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.
You can do dithering in Blender compositor as well, you just need to get a dither texture image. How I do it is after Pixelating the image I use a dither image node (4x4 bayer pattern looks great) > Translate node (Wrap set to Both Axes) > Translate connected to Mix RGB Factor and set to Add. Top color input slot is your render result, bottom is your render also but with a HSV node to control how intense the dithering is. Then connect the Add to another Mix RGB color top input and set to Mix, bottom input is your render result again. The factor is your opacity for the dithering. Then connect to whatever color clamping setup you've got or your final render result. Unfortunately this will look scuffed in the real-time compositor, so make sure you are looking at an actual render to preview the result.
the PS1 only had rigid body linear animations and many games used limbs that were separate objects because of this. It allows for limb movement without deformation at the cost of making your model look more like an action figure.
dude idk how but ur channel is like the convergence of my hyperfixations and its crazy. You got Ultrakill, Femtanyl, Music Posting, and Sleep Deprived related content on your channel and its like the perfect combination of shit im hyperfixating on
Don't give up! I spent years trying to learn blender, followed tutorials, experimented, explored the counter intuitive UI that changes drastically with almost every update, learned a lot of esoteric terms for simple geometric functions, tried (and failed)about 300 times to build the simplest possible low poly humanoid, finally did the donut tutorial (I always thought it was beneath me despite having no skills whatsoever) and now after countless hours and forcing myself to spend an hour a day ( 30 minutes building simple models, 30 minutes flipping switches and twisting knobs to see what happens to them) I can make decent looking buildings and racetracks. I swear Blender is magic, you can make it do anything you just need to know how to tell it what to do. If I can do it, you can. And you're probably not a complete idiot like I am!
@@steverye8872 I'm trying to learn blender too it's so overwhelming and I'm only interested in it to make things that look PS1 style and the controls and all the buttons and options are so confusing 😂 I managed to rip a model from one of my PS1 games and I got it loaded in blender and I'm like okay now what 😂
thank you so much for this. there are a lot of videos out there going over this topic but none really explained the depth behind the techniques that you did with this amount of conciseness, and the reasons why some things look the way they do. i'll be having this open the whole time i do my first project like this :)
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 can get the dithering compositing effect with Aseprite ( go to sprite > color mode > more options. You can have an animated dithering using Floyd/Steinberg error diffusion dithering )
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 ;)
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
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!
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
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
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.
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
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
You can thank @SplendidMeepers for the absolutely wonderful original art I based that render on, they created so much of what makes that scene appealing!
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
Thanks for the interesting video! Honestly didn't expect to find content like this and will definitely give the resource site a check. Had a good nostalgia trip a while back to bomberman fantasy race, possibly my favourite childhood game and wanted to remake it in both modern style and also a fan remake in its original style with a new theme. 👍
This is just amazing- I learned a lot, thank you heaps. That note of yours about the N64 visual style was fascinating- do you think you could do a similar start-to-end tutorial specific to the N64's higher poly but lower res texture style?
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
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
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?
@@SunnyIsOnline No pressure but I think making more tutorials would be a great idea! There's definitely a growing interest in low poly/Y2K era graphics on the Internet
At least personally, I think the next step after the donut is the bunny tutorial 😭 this thing is great, it teaches texturing and rigging, and it's super easy to follow ruclips.net/video/AlPPYkZg9D4/видео.htmlsi=bZ-e9yY-zs8MCX--
This is a great tutorial. I hope to make lots of use of it. Those models of the characters you used are cute! Did you make them yourself? If so, are they available for purchase or download anywhere?
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
How far does it squirt?
@@fab246 7 miles minimum
@@SunnyIsOnline dam bbby let me see 🤭
clicked because music posting
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
me staring at the pre-req saying "intermediate" and knowing full well I can barely delete the default cube: yeah this is the tutorial for me baby
clicked and watching exclusively because of alex and astrid in the thumbnail, glorious glorious human
Are they his own models or are they from a game? They look great. Also what are they from?
@@pretzel1313they’re from the Sleep Deprived Podcast.
VERY COOL VISUALS
aztrosist spotted 🗣️🔥🙏
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.
I never thought of that when I was making low poly models, thanks for pointing that out
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.
