@@nicolaslindken9468 Yeah but it's a little more complicated than that, you I import my 3D model to unity, some faces disappear, some bones function wrong and so much more. I have no problem with creating a 3D model, nor with unity, but when these teo gotta br mixed shit always goes wrong
@@rodolf5941 Me neither, but if you put in your time and willingness, you can learn all these things. Especially with the amount of resources and tutorials available in today's internet.
@@Fooxoul thats true. It used somehow pre-written lookup table with trigonometrical values. Some DOS games were using that stuff too, for people that didnt have Voodoo or such, back then. Funny times. Today engineering students learn about such stuff, and try to implement it by themselves, as a project for a subject. It used to be a real technology to earn money with, lol.
Skeletal rigging wasn’t a thing on the ps1 or n64 until late in their lifespan. The polygons for arms and legs were separated due to the animations having to be done by rotating the polys by hand without rigging.
The Crash Bandicoot games used per-vertex animation, but using a custom compression algorithm to reduce the filesize of the animations to get it working on actual hardware.
Funny story, the devs at Valve (or maybe prior) during their pitch for Half-Life got turned down by a few studios because they wanted to try skeletal rigging. I'm trying to recall which interview it was, but nobody believed they could do it.
@@DesertPunks Skeletal rigging actually requires non-euclidian four dimensional math. Quaternions and matrices. I remember having to crash course that subject and I thought my brain was going to melt before I understood.
@@ZairotOne No, low poly modelling was never particularly hard, they had a hard time because they had sub-100Mhz processors and 4MB or fewer RAM to work with. The software engineering, level design, animations, characters, all had to be carefully designed so they hardware of the time could handle it. An universal engine like Unity was simply not possible; each game had to have a dedicated engine specifically designed for the game itself to extract the most performance.
@@jackmcslay The DS has pretty decent graphics, comparing it to the PS2's graphics, which came out 4 years earlier. The Nintendo 64 had graphics that look more like the ones in this video Edit: decemy is my new favorite word
"It's pretty hard to look at" 1:58 - I think something that people miss about retrogames is that they would be played on those CRT televisions, which had the effect of "smoothing out" the blockiness and pixels, and so when you try to re-create the look, you need to cheat a little in order to recreate the "feel"
to be fair, most indies didn't even go for any kind of 3D graphics until relatively recently. For a long time, most indie games were 2D with very thick pixels for a "retro" look due to the limitations of the one-man-army making them, then people started slowly upgrading to PS1 and N64 looking simple 3D graphics, again because it's usually just one person working on the games who typically doesn't have as much of a background in graphics as they do in programming and game design
Nice one! For a full PS1-like effect you should figure out how to implement affine texture mapping and how to disable the z-buffer depth, but I think you already knew that.
@@garbaj Also, by the way, the PS1 does support 640x480, it’s just locked to interlaced rendering. Not very many games used it for regular gameplay due to the hardware demands though, but some 480i titles did crop up later into the PS1’s lifespan. Tekken 3, Dead or Alive, and Ridge Racer Turbo Mode are a few examples. Most just stuck with 240p since it was easier to optimize a game’s assets for that resolution. Also, instead of skeletal animation, PS1 animators used different techniques. Namely, the Crash Bandicoot games preferred to manually animate by each vertex, but the animation data was compressed at an extreme ratio: something like 50,000:1.
Affine texturing can be done with just a shader, but the lack of z-buffer depth is not something that anyone is going to replicate. PS1 devs had to MANUALLY define the depths of vertices so that back parts of the model wouldn't show through to the front which created occasionally glitchy looking graphics because it wasn't perfect. No way an indie dev is going to put in that much effort for a small effect that most people wont even notice
The part I struggle with the most is the shapes, and getting that to feel authentic. A lot of PS1 games were still aiming for "realism" despite the limitations. And the main difference between low poly and PS1 aesthetic is that the PS1 used tris, not quads. Which gave them more geometry to work with, under the same vertex count. That's why stuff like the Harry Mason model in Silent Hill 1 looks super detailed even though it's super low poly. And that's... kinda hard to go for intentionally. Like, you're not aiming for stylized low poly. You're aiming for "how can I make this look as high fidelity as possible within these limitations?" Because that's what developers back then were aiming for. It's a weird balance.
Alternatively, there were games even at the time (Mega Man Legends comes to mind) that embraced the low-poly aesthetic and were stylized accordingly. So it all depends on what look you want to go for!
@@sebastiankulche crash bandicoot did not look like a next generation videogame... you could literally count the polygons on his model. i think the ps1 game that pushed the ps1 to the limit in terms of 3d models from what i can think of the most is probably final fantasy 9.. look it up. Next closest i would say chrono cross.
@@RaimonTarou Heavily disagree. That could be said of any PS1 game, but Crash Bandicoot is one of the few fifth generation games with facial animation, something that not even FF9 have (and the places are just pictures and not 3d enviroments except the world map). And Crash 2 and 3 looks much better, not even the polygons are noticeable. I didnt play Chrono Cross, but i would check it out one of this days.
@@sebastiankulche ok crash was one of the few ps1 games that actually animated the faces ill give you that but ff9 models still looked better overall. maybe it was the way they painted the textures that made them look way better. and yea im only talking about character models, not backgrounds.
I appreciate the video. While I never played the old playstation games, I am a big fan of minimalist or limited art styles. These limits often end up leaving you more creative, which is always good in my book.
