darker themed heavy texture based games would go a long way. Shadow of Colossus, Metal Gear(s), Onimusha, DMC, FF-X, Resident Evil, etc. etc. You're absolutely right. There is a huge hole in Blender tutorials for this era of gaming and that would be the best place to start, IMO.
So true
Honestly I think Shadow of the Colossus had too much bloom, but other than that it was beautiful
everything from that period had too much bloom, and brown. brown bloom was "realism" back in the day
@@Klayperson i liked brown :(
Bloom is one of the things that makes the atmosphere of the game looks so pretty and immersive. I hate how they completely removed it on the remake
@@VicerFxI love the bloom, it’s such a important part of the atmosphere.
Twilight princess, SotC, etc, all use it well to create that magical, ethereal atmosphere.
But i just played through the prince of persia trilogy, and MY GOD it’s such a beautiful trilogy of games!
The combat is abysmal but the environments are some of the most gorgeous ones i’ve ever seen in any media, ever.
The bloom issuch an integral part of the dreamlike atmosphere, it’s amazing.
Ps2 Era of games are some of the most beautiful games to look at
Thanks for this, really enjoyed the insight. There's an artistic project I'd love to do where you essentially make a PS2/XBOX era licensed tie-in video game...for a movie that doesn't exist.
So you as a player have to decipher the plot of what this thing was supposed to be solely from this piece of ancillary material, and there'd be all these things that show up as padding that you as a player have to assume are presumably from additional ancillary media (i.e., cartoons, toylines, comic books, etc )...that, again, do not really exist.
And to top it off, you'd get actors who were actually famous around 2002-2005 (i.e., Sarah Michelle Gellar, Seth Green) to give intentionally flat, phoned-in performances. And there's all these digitally compressed extras like a music video and artwork.
All of the game would be an effort to capture the quintessential vibe of one of those "rushed-to-meet-a-release-date" movie tie-in games, since that's an aesthetic I feel has been unexplored but was a huge part of my generation's childhood, and has now been sort of lost as the landscape of film and video games have both shifted drastically.
That's incredible, and it's somewhat similar to an idea I'd like to work on some day. I remember catching episodes of Stargate SG-1 on analog TV back in the day and having absolutely no context for anything that happens in the plot. They were enjoyable on their own, but part of what made it fun was trying to piece the plot together - what exactly was the backstory here, who are these characters, why are they going to this planet or that ship, and what makes the bad guys the bad guys? With that bit of nostalgia in mind, I'd love to make a game that's the final game in a trilogy that doesn't actually exist, or maybe the mid-trilogy turning point like Empire Strikes Back. You don't know who these characters are or why they care about each other, but it definitely seems like they have a lot of history. Maybe a friend betrays the group, and you have to convey to the player the hurt that the protagonists feel without the context of having experienced the events leading to the friendship in the first place. Maybe there's a big reveal from the villains, and the player doesn't really understand its significance. Maybe an old ally from the "first game" makes a "return" to help out. It's got a lot of interesting things to play with in pursuit of giving you that feeling of jumping into a game series a couple games in and trying to catch up, or playing the only game in a series to get localized.
I just like the idea of seeing a game box for "Eloquent Malediction 3: The Starknights Reborn - The Anniversary Remastered Edition" and being unable to find any information about the series.
This is brilliant!!! I need something like this now. Mildly tempted to try it myself if that's okay.
What a absolutely amazing time to be alive for gaming graphics. I often feel shitty about the world im currently in but I have to remember how phenomenal it is that I was alive along side some of the biggest jumps in technology that the world has seen since. Many alive today or even in the last 20 years can't completely appreciate that jump. I was there.
The PS2 has 32 MiB of main RDRAM for the Emotion Engine (the brains). PS2 has 4 MiB of eDRAM for the Graphics Synthesizer, the graphics processor chip. There is 1.6 GB/sec of bandwidth between the EE and the GS, which allows for texture streaming between the 32 MiB RDRAM pool and the 4 MiB eDRAM pool.
The maximum pixel fillrate is theoretically over 1 gigapixel per second and the maximum texel fillrate is over 1 gigatexel per second, although assuming a native resolution of 640x480 at 60 FPS, the final rendered pixel fillrate will be about 12 million pixels per second fully rendered; and, assuming 3 megapixels of uncompressed 32-bit RGBA textures, updated at 60 FPS, the texel fillrate for a fully rendered output will be about 90 megatexels per second.
