How Nintendo Textures EVERYTHING

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Nintendo is known for their innovative games and nostalgic memories. Today, we're gonna break down the insane truth behind how Nintendo created their graphics, and how they are STILL using these methods today.
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[@Smeaf]

The first 1,000 people to use the link will get a 1 month free trial of Skillshare: skl.sh/smeaf12221

[@Hopp5ann]

ok

[@YourBoyDonald]

Lol okay!

[@YourBoyDonald]

Smeaf, thanks for hearting my comment! Also, i love your channel, please keep going with what you do! If you ever get really famous, remember me! 😊

[@p1ntu_]

@@YourBoyDonald hes famous already

[@bzdirt]

For anyone wondering, this has nothing specific to Nintendo. Everyone in the industry has been using texture collections for a long time now (and sound FX CDs too). Same for scrolling UV and the likes. As for memory requirements, PSX had way more storage, but not more RAM! So most of the CD were for music and videos. Now for actually interesting bits not covered here: did you know a lot of the textures on N64 or PSX were actually greyscale? This way they could, for example, use the same noise pattern for grass and sand and rock by using only vertex color!

[@SianaGearz]

I'm not sure about N64 but vertex/polygon colour was more rarely used on Playstation due to performance concerns. But if you have a greyscale 4-bit texture which is optimal, you can just reload its palette, you can have a number of palettes including doing surprising things, and you can store a lot of 16-entry palettes. You can even alter or generate these palettes programmatically, you can rotate a piece of palette for colour cycling effects, you can do a lot of effect animation just with that. Indeed reusing the same sprites with different handcrafted palettes is a technique that goes way back, you'll see a lot of classic JRPGs where numerous enemies are recolours of each other and they just use the same exact data (sprite or texture+geometry) except the palette. Indeed these systems have no inherent native support for greyscale textures at all, they support 4- and 8-bit palette textures and you can just designate a palette to be grayscale, you can even adjust the values to even them out visually and make the texture appear better. Some palette effects were conceivable for the era but didn't come about until much later. I have seen demo implemented on SONY PSP which does planar bump reflection mapping just with palette, such as sea reflecting the sky. The normal map is encoded as an 8-bit palette texture, thus storing 256 representative normals that are reused all throughout the larger texture. The software only needs to perform 256 raycasts per frame into the environment map and store them in the palette. Of course ram and storage are an issue in earlier eras if you're trying to make an actual animated sea, since you can't just combine coordinate-animated textures at runtime, you have to have the animation precomputed and loaded in. I have also seen a grass waving in wind effect just with palette logic, which would have been a lot more era-appropriate on early 32-bit systems.

[@Uradamus]

The grayscale thing isn't entirely true, while some games went the route of vertex color tinted grayscale images for some parts, I don't think any game used that approach exclusively. Most stuff was instead palettized graphics, which was a way to compress things without actually having to give up on colors. On the PSX for example most textures were stored into a grid of tiles where each tile used I think 16 palette values (4 bits, allowing them to store 2 pixels of data per byte). And then as they were composing the frame, they would look up the color values from the palette assigned to that tile to decide which colors to use in the final render. In vram this usually looked like a bunch of thin rectangles made up of psychedelic looking horizontally squashed textures on one side (again because each pixel represented 2 neighboring pixels in the final texture), then the other half would have an area where they'd draw the frame to and a section with a bunch of color strips that were the various palettes the textures could reference. While each face was effectively limited to 16 colors each in this setup, those color choices were open to a much larger set of colors (I think a few million) and each face/texture could use a different arbitrary color palette.

[@alfo2804]

@@SianaGearz Mario in Super Mario 64 is almost entirely vertex colour - the only textures on the model are his eyes, moustache, sideburns, buttons and emblem on the hat. Doom 64 also has a lot of greyscale textures that rely solely on the game's coloured lighting system to recieve any colour at all. So yeah, vertex colouring was definitely used on the N64.