@@dontkickmychick6076 I prefer the Midground PS2 look, IMO I think this is the best for game graphics, not too unrealistic, not too (sometimes lol the PS2 had gorgeous games) realistic
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR, I’m learning to make animations and render visuals for my clothing brand and I’ve been seeing a lot of these really cool low res video game style animations and really wanted to do my own but didn’t know how, thank you for this existing on CZcams because I don’t know how I found it
If you wanna nail the ps1 aesthetic, there are a few more things you can do. 1#. Simulate a lack of a z-buffer. The z-buffer tells the render engine what polygons to draw first and what ones to draw last depending on their distance from the camera. Lots of PS1 games had issues with this since the console didn't have a native way of doing this. If you've ever played a PS1 game, you might see that some polygons that are obviously behind other ones get drawn in front due to small errors. 2#. Get a shader that uses affine texture mapping. This will cause the textures to warp in strange ways depending on how the in-game camera looks at them. Affine texture mapping simply linearly maps the texture onto polygons without any care for perspective. The PS1 used affine texture mapping, so if you want to mimic the PS1 aesthetic, it'll be one of the things you'll need to use, but another tip in this tip, if you're gonna use this, you'll need to subdivide your meshes. Devs back on the PS1 did this to lessen the effect of affine texture warping, so if you wanna hit the aesthetic on the head, it'll be useful to take advantage of that too. Just remember not to make your meshes too high poly. 3#. Integer vertex snapping. The ps1 couldn't use decimal values for vertex positions, so it had to snap vertexes to screenspace Integer values. This cause the vertex snapping that we all remember. 4#. Colour Depth and Dithering. The PS1 could show 24 bits worth of colour or 16,777,216 different colours, but this mode was basically only for still image display. It was more common for games to use a 15-bit colour mode for actual gameplay. This means most games only had access to 32,768 colours during gameplay. If you want to simulate PS1 graphics, that's one thing you'll have to do. However, with such a small amount of colours, colour banding was basically a guarantee. To help with this, dithering is used to break up the banding and give the illusion of more colour. Personally, I'd only recommend using dithering on 3D graphics, but if you wanna use them on 2D art too, you do you. 5#. Vertex shading. The PS1 couldn't quite handle per-pixel shading, so it had to survive with vertex shading. This causes shadows to be calculated per vertex instead of per pixel. No doubt I've missed something or I've gotten something blatantly wrong, so if you have any input or a correction, please tell me!
its suprisingly difficult once you try and do it yourself and try and make game ready assets and characters when there's no good tutorials explaining everything and you spend hours dive bombing down a youtube tutorial rabbit hole jus to learn the little nuggets of information you need that are being KEPT away from you
Very straight forward felt like this was perfect video wasn’t too long kept me engaged the whole video, the other ps2 style videos were more based on game building less how to style the models and this broke it all down in a way I can understand. I’m for sure hopping in blender and trying this out I didn’t know the textures were just super tiny that actually makes sense now. subbed❤️
"The first thing I did was create a 3D model" oh silly fucking me I thought that might be part of "learning to make PS1 graphics" "I learned how to paint masterpiece paintings in under 24 hours. First, I sketched a photorealistic woman with a slight sly smile"
@@sagehanson190 I didn't say it was hard. I said I expected this video about how to make PS1 graphics to be about how to make PS1 graphics, not about how if you already know how to make PS1 graphics, you can make them look more accurate.
@@MateriaGirl So you expected a tutorial going over the basics of blender and low poly? I mean if you're interested in that stuff why not just go look up an actual tutorial? PS1 graphics seem very simple but they're not where you start, they're stylized and have a certain aesthetic as you probably saw in the video. You need a small bit of knowledge before you can move in that direction.
This is something I can imagine a lot of people wanting to do and you did it with free software that anyone can download and use on their computer, so brilliant job!
Note for the Chads who want Saturn style visuals based on this video, instead of just PS1 or N64- Saturn was more color saturated than PS1 and also had no texture filtering, in addition, there would sometimes be flickering polys. 3D games on Saturn also had a more reflective look to their polys since the first party titles used what would later become Sonic Adventure's Lantern Engine lighting, palette based. Really good examples to reference are Burning Rangers and Panzer Dragoon Saga if you want to make something that looks nicer, or Tomb Raider and Sonic R if you're trying to go full Saturn faithful. Resolution for like 90% of games on the console was 320x240, but it also had a high res mode that a few games used at an absolute maximum of 704 X 480
Also used shadowed light source. Shadows had to be baked or faked. Also skeletal rigged the model when rigging wasn’t possible on the ps1 until very late in its lifespan (2000-2002) Not sure they had the right culling limit either.
For anyone wanting to do stuff that could run on the real deal: Most textures in PS1 games were about 64x64 and often did not have more than 16 colours each, the models also had to be carefully designed to avoid depth sorting issues as it didn't have a Z-buffer, triangles close together would flip back and forth which one was in front/behind. You could have about 3000 triangles on screen at one time. Per pixel lighting (like the circular lights you get in unity or unreal) did pretty much not exist and was far too expensive. Instead you tended to see vertex lighting either baked on a model or dynamic.
joints were not connected in old 3D games because lack of proper skinning that would work in real time so it was easier to separate body into parts with pivots in joint spots and animate it like that...