If we assume a baseline of 12 MiB of texture data (this is enough to store 12 uncompressed, 32-bit RGBA, 512*512 resolution textures), and a framerate target of 60 FPS, this would take at least 720 MiB/sec of the 1,600 MB of available GIF bus bandwidth between the EE & GS.
Geometry data requires at least 40 bytes per triangle, and the PS2 has a maximum of 75 million triangular transforms per second for unrendered geometry, and 20 million per second for fully rendered geometry across the GS's 16 pixel processing pipelines. Assuming 300,000 triangles for a given scene, at least 12 MB of RAM is required for geometry data, which at a 60 FPS framerate target, translates to 720 MB/sec of memory bus bandwidth required, and a geometry transform fillrate of 18 million fully rendered, transformed, lit, shaded triangles per second; 90% of the theoretical maximum.
12 MiB of geometry data plus 12 MB of texture data, updated at 60 times per second, requires over 1,440 MB/sec out of the available 1,600 MB/sec GIF EE-to-GS bus bandwidth for geometry and texture data streaming, between the 32 MiB RDRAM and 4 MiB eDRAM pools. The eDRAM stores up to 4 MiB at any time, of that combined 24 MiB texture-geometry data, and the remaining 20 MiB is left in the 32 MiB of RDRAM, which has 12 MiB leftover to work on the main engine threads, including streaming data from the DVD or HDD or memory card storage, sound, phyics, AI, and feeding the rest of the system with data. The PS2 has about 6 MB/sec of DVD read bandwidth, and the storage disk is about ten times that at best. Memory card bandwidth is even higher.
I really appreciate your detailed explanation, 👏 very informative 😏✌️
Regarding the lighting, I recall Silent Hill 2 having an interesting situation. The original release used Gouraud (aka per vertex) lighting. However, when the game was ported to Xbox and PC, they were able to implement Phong (per pixel) lighting. The PS2 Greatest Hits release of the game (the one with the Maria side-campaign) was able to backport this lighting method for that release of the game. This was especially noticeable with the flashlight.
MGS2 and SH3 still look amazing. SH3 was able to use the ps2 gpu’s stellar fill rate and imbedded texture memory to great effect.
I came here because as much as I'm tired of the industry pushing graphics far beyond what a top-end rig can do nowadays, I want to make a game that takes a lot of inspiration from Kingdom Hearts, not just for its gameplay, but also its graphics.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is one of the best example of that, by staying as close as possible to the original material (DreamCast) and that game runs smooth AF!
I'd love a video about ps3 and xbox 360 graphics. Thats an entire era of its own that no one ever talks about.
best garbaj i've had in weeks (fr tho your channel is great, keep it up homie)
PS2 era feels like a golden age. Because there wasn't so much put into physically based rendering, everything had to be so artist driven and on top of that it's just so performant. (of course most of PS3 gen didn't have physically based rendering either) I don't think games these days have to be so pressured to use so much physical rendering.
Specifically, Switch games too often look worse than PS2 graphics because their target is on Vfx that are just too heavy for the machine to make good use of. (Deadly Premonition, No More Heroes 3, and Beyonetta 3, all suffered some flat/dull/janky looking worlds mixed with rough performance)
One old game on the GameCube that still looks fantastic is Luigi's Mansion. I always loved to use the first person view to admire the environments. The lighting still looks great, and the environments are detailed. I'm amazed that Nintendo could make something look so good with the hardware they were working with, and with the game being rushed all to hell like all Nintendo GameCube games.
Honestly, I think it's one of those games that would look objectively worse without filtered textures. The other game I think just looks wrong without texture filtering is Half Life.
Cartoony styles seem to hold up pretty well over the years. Nintendo is really good at this
@@garbaj I think they learnt that lesson from twilight princess
@@MrMoon-hy6pn they haven't learned a lesson from it, they knew it was a bad idea (eg. TWW) but did it because that's what everyone wanted
I prefer unfiltered textures for Half-Life 1, Quake 1, Quake 2, and even Quake 3. They have PS1-quality textures and tend to have evenly sized texels. Except for Quake III, they were designed with software rendering in mind (Quake 1 and Half-Life 1 were actually designed for the software renderer first and foremost), and the sharp subjectively more visually pleasing, as it makes the games look more detailed and less muddy.
@@SirYodaJediunfiltered textures are sharper
Great vid, very insightful and well ahead of the art style popularity curve. Given time, the community will name and use various PS2 art/graphic styles, and you will look very prophetic.