[@DJ_POOP_IT_OUT_FEAT_LIL_WiiWii]

@@alfo2804 Thanks, was hoping for more useful information like this to be in the video.

[@monhi64]

I was just blown away when someone found the metal Mario texture and it turned out to be a heavily distorted picture of just some regular nice purple flowers. Then of course you kind of can’t “unsee” it, so you can just barely tell it’s flowers while playing

[@CatwithaKnife12]

Texturing is honestly the hardest part for me, it's so limited in blender.... Can you do a video about the Hades texturing method pls?

[@Smeaf]

I think that is a great idea :)

[@CatwithaKnife12]

@@Smeaf : D Thank you!!!

[@dwsel]

Limited? Wha? 😮

[@Thebassjunk]

How is it limited? There's literally endless ways to do anything these days in Blender.

[@brickmasterstudios447]

Texturing is not limited in blender idk what your on

[@ner9469]

As someone coming from NES development, 4MB of RAM and storage space seem a hell of a lot compared to the NES' 40kB storage on a game PAK and like 8kbs of RAM

[@blueberrryy]

ok.

[@antusFireNova]

I've hear 8k was only for the more expensive cartridges, like the NES itself had only 2k and you could "upgrade" by putting more into the cartridges

[@giftnfor1265]

Texturing is my favorite part of the process

[@omkarprabhu777]

On my way to buy Vol.32 textures 🏃‍♂🏃‍♂🏃‍♂🏃‍♂

[@Smeaf]

Same also

[@wilhellmllw3608]

hehehehe

[@omkarprabhu777]

Fascinating to see the how they had to find workarounds just because of technical limitations Me with my High END PC: why render no photo realistic 🐵

[@Smeaf]

We got first world problems these days lmao

[@1gnore_me.]

I understand these videos are made for a younger generation, but I really wanted to applaud you for how well researched everything is. so much information condensed into a short space, with lots of things most video essayists would not touch upon. excellent work.

[@Attucky]

Excellent video! Please do more content analyzing games industry like this. Love your work and always crack up with your edits.

[@Smeaf]

Thanks! Yes I will be 😅

[@notaninstrument7707]

There’s a video by the KZbinr Jasper which goes more in depth on Nintendo’s scrolling textures and displacement maps

[@Funtimetronic123]

Jasperdev?

[@notaninstrument7707]

@@Funtimetronic123 nah it’s just Jasper Just search “Jasper mario galaxy” or something

[@Funtimetronic123]

@@notaninstrument7707 oh, right 🤣

[@SuperQuesty]

This got to be a real video, i guess Illumination has a point.

[@SuperQuesty]

Oh yeah i know how it feels like to change thumbnail a lot of times

[@yojan69]

Love ya man, youre simply amazing both editing and humor

[@simonw.1223]

8:20 here you see repeating texture and liw res textures... welcome to 2022

[@lowlink534]

That's also true for music and sound effects, not the entire songs, but the instruments samples and sound effects many times also came from CDs much like those texture ones

[@lonergothonline]

Kaze emmanuaure is making a mod for mario 64, his mod changes a lot of the original rom, but he benchmarks it every now and again on real hardware. its actually impressive what he and his friends have managed to accomplish. that said one of the things that stuck out to me was that he removed a lot of the sound library that came on the rom, and which was used in other n64 titles, because the original unedited mario 64 didn't even fully utilize most of it, so it was just unnecesary data. thanks to limiting the sound library to just what he uses in his mod, he was able to more quickly reference the elements of the sound library he needed when he needed it. but he did a lot of other things besides this. for instance, he made a really nice skybox that isn't just a cube with a single image stretched over it, but rather has like, dimples, crunches, exapanded areas, to make it kinda look like a painting, if you don't look at it close enough. without relying on a single image, most of the sky box is comprised of polygons and textures. but that too is only one small thing in an otherwise epic mod. he re-wrote the render pipeline, changed how the rom was handling the consoles' memory, halved a lot of polygon counts, and minor optimizations across many aspects such as less overall 'bones' for the models. for instance a spider like enemy had double the amount of bones than necesary most of which went unused, so he just edit them out, then further optimized the enemy. oh, and he made it so enemies in the distance squish into the ground and inflate out of the ground instead of just fading in or out when mario nears their render distance. oh, and new music, new sound effects, new dialogue, new npcs, new maps, some new hats/mechanics.... typical mod stuff.