You could also simplify the lighting too because most games of that era had either no lighting, baked lighting, or vertex shading where the vertex would be assigned a color depending on the position of the lightsource and the normals
I was about to cry when you said retro graphics. It seems that people have started considering PS1 era games as retro which means I’m now officially old.
Great video. I suggest for an even more PSX look: convert the textures to TIM files and back before making the atlas. It will introduce compression artifacts that, I think, are essential to the look. Oh, and vertex shading solid colors... Keeps texture maps from looking like a carpet sample book, reduces number of texture maps needed, reduces UV work, etc.
2 pretty important things if you wanna make it look as convincing as possible: 1. make a shader that rounds vertex positions in view space. This gives models that strange wobbliness as the ps1 didn't have floating point values for those positions (pretty sure, don't quote me on that) 2. Use affine texture mapping and subdivide your models on large flat surfaces. This gives textures that strange warped look as the camera gets closer.
Christ, that Press Start takes me right back to playing the home console version of Radical Bikers. Still have that PS1, and it still runs perfectly despite being nearly... oh wow it's nearly thirty. Christ.
@1:51 The PS1 also supported hi-res modes. Wipeout 3: 720x480 (480i), and various other hi res modes like Ergheiz: 640x480, Tobal 1+2: 512x512 (which scaled to 640x480), Crash, Kain, Soulreaver, Quake2: 512x240, Tekken 3: 384x480 (also scaled to 640x480) The problem of course, these screen modes leave little texture space. Depending on the art direction, vertex colors alone would do the job...
This was the perfect video I needed to complete my current 3D project. I'm actually building a replica of some of the cars from the PS1 game LEGO Racers. I'm definitely putting a filter on them now to give them a classic look.
I'm not complaining. It is a tried and tested look. It allows one developer working on a project to focus more on actually creating the game and programming it rather than fiddling around for thousands of hours making photorealistic assets that can still look uncanny in the end. That way you can also spend more time on the gameplay features and art style instead and adding little things. Oh, and you can also run it on anything. So that is a bonus. And let's be real here, do most aspiring game developers who are just starting out with no programming experience really need those 8th gen AAA graphics to fulfill their vision in every scenario? Horror games especially come to mind here.
PS1 maximum resolution is actually 640x480 interlaced (in NTSC) but this was rarely used because the entire screen takes up part of the same video memory used to store textures, and there isn't much VRAM.
it's only easy if it's not done right. it's more than just a low poly mesh with pixelated textures. most people doing 'ps1 style games' hat absolutely no idea what's important. vertex lighting instead of pixel lighting, NO real time shadows, correctly compressed textures (both in size and colors), no texture filtering, affine texture mapping, reduced float precision of vertices, no depth buffer, correct screen resolution and aspect ratio, no mipmapping (unless it's faked by LOD), fake CD loading times, draw distances, framerate. done right it's a really difficult task
Generally i don't like this kind of non video tutorials on this topics but this video actually made me to learn something and it was actually well made. Nice work garbaj
Cool, thanks for this. Honestly after growing up in the 80's and witnessing the 8bit wars and then the 16bit and into the 3d gaming world, not much has changed. For a while games were just being re created over and over with just better graphics. Today, the playing field is level and you have to make games with creativity, just showcasing what the GPU can do isn't enough anymore.
Some old games from PS2 era had special 16:9 mode that makes everything squashed. Then if you happen to have a 16:9 CRT or LCD the game looks nice and proportional. It works like anamorphic lens from 4:3 video camera and the final picture looks good on 16:9 TV Monitor or projector. The same way was working with funky resolutions that old consoles had but ratio standard was 4:3.
Making models isn't too difficult and PS1 type models can be done by anyone in blender if you had some simple steps laid out for you. I absolutely would recommend doing blender guru's Donut modeling tutorial though, that thing is genuinely a holy grail for getting into modeling and learning blender. And there's also some fantastic rigging tutorials out there as well. Alternatively you can also just import something like the Resident Evil 2 PS1 models into blender and just use those. I've made some models using Leon Kennedy and it's about as authentic as you can get. The hard part is all the shaders and dithering and shit you gotta do afterwards that sucks. Like right now i've figured out how to get those jagged edges but getting the dithering native to ps1 titles is apparently very difficult (though I did find a shader for that on unity)
>the maximum texture size is 256x256 that seems more like average gamecube texture sizes LOL n64 max is 32x64 RGBA16, but if you use CI4 (basically color palette) you can save more TMEM and have 64x64 of course, if you use tile loading correctly, you can "stitch" the textures together to make them bigger not to be "that guy" but I thought I'd add my 2 cents in as an N64 ROM Hacker
I'm pretty sure there are more convenient ways to do it (I believe you can use an animated texture?) but yes changing the texture based on a timer or RNG can also work
Dope! How long do you think it would take to recreate the last cutscene from the first kingdom hearts game by yourself? Those graphics blow my mind. And you should recreate the scene a ps1 version hahaha. Maybe you could make a series where you take certain cutscenes from games and recreate them as ps1 versions. I think it’d be dope
imo locking the resolution to 320x240 will make the game look more like an old PC game, maybe a contemporary PC port of a PS1 title. I grew up with the Windows port of MGS1 so this looks pretty nostalgic to me. But composite video couldn't output sharp pixels like that.