THANK YOU SO MUCH!
Not kidding, I've been thinking about this for at least a month, and I've been learning code so I can make a PS2 style game, but I had no idea how to make PS2 graphics. The timing of this video coming out is flippin perfect. Thanks mate :]
Why not just make an actual PS2 game? The consoles are incredibly easy to softmod, so running homebrew software is easy.
@@uppishcub1617 because of the reach. I mean, as much as I would love to just make a ps2 game, not nearly as many peoe would play it as if I just put it on steam. Plus, hopefully it's a big game. Maybe not graphically intensive, but I plan on doing something with it, and the PS2 hardware might not work with it.
And in general, it would be a lot more work for the long-term, learning how to work around the ps2 for one game and then learning how to make a game for wider PC users.
@@XEPHOURIA for your first point, PS2 emulators have been working for over ten years now. Anyone with a decently modern or at least moderately capable PC can run them. People would definitely be able to play the game if they wanted to.
However I will concede the second point. That is a lot of work for only one game.
Maybe you could just make your game theoretically capable of being ported to a PS2. Like make it capable of running on a similarly powerful PC.
Whatever you do, I'd advise that you avoid unity, unreal, Godot, and the other public game engines. Using a modern engine means you'll always be fighting with it to make sure it doesn't look modern. If you use your own engine, not only will it allow you to have a very authentic look, but it will also make the game stand out and have more personality. Plus, engine programming is a very transferrable skill.
@@uppishcub1617 it's not about who 'can' play it, it's about who will. Or, like, who's willing to? And also, it's already hard to market my game unless some big content creator makes it popular, and it would be way harder if it's not, like, on a convenient steam page that anyone can see anytime completely randomly.
And I already plan on doing that! It's going to be easier to do physics my way, and mix the power of modern stuff with the style of semi-retro games, plus, it might help other creators if they have a similar niche that they need filled.
But yeah, since I'm a super PS2 freak, I'm like, almost definitely at least going to commission people to port my game to ps2 when it eventually comes out. I want to be able to hold the disk and put it in the little tray and listen to that iconic death screech play before I get to the tasty game.
My goal is to make something that combines the awe and joy of looking at games like the original PS2, and the standards of today's games. With my own personal touches blasted into it, of course. But I miss the vibe of old PS2 games and I wanna being it back :]
@@XEPHOURIA have started work on it yet?
I just finished MGS on a Playstation 1 emulator, first time I've played it, and here you are releasing video with MGS in it.
You are good at explaining stuff like these, good job
We got to keep this series going, eventually we'll learn how to make ps5 graphics.
Personally I think PS1 and PS2 graphics have a lot more personality than the newer generations (or maybe are the games lol)
Retro graphics seem to get renewed interest eventually while the more recently abandoned graphical trend gets seen as ugly.
I remember being in high school when there was a big 8/16-bit revival and it was kind of a consensus that early 3d games were ugly and hard to look at. Now I'm seeing more and more PS1 style indie games and a nostalgia of Nintendo 64 aesthetics. What seems ugly now is the early 360/PS3 graphics, where color seemed to have been washed away. But I expect people to make purposely "PS3" styled games eventually
@@TombaFanatic then they worked on colours, textures and that stuff but now we like "omg 4k!!!" And it's slightly sharper
There's 2 main reasons behind it imo. The first is that all the AAA games are chasing realism above anything else, and realism doesn't have a particularly identifiable personality or style beyond looking like reality, so all games end up looking basically the same beyond some slight differences in colouration. Creativity and beauty are less important than looking realistic, so most beauty in modern gaming is relegated to indie titles.
The other issue is one of limitations - or more importantly the lack of them. Modern consoles and computers can create pretty much any aesthetic or game you want. The biggest hurdle remaining is fully real-time ray-tracing in 4K, which means we can't do real-time mirror reflections or fully photorealistic lighting and shadows. Pretty much everything else is achievable given enough time and effort. You might think this would lead to an explosion in creativity, but it has caused the opposite. The problem with having no boundaries is that you also have no guidance - no walls to define your project against - and so it's difficult to even know where to start. Think of it like this: you have 2 painters, and you tell one of them to paint the most beautiful thing they can find on a single broken wall, and you tell the other to paint the most beautiful thing they can find in the whole of New York City. The first painter will be able to fully examine the wall within hours and start work immediately after, painting a beautiful and extremely detailed picture of a single crack in the wall. The second painter will either spend days endlessly wandering the city looking for something ever more beautiful and never even start, or they will go "I don't want to spend days wandering aimlessly. The Statue of Liberty is beautiful so I will paint that.", and you end up with yet another painting of the Statue of Liberty. It's still beautiful, but you've seen it a million times already so it feels hollow. Developers used to operate within extremely strict hardware and software limitations, so they were always looking to push as close as they could to those limitations, and you ended up with extremely focused and inspired games. Nowadays there are no boundaries, so there is no drive to push them, and you end up with shallow, derivative games that are trying to be everything at once, and as such do nothing particularly well.