MUSIC POSTING PODCAST!!
mikasacus
YOURE THE GUY WHO MADE THE FEMTANYL ANIMATION
thats so sick and this tutorial is so helpful omg
You can do dithering in Blender compositor as well, you just need to get a dither texture image. How I do it is after Pixelating the image I use a dither image node (4x4 bayer pattern looks great) > Translate node (Wrap set to Both Axes) > Translate connected to Mix RGB Factor and set to Add. Top color input slot is your render result, bottom is your render also but with a HSV node to control how intense the dithering is. Then connect the Add to another Mix RGB color top input and set to Mix, bottom input is your render result again. The factor is your opacity for the dithering. Then connect to whatever color clamping setup you've got or your final render result.
Unfortunately this will look scuffed in the real-time compositor, so make sure you are looking at an actual render to preview the result.
I could not for the LIFE of me find a way to do this natively in blender, genuinely thank you 😭😭
Was just about to post the same thing.
Femtanyl mentioned 🗣🔥🔥
the PS1 only had rigid body linear animations and many games used limbs that were separate objects because of this. It allows for limb movement without deformation at the cost of making your model look more like an action figure.
Im still in the process of even making a first model, let alone trying to animate or anything else. Definitely a motivation booster.
dude idk how but ur channel is like the convergence of my hyperfixations and its crazy. You got Ultrakill, Femtanyl, Music Posting, and Sleep Deprived related content on your channel and its like the perfect combination of shit im hyperfixating on
blender knowledge "intermediate" okay bye
I watched this just cuz I’m kinda interested but I don’t plan on doing anything with it
Cya
Don't give up! I spent years trying to learn blender, followed tutorials, experimented, explored the counter intuitive UI that changes drastically with almost every update, learned a lot of esoteric terms for simple geometric functions, tried (and failed)about 300 times to build the simplest possible low poly humanoid, finally did the donut tutorial (I always thought it was beneath me despite having no skills whatsoever) and now after countless hours and forcing myself to spend an hour a day ( 30 minutes building simple models, 30 minutes flipping switches and twisting knobs to see what happens to them) I can make decent looking buildings and racetracks. I swear Blender is magic, you can make it do anything you just need to know how to tell it what to do. If I can do it, you can. And you're probably not a complete idiot like I am!
@@steverye8872 I'm trying to learn blender too it's so overwhelming and I'm only interested in it to make things that look PS1 style and the controls and all the buttons and options are so confusing 😂 I managed to rip a model from one of my PS1 games and I got it loaded in blender and I'm like okay now what 😂
I LOVE LOW POLY
Music Posting and Femtanyl fan spotted! Good tutorial, very helpful!
The nervous silence at 15:35 was priceless LOL. Cool stuffs!
Why do I keep watching blender tutorials... my pc cant even handle blender...
i love these though-
thank you so much for this. there are a lot of videos out there going over this topic but none really explained the depth behind the techniques that you did with this amount of conciseness, and the reasons why some things look the way they do. i'll be having this open the whole time i do my first project like this :)
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
Im buyin that plugin at the end
Affine texture mapping is what makes ps1 look ps1, imo.
5:41 in this case you can just select all faces and use UV -> Reset
You can get the dithering compositing effect with Aseprite ( go to sprite > color mode > more options. You can have an animated dithering using Floyd/Steinberg error diffusion dithering )
The vertex wobble is amazing
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
Actual legend I didn't even think to use vertex colours for the shadows
Thanks a lot for this guide. Not only useful in step by step, also explaining why those steps are needed.
Lock Camera to View when you're difining your camera composition! It's in the N-menu under view and I recommend you add it to the Q-menu
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 ;)
To make a good PS1 model you must make characters like it was the 90s
Golden tut my dude. Thanks for sharing your wobbly secrets.
this is AMAZING im so excited to get better at blender just so i can learn these skills ty!!!
I was hoping to see how you modeled that couple sitting together instead. Video was fine, but totally do one on that though!!
das aztrosist and mikasaurs from music posting
Yep… That’s exactly how I make animations.
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
great video, i’ve been down the psx rabbit hole and this is easily the greatest and most straightforward walkthrough !
Incredible video man, just helped me a ton. Thank you, the research behind it does not go unnoticed.
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!
“Low poly isn’t as hard as you think” it was harder than I thought when I created my first low poly character 😅
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
ive been trying and struggling to good guides, thank you
This is the exact guide I was looking for!!! Thank you :D
Ayo, this rocks! Totally gonna try a PSX style render!