Yeah 480p on todays 4k panels would be rough on the eyes. I think 1080p is acceptable, cause even if you played on a ps1 console, you can still upscale to 1080p.
The ps1 had a quirk of the polyg0n rendering where the polys didn't render totally still/flat there was always some kind of poping or shifting effect on the trianges. You'll see this in action if you look up "ps1 shaders"
It looks like that when you upscale the rendering in emulators, but this effect wasn't really all that apparent on real hardware. The vertex coordinates are snapped to the nearest integer, but when you emulate at higher resolution, it skips several pixels instead. There is another quirk that the matrix-vector multiplication was integer too, so there is a bit of jitter on top of that all when things move, but it's difficult to recreate convincingly.
@@SianaGearz the flickering i speak of is present on the real hardware as well as emulation, with an upscale or not czcams.com/video/ngSA8ql4ly4/video.html
low poly, low resoultion 4:3 with low res unfiltered textures are super comfy. even after getting a powerful pc that can run games at 1080p 144hz, i'm always tempted to play at 640x480. there is something very appealing about the low resolution to me. i dont know why.
One thing that was missing here is the low resolution PS1 dithering effect, doesn't look quite right without it to be honest because the shading is too smooth.
"First I make a 3D model"
Well that's the first problem
not really
@@gahmuretvanbegonia994 yes really
*Sighs* ... so I learned to make a 3D Model in less than 24 hours ...
@@nicolaslindken9468 Yeah but it's a little more complicated than that, you I import my 3D model to unity, some faces disappear, some bones function wrong and so much more. I have no problem with creating a 3D model, nor with unity, but when these teo gotta br mixed shit always goes wrong
@@rodolf5941 Me neither, but if you put in your time and willingness, you can learn all these things. Especially with the amount of resources and tutorials available in today's internet.
"First I made a 3D model" I believe that's actually the step I got stuck on.
ong
I literally have no idea where to begin
You need to disable z-buffer depth to give that weird janky wobbly look the PS1 had. :)
Mostly that snapping look was due to the GPU on the PS1 only using ints and not floats from what I remember.
I was about to say, if polygons don't clip into everything and wobble on every move it aint real ps1
using a vertex shader you could emulate the texture distortion
@@Fooxoul thats true. It used somehow pre-written lookup table with trigonometrical values. Some DOS games were using that stuff too, for people that didnt have Voodoo or such, back then. Funny times. Today engineering students learn about such stuff, and try to implement it by themselves, as a project for a subject. It used to be a real technology to earn money with, lol.
I was actually gonna mention that. I wonder if there is a way to do that in Godot...
Skeletal rigging wasn’t a thing on the ps1 or n64 until late in their lifespan. The polygons for arms and legs were separated due to the animations having to be done by rotating the polys by hand without rigging.
i feel so bad for the devs and animators back then oh man! the look was gorgeous though so the hard work payed off
Then the Conker's Bad Fur Day cutscenes come to mind....
The poor sods....
The Crash Bandicoot games used per-vertex animation, but using a custom compression algorithm to reduce the filesize of the animations to get it working on actual hardware.
Funny story, the devs at Valve (or maybe prior) during their pitch for Half-Life got turned down by a few studios because they wanted to try skeletal rigging. I'm trying to recall which interview it was, but nobody believed they could do it.
@@DesertPunks Skeletal rigging actually requires non-euclidian four dimensional math. Quaternions and matrices. I remember having to crash course that subject and I thought my brain was going to melt before I understood.
"it is suprising easy"
early 2000's devs: am I joke to you?
Yeah, it's easy now because devs didn't have access to tools like Blender back then.
@@ZairotOne No, low poly modelling was never particularly hard, they had a hard time because they had sub-100Mhz processors and 4MB or fewer RAM to work with. The software engineering, level design, animations, characters, all had to be carefully designed so they hardware of the time could handle it. An universal engine like Unity was simply not possible; each game had to have a dedicated engine specifically designed for the game itself to extract the most performance.
uh, no game in 2000 had these graphics.
Try the 90s.
@@JesterWhoHelps Nintendo DS:
" Am I a joke to you?"
@@jackmcslay The DS has pretty decent graphics, comparing it to the PS2's graphics, which came out 4 years earlier. The Nintendo 64 had graphics that look more like the ones in this video
Edit: decemy is my new favorite word
"It's pretty hard to look at" 1:58 - I think something that people miss about retrogames is that they would be played on those CRT televisions, which had the effect of "smoothing out" the blockiness and pixels, and so when you try to re-create the look, you need to cheat a little in order to recreate the "feel"
dude just dont like that spoopy ye olde rabbit hole he jumped in 😑
Everyone: The game should be as realistic as possible
Garbaj and Miziziziz:
don't forget Anders Lundbjörk!
@@fr4nk0 who is that
It's realistically PSX
to be fair, most indies didn't even go for any kind of 3D graphics until relatively recently. For a long time, most indie games were 2D with very thick pixels for a "retro" look due to the limitations of the one-man-army making them, then people started slowly upgrading to PS1 and N64 looking simple 3D graphics, again because it's usually just one person working on the games who typically doesn't have as much of a background in graphics as they do in programming and game design
@@bokunogentoo4420 Me who downloads all graphics from internet and downloads animations from mixamo:
*visible confusion*
Half of Garbaj's tutorials I don't even want to do; he just makes it fun to go on the journey with him lol
true
ok colly
Haha, you name it, Colly! And still he gives enough to learn in almost every lesson.