@@BambiTrout well said
@@TombaFanaticps3 games would all look like 90s cgi
finally some PS2 graphic tut
PS2 is my nostalgia era. That's what I try and fiddle with in blender
I would love for you to do a video discussing the graphical limitations of the PS1 and the PS2 in terms of maximum polygons at once maximum objects highest texture possible and then go over you know the most common uses to get a better idea of how to go about creating graphics that resemble each respective console
I was playing Gamecube Zelda Twilight Princess not that long ago and it's crazy how much better the Gamecube can be vs the PS2 by the lighting alone.
the fact that the ps2 era was a transitional period between two console generations with more defined aesthetics, the ps1 (known for a more explicitly low-poly aesthetic) and the ps3 (known for a more muted/desaturated look with glossy & light bloom-heavy finish; see ThorHighHeels' video on "Mysterious PS3 Games"), makes the discussion on a "PS2 aesthetic" more frustrating in comparison.
additionally, I wonder how the discussion for a PS4 and PS5 aesthetic in the future would be as well
I think the thing that lets ps2 and even ps3 graphics down nowadays is playing them back on HD monitors make them look worse because they weren't designed for them, with good upscaling they really do still hold up a lot of the time
another thing with PS2 visuals is just changing the display type; component fixes a lot of the issues with graphics relative to the display. This is an explicit thing due to everyone using the basic AV composite cables that came with the PS2 which hold most of the display issues. You can find videos of this stuff with 'component v composite PS2' here on youtube
Hell yeah man!
00:09 Also don't you dare ignore me I was one of the few "elites" that was interested in PS2 graphics 😤
One of the things I don't understand and don't even know how to really put to words is that even thought the Dreamcast and PS2 don't really have one obvious dominating style, the visual difference looking at the two is pretty consistent. Like, somehow PS2 games tend to have more detailed textures, better dynamic lighting effects like glares and glows, but overall darker and less saturated colors. Dreamcast games tend to have more vibrant colors in a way that works fantastically with cartoonier games. And while I'm not _sure_ of it, it seems like Dreamcast games tend to have a softer feel.
This was amazing! thank you so much.
I remember when this video was titled [We Need To Talk About "PS2" Graphics....and PS1 Graphics Too].
I kinda liked that title better? Seems more accurate to the content as well. But I know the algorithm stuff is weird, you do what you gotta do.
The jump from the fifth generation to the sixth generation was almost as big the jump from the fourth to the fifth. I'm a Dreamcast fan, and despite it being the weakest console of the sixth generation, still looks great today. The colors are vivid and clear, the lighting is dynamic, and the VGA output looks quite good, even on large screens. It is a lot like the PS2 in that it had a huge variety of artistic styles. From Sonic, to Shenmue, to Jet Set Radio, to Soulcalibur, and so on.
You should do a video on how to do the old type of motion blur that older games did especially in the n64 and ps2 eras. Or other types of basic post processing from around that era, adding little touches like that can definitely add more authenticity
I'd really like to know more about ps2 post processing especially mgs3. Something about that soft, faintly grungy look is so cool
on a specific deep dive on silent hill two/ pathologic sort of things, so this is perfect, thank you!
jagged wobbly pixelated is the most iconic parts for ps1
THANK YOU I've been looking for a video to explain just this
This video needs shots from Rygar to remind people of how great the PS2 looked.
I Like How this Man has a Huge Dev Knowledge ! He's a Man of Science !
ty a lot, everyone talks about ps1 graphics, I was looking for a video just like this
I never understood the ps1 nostalgia cuz i wasnt a ps1 kid but now i know that feeling but with the ps2 style
Bro I just saw you on film theory so that is cool
THANK YOU!!! I've been looking for a video like this.