[@pouchabaka]

Once again i just learned so much from you, thank you so much

[@Smeaf]

Thanks!

[@blank1873]

DREAMYBULL THREW ME OFF SO MUCH

[@Smeaf]

[@jaiv]

hades texturing method hades texturing method hades texturing method

[@Purpbatboi]

I mean the max storage of the N64 Cartridges at the time were 64MB (512 Mbit) Three games used it. Conker's Bad Fur Day, Resident Evil 2 and Pokémon Stadium 2. But theoretically it can go way above than 64MB, you could basically do a 1gb N64 Cartridge They didn't do it back then because it would be way too expensive to produce. PSX CDs = Slow load-times/ Approx. 700Mb of storage N64 Cartridges = Somewhat Instant load-times / Max size was 64MB of Storage Its a double edged sword to develop games for those systems back then.

[@cazguy8786]

With all the amazing game footage to use, why spam unrelated mediocre memes? Ruins the flow of your video, and I don't want to look at them. They are too hyper for your monotone voice

[@9b8ll]

My goodness you are giving away some bomb secrets and good resources too. Great vid.

[@Smeaf]

The absolute bomb

[@magen6233]

Those are very basic tips and tricks for 3d textures/shaders, no secret here.

[@foxxxtheworst]

I should use this approach for my models on sketchfab

[@garlic-os]

This guy's editor is bonkers

[@Sandor3D]

Smeaf Talks about skillshare so you won't be in a loop hole watching video's. being linked twice to the next video on how to learn texturing and than links me to another video on how to learn texturing and than links me again lmao

[@Huguillon]

Did I saw the "abatucam" dude there??

[@Rock1290T]

Throwing some music from jet set radio you mad lad

[@Smeaf]

The most goated game of my life honestly

[@FireZollaBlue]

0:59 I didn't expect lol

[@Hopp5ann]

Great video! :D

[@Smeaf]

Thanks! 😁

[@Hopp5ann]

THANK YOU! :D

[@isoito5927]

Take a shot everytime the camera zooms in

[@catrop]

using Scarlet Violet as an artstyle example?

[@alex-qn5xp]

Your videos are wonderful to watch and the memes are actually funny.

[@MarcelE80]

Great video! What's the music at 7:45 ?

[@xguitarist_]

Bowling training from wii sports kzbin.info/www/bejne/nmS0hpdqf8h_mLc

[@Smeaf]

Thanks so much! Wii Sports OST

[@MarcelE80]

Ah thank you. I recognized it so much but couldn't put my finger on it. Amazing edits btw. I love your sense of humour!

[@StudioSunshineGames]

Great Breakdown, super interesting. There's also a short video about Nintendo Art Direction in general over at our channel - so make sure to check that out for more insights if you'd like.

[@Smeaf]

Thanks!

[@pokechamp3987]

Did they use photos/realistic textures deliberately to strike a balance against the low poly? Or do you think it was purely a time/budget thing? It kinda amazes me of games like ocarina of time, mario 64 and banjo-kazooie look so vibrant yet have textures that look so mundane when you dissect them.

[@MyEarsHurts]

What's the website at 4:08

[@NightW3VL]

This is so informative and funny at the same time. Nice video!

[@Smeaf]

Thanks so much!

[@VsevolodPankratov]

What game is that level at 7:49 from?