"You notice something just doesn't look right"
Me watching this in 240p: 👀
Literally me with rural internet
Literally me with rural internet
42 kps
like "now that you mention it..."
why she wearing that twitter merch
Garbaj accidently predicted the future
Nice one!
For a full PS1-like effect you should figure out how to implement affine texture mapping and how to disable the z-buffer depth, but I think you already knew that.
I didn't know anything about that actually. More to learn!
@@garbaj Also, by the way, the PS1 does support 640x480, it’s just locked to interlaced rendering. Not very many games used it for regular gameplay due to the hardware demands though, but some 480i titles did crop up later into the PS1’s lifespan. Tekken 3, Dead or Alive, and Ridge Racer Turbo Mode are a few examples.
Most just stuck with 240p since it was easier to optimize a game’s assets for that resolution.
Also, instead of skeletal animation, PS1 animators used different techniques. Namely, the Crash Bandicoot games preferred to manually animate by each vertex, but the animation data was compressed at an extreme ratio: something like 50,000:1.
Affine texturing can be done with just a shader, but the lack of z-buffer depth is not something that anyone is going to replicate. PS1 devs had to MANUALLY define the depths of vertices so that back parts of the model wouldn't show through to the front which created occasionally glitchy looking graphics because it wasn't perfect. No way an indie dev is going to put in that much effort for a small effect that most people wont even notice
The part I struggle with the most is the shapes, and getting that to feel authentic. A lot of PS1 games were still aiming for "realism" despite the limitations.
And the main difference between low poly and PS1 aesthetic is that the PS1 used tris, not quads. Which gave them more geometry to work with, under the same vertex count. That's why stuff like the Harry Mason model in Silent Hill 1 looks super detailed even though it's super low poly.
And that's... kinda hard to go for intentionally. Like, you're not aiming for stylized low poly. You're aiming for "how can I make this look as high fidelity as possible within these limitations?" Because that's what developers back then were aiming for. It's a weird balance.
Alternatively, there were games even at the time (Mega Man Legends comes to mind) that embraced the low-poly aesthetic and were stylized accordingly. So it all depends on what look you want to go for!
Or games like Crash Bandicoot that looks practically like a next generation videogame.
@@sebastiankulche crash bandicoot did not look like a next generation videogame... you could literally count the polygons on his model. i think the ps1 game that pushed the ps1 to the limit in terms of 3d models from what i can think of the most is probably final fantasy 9.. look it up. Next closest i would say chrono cross.
@@RaimonTarou Heavily disagree. That could be said of any PS1 game, but Crash Bandicoot is one of the few fifth generation games with facial animation, something that not even FF9 have (and the places are just pictures and not 3d enviroments except the world map). And Crash 2 and 3 looks much better, not even the polygons are noticeable.
I didnt play Chrono Cross, but i would check it out one of this days.
@@sebastiankulche ok crash was one of the few ps1 games that actually animated the faces ill give you that but ff9 models still looked better overall. maybe it was the way they painted the textures that made them look way better. and yea im only talking about character models, not backgrounds.
I appreciate the video. While I never played the old playstation games, I am a big fan of minimalist or limited art styles. These limits often end up leaving you more creative, which is always good in my book.
Me too
I am also a big fan of minimalist styles. in addition to making you more creative, it further develops the player's imagination.
You should play them, your missing out
A Retro graphics comeback would be fun to see(but with advanced effects)
I don't think you've seen the explosion of PS1-styled games in the past 3 years.
@@dylanroemmele906 its all *pixels* now... honestly im into it, especially against that "im trying too hard to be realistic" look
@@dylanroemmele906 Could u name some examples? I’m super interested in checking them out!
@@dontkickmychick6076 I prefer the Midground PS2 look, IMO I think this is the best for game graphics, not too unrealistic, not too (sometimes lol the PS2 had gorgeous games) realistic
@@MerkhVision Look up the Haunted PS1 community, it's literally nothing but retro style horror games lol
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR, I’m learning to make animations and render visuals for my clothing brand and I’ve been seeing a lot of these really cool low res video game style animations and really wanted to do my own but didn’t know how, thank you for this existing on CZcams because I don’t know how I found it
May I ask what game engine you’re using to make and render the characters animations?
@@goon4696 I think he uses Godot, but you can use any game engine
Can we appreciate the cute character design though?Got some nostalgic "Coraline" vibes.
Also I would love to see this project fleshed further!
It's evolving, just backwards.
what the hell do you mean easy. this is hell.
If you wanna nail the ps1 aesthetic, there are a few more things you can do.
1#. Simulate a lack of a z-buffer.
The z-buffer tells the render engine what polygons to draw first and what ones to draw last depending on their distance from the camera. Lots of PS1 games had issues with this since the console didn't have a native way of doing this. If you've ever played a PS1 game, you might see that some polygons that are obviously behind other ones get drawn in front due to small errors.
2#. Get a shader that uses affine texture mapping.
This will cause the textures to warp in strange ways depending on how the in-game camera looks at them. Affine texture mapping simply linearly maps the texture onto polygons without any care for perspective. The PS1 used affine texture mapping, so if you want to mimic the PS1 aesthetic, it'll be one of the things you'll need to use, but another tip in this tip, if you're gonna use this, you'll need to subdivide your meshes. Devs back on the PS1 did this to lessen the effect of affine texture warping, so if you wanna hit the aesthetic on the head, it'll be useful to take advantage of that too. Just remember not to make your meshes too high poly.