> doesn't explain
> leaves
FINALLY!!!! someone finally did a video on this!!!! thx man
PS2 games still look nice and the good looking games (the ones that have aged well) have this distinct charm.
low poly and pixel games test creators to push the boundaries of creativity and craft in this style, the best thing about it is it has low budget for talented indie devs, and it just take very low processing power for budget gamers, i can play a great full fledge creative original 2d or 3d game made in low poly or pixel with my weak pc and probably in my mobile device, this trends needs to be keep popularizing more and more
There has been this thing that bugs me how the jump form ps 1 to 2 feels like a huge leap but as we progress ps 3 to 4 to 5 it all feels like it is on paper but practically feels the same.
People as been talking about future being this and that in next 20 years but the truth is imo that no we probably won't reach the technological singularity and it will get harder and harder to further process the tech itself.
I personally would argue that the last truly big "jump", technologically, was from the original Xbox/PS2 era into the Xbox 360/PS3 era.
ty for this bc ive been trying so hard to hit the ps2/gamecube era with my game
Fixed camera angle PS2 games hold up insanely well when upscaled today. Haunting Ground's character models are shockingly good looking even today.
i love modern adaptation of low poly graphics of ps1 n64, but we need more mid poly graphics style of ps2 gamecube wii also, and their are so much variety in it low mid, mid, high mid
About time you made this video
finally something for ps2
1:53 Is this the technique used for the default Minecraft lighting? I feel like your description fits what I see in game
More or less. It's definitely vertex-based, because I can see distinct diagonal lines across certain shadows. But the actual lighting data is block-based rather than vertex-based, so I'm not sure how they gather the vertex data, nor how corners get darkened. One other thing it does, though, is darken different faces depending on orientation to make edges more prominent. The top side of any block is the lightest, followed by the north/south sides, then east/west, and finally the bottom. This happens regardless of light level.
@@stevethepocket good reply, thanks!
While I like old school, low poly, pixelated games, I'll never understand why someone would want to reimplement wobbly affine texture mapping. To me, that never looked good, even back then.
Yeah I agree with that but maybe if the are using wobbly ln background object and in the order to save performance I don't see eny other reason
For example my game is fps game and technically almost every object is 3D in my seen however meny off my object wean is far the billboard off the object instead in the order to save performance I mean if my game don't follow the doom aesthetics the still use billboard for far away objects
My point is it may be a way to use those old techniques without looking terrible
yep, looks terrible. i absolute hate that look.
and ps2 has it too, it's just on a smaller scale so you couldn't see on a crt.
@@watercat1248 wobly texture mapping and vertexes are cause by VERY low precision vertex rendering arrays and for the fact that ps1 does not have perspective correct texture mapping. making things wobble won't save on performance.
although if you make a game like an ass, you might still get it in very large open worlds. halo infinite has it. it could not have it, but 343 is a terrible and amateurish studio and their engine absolutely sucks, so the weapon model wobbles like crazy as soon as you get out in the open world.
@@GraveUypo okay I don't know about that thenk that let my know if that is the case ther is not reason to use wobbles
Yeah, the only reason to implement it now is for nostalgia's sake, or to achieve a very specific effect
I think were gonna work up all the way back to ps5 with garbaj
Making a PS2 playable character would have about 3k polygons, while the character cutscenes would be about 5k. Like MGS3.
So much information and nostalgia
FINALLY PS2 Graphics, FUCK THEM PS1 Graphics, Only PS2 Graphics
To me the ps2 look in essence is blurry, low poly and weirdly lit
Basically video game : dream edition
In general, I just don't like how the average game looked after the PS2/GCN/Xbox era. IMO, that was the last era where games could hit that butter zone of being able to look good without having a ginormous budget to hire huge teams of artists. A single material was just a single texture, making it quicker to apply them and there were no surprises to the artist about how it would look when lighting is applied. If you are creating a texture, you can tell if it looks right just by looking at it. But once they started adding normal maps and specular highlights you had to really understand how these different things would come together, and with modern PBR models that fact has increased tenfold. Sure, the best and most talented creators can make masterpieces, but the average and common teams have to spend way longer just to hit par.
I'd love to see more titles aim to replicate that style of graphics, but I get why it's such a hard sell. You need a very discerning eye to identify the visual effects that separated that generation from the next, so if you made such a game many people would think it just has bad graphics instead of being a stylistic choice.
My main takeaway here: Holy crap, there's a Kenshin videogame?!
Title: “How to make ps2 videos”
Actual video: ps1 graphics vs ps2 graphics comparison and “nobody uploads videos about ps2 on youtube”
Good video bro
Clock Tower 3, Silent Hill 2, Haunting Ground, these are PS2 titles that have high poly character models.
