So I Learned To Make PS1 Graphics In Less Than 24 Hours

Retro graphics are coming back in a big way, and it's surprisingly easy to do.

Discord: The discord has been shut down, sorry!

[rodolf]

"First I make a 3D model"
Well that's the first problem

[ragnarockerbunny]

"First I made a 3D model" I believe that's actually the step I got stuck on.

[viniciusantonio]

"it is suprising easy"



early 2000's devs: am I joke to you?

[ZeoWorks]

You need to disable z-buffer depth to give that weird janky wobbly look the PS1 had. :)

[billyj.causeyvideoguy]

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.

[anindyaroythetechmaster]

Everyone: The game should be as realistic as possible

Garbaj and Miziziziz:

[Problematist]

"You notice something just doesn't look right"
Me watching this in 240p: 👀

[colly]

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

[AmericasComic]

"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"

[voxelvoid]

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.

[Dogman_]

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.

[cheapshushi]

what the hell do you mean easy. this is hell.

[felineentity]

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.

[Chevifier]

A Retro graphics comeback would be fun to see(but with advanced effects)

[MateriaGirl]

"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"

[goon]

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 YouTube because I don’t know how I found it

[alcatrazthatguyontheintern]

Can we appreciate the cute character design though?Got some nostalgic "Coraline" vibes.
Also I would love to see this project fleshed further!

[colderplasma]

"I learned to make PS1 graphics"
- Did not use affine mapping
- Did not snap vertices
- Did not make PS1 graphics

[FicoosBangaly]

You're missing the most important part of the aesthetic. The classic PSX dither.

[Definitely_a_Fox]

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!