3#. Integer vertex snapping.
The ps1 couldn't use decimal values for vertex positions, so it had to snap vertexes to screenspace Integer values. This cause the vertex snapping that we all remember.
4#. Colour Depth and Dithering.
The PS1 could show 24 bits worth of colour or 16,777,216 different colours, but this mode was basically only for still image display. It was more common for games to use a 15-bit colour mode for actual gameplay. This means most games only had access to 32,768 colours during gameplay. If you want to simulate PS1 graphics, that's one thing you'll have to do.
However, with such a small amount of colours, colour banding was basically a guarantee. To help with this, dithering is used to break up the banding and give the illusion of more colour.
Personally, I'd only recommend using dithering on 3D graphics, but if you wanna use them on 2D art too, you do you.
5#. Vertex shading.
The PS1 couldn't quite handle per-pixel shading, so it had to survive with vertex shading. This causes shadows to be calculated per vertex instead of per pixel.
No doubt I've missed something or I've gotten something blatantly wrong, so if you have any input or a correction, please tell me!
its suprisingly difficult once you try and do it yourself and try and make game ready assets and characters when there's no good tutorials explaining everything and you spend hours dive bombing down a youtube tutorial rabbit hole jus to learn the little nuggets of information you need that are being KEPT away from you
Very straight forward felt like this was perfect video wasn’t too long kept me engaged the whole video, the other ps2 style videos were more based on game building less how to style the models and this broke it all down in a way I can understand. I’m for sure hopping in blender and trying this out I didn’t know the textures were just super tiny that actually makes sense now. subbed❤️
glad you liked the video, welcome!
Very accurate! Btw, you can set your test resolution to HD, but your window resolution to not hd and youll have a full sized but pixlelated game.
You're missing the most important part of the aesthetic. The classic PSX dither.
Without it, it looks like N64 instead, XD 😆
Sort of. The dither was supposed to get blended out by the CRT so it's really a matter of preference
@@wiegraf9009 did you even seen how textures screaming in pain from perspective? you cant hide that by crt
"The first thing I did was create a 3D model"
oh silly fucking me I thought that might be part of "learning to make PS1 graphics"
"I learned how to paint masterpiece paintings in under 24 hours. First, I sketched a photorealistic woman with a slight sly smile"
I learned how to make a low poly model in less than hour lmao
I had literally zero experience. It really isn't that hard.
@@sagehanson190 share the tutorial
@@ThatFilmisGnarly
Modeling:
czcams.com/video/4OUYOKGl7x0/video.html
Rigging:
czcams.com/video/srpOeu9UUBU/video.html
@@sagehanson190 I didn't say it was hard.
I said I expected this video about how to make PS1 graphics to be about how to make PS1 graphics, not about how if you already know how to make PS1 graphics, you can make them look more accurate.
@@MateriaGirl So you expected a tutorial going over the basics of blender and low poly? I mean if you're interested in that stuff why not just go look up an actual tutorial? PS1 graphics seem very simple but they're not where you start, they're stylized and have a certain aesthetic as you probably saw in the video. You need a small bit of knowledge before you can move in that direction.
This will be most likely be the next movement toward retro gaming.
This is something I can imagine a lot of people wanting to do and you did it with free software that anyone can download and use on their computer, so brilliant job!
What software is it?? I wanna do this
@@MrEspaillat He used blender and godot
Note for the Chads who want Saturn style visuals based on this video, instead of just PS1 or N64- Saturn was more color saturated than PS1 and also had no texture filtering, in addition, there would sometimes be flickering polys. 3D games on Saturn also had a more reflective look to their polys since the first party titles used what would later become Sonic Adventure's Lantern Engine lighting, palette based. Really good examples to reference are Burning Rangers and Panzer Dragoon Saga if you want to make something that looks nicer, or Tomb Raider and Sonic R if you're trying to go full Saturn faithful. Resolution for like 90% of games on the console was 320x240, but it also had a high res mode that a few games used at an absolute maximum of 704 X 480
"I learned to make PS1 graphics"
- Did not use affine mapping
- Did not snap vertices
- Did not make PS1 graphics
Also used shadowed light source.
Shadows had to be baked or faked.
Also skeletal rigged the model when rigging wasn’t possible on the ps1 until very late in its lifespan (2000-2002)
Not sure they had the right culling limit either.
Pseudo PS1 graphics. I still think it looks good though.
And it's not on 320x200, which is the best part of the PS1 graphics imo
and he’s not running it on an actual ps1
smh 😔
recommend a youtuber or video that shows this? Im interested in learning this
For anyone wanting to do stuff that could run on the real deal:
Most textures in PS1 games were about 64x64 and often did not have more than 16 colours each, the models also had to be carefully designed to avoid depth sorting issues as it didn't have a Z-buffer, triangles close together would flip back and forth which one was in front/behind.
You could have about 3000 triangles on screen at one time.
Per pixel lighting (like the circular lights you get in unity or unreal) did pretty much not exist and was far too expensive.
Instead you tended to see vertex lighting either baked on a model or dynamic.
Damn, you predicted the twitter thing.