Never thought I’d see Kenshi here lol.
Don't forget that the PS2 games also had their own unique aesthetic - minimal HUDs and simple, but beautiful level design - complete opposite of the mess in modern games!
One thing a lot of ps2 games used was some kind of big smear effect that I recognize immediately upon seeing it. I think of it as the "you just beat a boss in Kingdom Hearts 1" effect, but it's used in a bunch of other places, in that game and in others. Did the ps2 have premade effects like that built in? Or did a bunch of games all coincidentally use a similar looking effect?
Motion-Blur/Trails using the Accumulation Buffer
I see where you are coming from and agree with alot of stuff, but I think the interest in PS1 and N64 graphic comes not just from nostalgia but, like you said, also from the limitations that come with it, PS2 like you said uses alot of "modern" rendering techniques like filtering and lighting, and because of the higher poly models and higher textures, you quickly can lose the "retro" aesthetic, with PS1 style rendering you will always know what its supposed to be, even if you bump up the resolution, it's still an extremely low poly model with pixelated textures, but render a PS2 game in FullHD or 4K and suddenly you lose the lofi feel of it, models look clean, maybe the textures lack in some detail, but it's just not as identifiable/iconic
don't take what he says on face value. lighting on ps2 is absolutely NOTHING like lighting today. it's okay to watch for entertainment but if you want to watch his videos for education i suggest you look somewhere else, otherwise you'll end up with a vast amount misconceptions. seriously, there's some in every single one of his videos. he's is obviously self-taught and young, so he wasn't there for most of these developments, and is just "figuring out" (read, guessing) most of the stuff he says on his own.
@@GraveUypo looks like I hit a nerve there, that's why I put modern in quotes
@@GraveUypo the videos are completely fine as surface-level introductions, of course they won't be 100% accurate and in-depth, but that's just not a possibility for videos that lasts around 3 minutes, it's pretty clear that his intentions are just to get people interested in a subject by giving a simplified explanation in layman's terms, not actually serve as the ultimate course on the subject
GOOD PS2 graphics are super hard to make because having to model eyes and fingers on humanoids is harder than you think.
I think PS2 itself does not have a "look" but the sixth generation of gaming as a look. You know just by look that if game does not looks blocky or too blurry but also does not look high def enough that is definitely a 6th gen game
You know about Kenshin finally someone who knows bout it
I kind of thought this would be a tutorial, but this is cool too.
One important missed point: field rendering (the jaggies).
I'm one step ahead of you!
I've already figured out the secret to getting that ps3/Xbox360 look!
Step 1: Install post processing.
Step 2: Enable every setting and max every slider.
Your videos are great, but can you not use such clickbait-y titles? How do I find your videos in the future if they're all named something vague like "why do all game devs do this?" "I can't believe this" "I can't unsee this". Thanks
eh, the content of the videos are about the same quality as the titles, to be fair.
I'd really like to someday replicate the look of Star Wars Battlefront 2 (2005)'s models, terrain and lighting in my own game.
I see a term being thrown around a lot in the PS1Graphics subreddit "ps1.5" which I imagine is supposed to be like this is better than what you'd see on the ps1, but not as good as what you'd see on the ps2, and a lot of those models still look really interesting.
I'd really enjoy it if people started making models that would almost bridge the gap between the N64, and Gamecube
So, Dreamcast graphics?
@@uppishcub1617 I don't believe it's really as clear cut as that the dreamcast was actually better than the ps2 in a lot of ways, such as better anti-aliasing, better textures, higher native resolutions
The ps2 was mostly just really good at volumetric stuff like fog, as well as being a beast at rendering polygons from my understanding
You are in the new Film Theorists video :p
man Crash bandicoot and Rayman 3 give me the chills
Dude I've waited for a video on this topic for SO LONG. Too bad that as I suspected, it's just that the PS2 did not have any consistent style except for what you mentioned + polygon limitations
The samus in the thumbnail is so cursed
Tomb raider o my what a game played that for hours as a kid on the ps1
I thought the exact same way “Why does everyone talk about PS1 but no one talks about PS2?”.
Id actually be more interested in creating a Dreamcast look.
PS2 was the pinnacle of gaming
I would like to learn more about old-school mapping tools, like imo the best Radiant style BSP editors
Warriors on ps2 was an amazing game
You could maybe so a video on how retro games don't look as good on modern monitors compared to old CRT TVs.