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
Fantastic tutorial, thank you so much! I didn't even know about Model Resource, so that was awesome to discover and wander through :)
Low poly gang rise up
you can get away with shitty geometry if you overpixelize everything
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.
holy shit i've been looking for something exactly like this for months!! thank you amazing
This is the most helpful tutorial I've ever watched - thanks so much!!!!!
ive started learning blender to model lowpoly characters, this video is extremely useful thank you!!!
0:21 IS THAT FEMTANYL???
I had no idea there was a models resource! I only ever used spriters resource.
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
Idk why I watch this video all the way through even though I have never ever used blender and have no intentions to do so
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
I din't even plan to make any 3d stuff again, but this video is so good. Now I'm actually considering to come back to 3d modeling.
my favorite person to go to for ancient looks
Hey, thats awesome and made me wanna make some project ! Also I'm very in love with you scene style in 00:32.
You can thank @SplendidMeepers for the absolutely wonderful original art I based that render on, they created so much of what makes that scene appealing!
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
You don't need more edge loop to avoid collapsed volume, make the edge loop a 45° 😮 don't keep it flat
This is actually a super rad tip! That was part of the silent hill model and I completely missed it 😭
This is a really well produced and high quality tutorail! Keep up the great work as always!
Killer tutorial, earned a subscriber, keep it up man!
I have never touched a 3d art program in 3 years but thanks!!
rad introduction to the subject
Really great video! Also love the music posting models!
Very helpful tutorial, Im excited to try this out
Thanks for the interesting video! Honestly didn't expect to find content like this and will definitely give the resource site a check. Had a good nostalgia trip a while back to bomberman fantasy race, possibly my favourite childhood game and wanted to remake it in both modern style and also a fan remake in its original style with a new theme. 👍
I love sunny online
suddenly the blocky ff7 character sprites makes perfect sense
Amazing!!
This is just amazing- I learned a lot, thank you heaps. That note of yours about the N64 visual style was fascinating- do you think you could do a similar start-to-end tutorial specific to the N64's higher poly but lower res texture style?
Oh finally. A tutorial from my fav youtube
I recommend looking at some Resident Evil PSX models if you wanna see how they could have bendier limbs.
Oooh this is what i need. Bookmark it for later
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
The scene you made depicts almost EXACTLY what my gf and I like/how we look that's kinda scary but hella cool
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
Super cool tutorial thanks for sharing your knowledge
Thank you so much!! Very helpful video!
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?
Indeed it is!!
Most generous mf fr fr, sharing your knowledge to the youth!!!
Thanks for this! Really helpful!
Great video! Mannnnnn we need another one!!!🔥
Omg can you make this a series?!
I honestly might, I didn't expect to enjoy creating tutorials so much
@@SunnyIsOnline No pressure but I think making more tutorials would be a great idea! There's definitely a growing interest in low poly/Y2K era graphics on the Internet
thank you for saving my life
Slammed the Sub the very second I saw Vertex Wobble in viewport 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯😈😱😱😻😻💗💓💗
Hell yeah good stuff I don’t even use blender but this was cool to follow along you explained it great🗣️🗣️
You think you can make a video on making Mid-poly models and graphics like the Gamecube era like Wario World and Luigi’s Mansion?
120 X 120 is insanely huge for a basic crate
aweosme. now i just need to leanr blender
I did the donut so long ago but I'm clueless about rigging and real sculpting and any kinda texturing
At least personally, I think the next step after the donut is the bunny tutorial 😭 this thing is great, it teaches texturing and rigging, and it's super easy to follow
ruclips.net/video/AlPPYkZg9D4/видео.htmlsi=bZ-e9yY-zs8MCX--
Music posting mentioned 🗣️🗣️🗣️
super helpful tutorial thank you!
I LOVE you, this came at the right time.
YOU SAVED ME FROM MADNESS
Top notch tutorial, cheers!
This is a great tutorial. I hope to make lots of use of it. Those models of the characters you used are cute! Did you make them yourself? If so, are they available for purchase or download anywhere?
I love this
Reallu awesome video. Helped me out a LOT.
Great overview of the PSX process! What is the method to make the vertex snap happen when the camera is not moving?
i see aztrosist in the thumbnail, i click