Thats really funny! Keep making amazing vids :3
joints were not connected in old 3D games because lack of proper skinning that would work in real time so it was easier to separate body into parts with pivots in joint spots and animate it like that...
You could also simplify the lighting too because most games of that era had either no lighting, baked lighting, or vertex shading where the vertex would be assigned a color depending on the position of the lightsource and the normals
I was about to cry when you said retro graphics. It seems that people have started considering PS1 era games as retro which means I’m now officially old.
the character model you made for this is kinda adorable ngl
Great video. I suggest for an even more PSX look: convert the textures to TIM files and back before making the atlas. It will introduce compression artifacts that, I think, are essential to the look.
Oh, and vertex shading solid colors... Keeps texture maps from looking like a carpet sample book, reduces number of texture maps needed, reduces UV work, etc.
Definitely looks authentic - Mel Brooks would be proud.
2 pretty important things if you wanna make it look as convincing as possible:
1. make a shader that rounds vertex positions in view space. This gives models that strange wobbliness as the ps1 didn't have floating point values for those positions (pretty sure, don't quote me on that)
2. Use affine texture mapping and subdivide your models on large flat surfaces. This gives textures that strange warped look as the camera gets closer.
Great video btw!
this is like building your own chair and saying how easy it was compared to the cavemen while holding power tools, nails, and construction implements
I'm glad they bring this style back, PS1 style graphics were just a nostalgic coin in my saved data! There has to be more games like this!
Christ, that Press Start takes me right back to playing the home console version of Radical Bikers. Still have that PS1, and it still runs perfectly despite being nearly... oh wow it's nearly thirty. Christ.
@1:51 The PS1 also supported hi-res modes. Wipeout 3: 720x480 (480i), and various other hi res modes like Ergheiz: 640x480, Tobal 1+2: 512x512 (which scaled to 640x480), Crash, Kain, Soulreaver, Quake2: 512x240, Tekken 3: 384x480 (also scaled to 640x480) The problem of course, these screen modes leave little texture space. Depending on the art direction, vertex colors alone would do the job...
With modern technology and 4k graphics, we can replicate low poly playstation games but slightly less of an eyesore
Only guy I've seen editing textures with inkscape
This was the perfect video I needed to complete my current 3D project. I'm actually building a replica of some of the cars from the PS1 game LEGO Racers. I'm definitely putting a filter on them now to give them a classic look.
A surprising amount of info packed into a 3 minute video. Top job, mate.
this graphical style (sans the resolution and aspect ratio part) is gonna be the 3D pixel art. I am extremely confident of this.
I can see this being a new trend for indie games like how pixel games are now. No complaints.
it kinda is, i seen a couple (mostly indie horror) games use this kinda style
Anodyne 2 is a good example.
I'm not complaining. It is a tried and tested look. It allows one developer working on a project to focus more on actually creating the game and programming it rather than fiddling around for thousands of hours making photorealistic assets that can still look uncanny in the end.
That way you can also spend more time on the gameplay features and art style instead and adding little things. Oh, and you can also run it on anything. So that is a bonus.
And let's be real here, do most aspiring game developers who are just starting out with no programming experience really need those 8th gen AAA graphics to fulfill their vision in every scenario? Horror games especially come to mind here.
My face just started to shine when you switched to an "old school" resolution. Great video :-)
I see we're using the "Draw the rest of the owl" school of learning
Oh my goodness now I wanna make ps1/ps2 graphics now. Thanks!
Great video, well explained and straight to the point thank you!
You've nailed the aesthetic! I often think it might be interesting if more new games were like this but with higher resolutions.
PS1 maximum resolution is actually 640x480 interlaced (in NTSC) but this was rarely used because the entire screen takes up part of the same video memory used to store textures, and there isn't much VRAM.
THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!
it's only easy if it's not done right. it's more than just a low poly mesh with pixelated textures. most people doing 'ps1 style games' hat absolutely no idea what's important. vertex lighting instead of pixel lighting, NO real time shadows, correctly compressed textures (both in size and colors), no texture filtering, affine texture mapping, reduced float precision of vertices, no depth buffer, correct screen resolution and aspect ratio, no mipmapping (unless it's faked by LOD), fake CD loading times, draw distances, framerate. done right it's a really difficult task
Generally i don't like this kind of non video tutorials on this topics but this video actually made me to learn something and it was actually well made. Nice work garbaj
1:57 Bro, Look at the graphics! OMG so cool!
Cool, thanks for this. Honestly after growing up in the 80's and witnessing the 8bit wars and then the 16bit and into the 3d gaming world, not much has changed. For a while games were just being re created over and over with just better graphics. Today, the playing field is level and you have to make games with creativity, just showcasing what the GPU can do isn't enough anymore.
damn i never thought to make a 3d model you made this so much easier
Needs a post-process jitter filter on the game camera! Awesome video!!
Love it, another thing that adds a lot to that retro aesthetic would be texture warping.
Some old games from PS2 era had special 16:9 mode that makes everything squashed. Then if you happen to have a 16:9 CRT or LCD the game looks nice and proportional. It works like anamorphic lens from 4:3 video camera and the final picture looks good on 16:9 TV Monitor or projector. The same way was working with funky resolutions that old consoles had but ratio standard was 4:3.
"...and it turns out it's pretty easy. The first thing I did was make a 3D model."
Me: 😢
"first i made a 3D model"
oh okay, this tutorial isn't for me then, got it, best of luck though, the graphics look great!
Making models isn't too difficult and PS1 type models can be done by anyone in blender if you had some simple steps laid out for you. I absolutely would recommend doing blender guru's Donut modeling tutorial though, that thing is genuinely a holy grail for getting into modeling and learning blender. And there's also some fantastic rigging tutorials out there as well.
Alternatively you can also just import something like the Resident Evil 2 PS1 models into blender and just use those. I've made some models using Leon Kennedy and it's about as authentic as you can get. The hard part is all the shaders and dithering and shit you gotta do afterwards that sucks. Like right now i've figured out how to get those jagged edges but getting the dithering native to ps1 titles is apparently very difficult (though I did find a shader for that on unity)
wow thanks for making this super simple to understand!
0:34 well actually Kaze Emanuar talked about that in one of his videos, it was a problem with earlier microcodes of the n64 which got fixed later
id really love to see the tutorial of making that model
I kinda wanted the noob version of this where he shows you how to make the model itself... The rest is easy. I dunno Blender.
Nobody animates the iconic artifacts of PlayStation 1 rendering. Popping polygons, extremely low resolution textures, fixed cameras, etc...
>the maximum texture size is 256x256
that seems more like average gamecube texture sizes LOL
n64 max is 32x64 RGBA16, but if you use CI4 (basically color palette) you can save more TMEM and have 64x64
of course, if you use tile loading correctly, you can "stitch" the textures together to make them bigger
not to be "that guy" but I thought I'd add my 2 cents in as an N64 ROM Hacker
all that's missing is dithering and, if you really want to bing it back, using a shaders that do "affine texture mapping" or whatever its called
I would love to play some sort of online multi-player 3rd person shooter in this style and a near future theme
this is some high quality garbaj
yes i'm aware this probably isn't the first time someone's made the joke, though im new here so maybe idk
I was sure this would be how to get the weird texture distortions the PS1 had.
Those ps1 graphic horror games are fire
the one thing you missed is that the shadows are typically drawn onto the textures, but i think you covered that in another video
you're growing fast boi B]
All according to plan >:)
Now that's something for me! As long as I don't have to do retopo, I'm golden!
Can I ask how you'd get models to blink in godot? Would it be a matter of having a timer change its texture to one where it has its eyes closed?
I'm pretty sure there are more convenient ways to do it (I believe you can use an animated texture?) but yes changing the texture based on a timer or RNG can also work
@@garbaj thanks for the response I'll look into how animated textures work because that sounds like a better solution
amazing how much information in less than 3 minutes. ! +1 new sub
Ngl, this model is super cute.
"so I learned how to draw a realistic woman in less than five minutes. It is surprisingly easy!"
-Picasso
Dope! How long do you think it would take to recreate the last cutscene from the first kingdom hearts game by yourself? Those graphics blow my mind. And you should recreate the scene a ps1 version hahaha. Maybe you could make a series where you take certain cutscenes from games and recreate them as ps1 versions. I think it’d be dope
just me coming from the new trippie redd visuals because I fell in love with the aesthetic
imo locking the resolution to 320x240 will make the game look more like an old PC game, maybe a contemporary PC port of a PS1 title. I grew up with the Windows port of MGS1 so this looks pretty nostalgic to me. But composite video couldn't output sharp pixels like that.
These polygons are to precise, this is to precise and solid to PS1. You need to take that pixel precision off a little bit xD
Yeah 480p on todays 4k panels would be rough on the eyes. I think 1080p is acceptable, cause even if you played on a ps1 console, you can still upscale to 1080p.
Literally my ideal aesthetic tyvm
The ps1 had a quirk of the polyg0n rendering where the polys didn't render totally still/flat
there was always some kind of poping or shifting effect on the trianges. You'll see this in action if you look up "ps1 shaders"
It looks like that when you upscale the rendering in emulators, but this effect wasn't really all that apparent on real hardware. The vertex coordinates are snapped to the nearest integer, but when you emulate at higher resolution, it skips several pixels instead.
There is another quirk that the matrix-vector multiplication was integer too, so there is a bit of jitter on top of that all when things move, but it's difficult to recreate convincingly.
@@SianaGearz the flickering i speak of is present on the real hardware as well as emulation, with an upscale or not
czcams.com/video/ngSA8ql4ly4/video.html
it is also needs something called, vertex/gouraud lighting
most render engines nowdays uses phong lighting
These guys never keep in mind that the CRT smooths out the ps1 graphics and never put a smoothing filter on.
what software did you use at 0:45 second? thanks, nice tutorial.
Low-key "I hate it, but doing it because it's popular" vibes, ngl
If you really wanna go the full length for the PS1 style you could add vertex jittering, texture warping, and color dithering.
This is magic
low poly, low resoultion 4:3 with low res unfiltered textures are super comfy. even after getting a powerful pc that can run games at 1080p 144hz, i'm always tempted to play at 640x480. there is something very appealing about the low resolution to me. i dont know why.
One thing that was missing here is the low resolution PS1 dithering effect, doesn't look quite right without it to be honest because the shading is too smooth.
That 3D Character is so cute haha.
This might surprise you but MGS and Vagrant Story are PS1 games with PS1 graphics.
Vagrant Story was remarkably advanced though, they came up with so many neat techniques.