[@knottstilting]

Love your editing style, I’m seeing some hints of FinZar but with your own personal style and flare - your videos are awesome and engaging. Thx for the amazing content 🎉

[@SkillipEvolver]

Although I do like the way he comments on 'earliest Nintendo games' 😆😆

[@leosalazar9213]

Nice Nfts ♡

[@justahuman4862]

In Photoshop there's old texture tiles technique artist would use...doing some offset nonsense... I really like krita for creating tiled textures...now I use asesprite because it has a tiled option when you paint.

[@NichoMania2]

Just found this channel and already love these videos, just wanted to say though, I think the top screenshot at 3:49 is from Super Mario 64: Star Road, a mod, and not the original SM64 🤔 But still, loved the vid, and how deep it goes into the slow evolution of the nintendo artstyle over the decades. Honestly might use this for reference in my own projects to try and mimic that style.😁

[@brutusmagnuson315]

A lot of these techniques are things I’ve used and thought I was a genius who did it first

[@JayFolipurba]

This is all pretty well known to me, because I've been researching this shit for the last couple years X'D

[@JoeyCarlino]

Legendary

[@Smeaf]

I'm bout to BloOoow

[@Emery_Pallas]

What is obscure Mario fan game mod Injoke doing here

[@Mix3Design]

Smeaf crazy again 😁😁

[@Smeaf]

Go crazy! Go Stupid!

[@Mix3Design]

@@Smeaf yeaaaah boy

[@scarletsence]

Was little unexpected 1:09

[@STICKOMEDIA]

7:11 lava textures be like

[@Bladetheblackdragon]

We cannot make every fan made character when it was not made by Nintendo

[@SouthernShotty]

I’ve heard SouthernShotty’s classes suck.

[@Smeaf]

I have a great audiologist that can fix that problem!

[@jumongandpudong]

Hi SouthernShotty

[@subzerocatalyst]

why did you say cache as quache?

[@fritchoffnilsson2574]

Still over-editing your videos m⁸. 😁

[@jamiecooper2885]

I'm kind of dissapointed that you didn't go into some of the more technical but interesting stuff like how back on the older generation games it was very common to create shadows and AO using vertex color instead of relying on realtime calculations or custom textures for it like modern games

[@jamiecooper2885]

another really cool thing to look at is .kkrieger which was a game that only took 100kb of data but had stunning visuals

[@NUCLEARARMAMENT]

@@jamiecooper2885 I'm assuming that it had self-modifying code in it to get those results in such a small file size.

[@chrissbasement169]

Quick note The playstation was slow for the time Key phrase For the Time Because compared to say the ps4 or even the much improved ps5 Its pretty fast and never have i seen a loading screen that lasts more than 10 seconds to be honest Given that the game is half decently coded

[@williamm4804]

2 minute video stretched to 8 minutes. No criticism but admiring the hustle.

[@banks3388]

The PSX mogged the N64, yeah the Nintendo had a much better GPU but the reality is that their lack of storage/cost of manufacturing physical game copies (as well as other horrible business practices) is what killed the platform for serious game development studios and more or less started the trend of AAA studios migrating away to other platforms and Nintendo having to rely on it's first party exclusives. It's interesting to see we've gotten to the kinda corporate stagnation in the console/AAA space where it is likely we'll either see another video game crash or third party jump in and try to shake things up again...

[@BrapStephens]

3:50 That's Star Road! Not a Nintendo level!

[@tudiboi6601]

eyo from where did you get that dreamybull clip you sussy baka?

[@andvaribekho]

CD holding 9999mb WHAT?. they only hold 650 mb

[@jlebrech]

640mb

[@fauxshowyo]

Have you thought of maybe calming it with the 5 million meme clips you throw in there? It's exceedingly distracting

[@NR-hh3ez]

David Thewlis??

[@DARK_AMBIGUOUS]

Switch games Stil don't use RTX Graphics or a Lumen Lighting

[@timmayvns]

FYI Everyone gets 1 month free on skillshare anyway , just saying ..they should have given you a better offer since they partnered with you on it , they ripped you off . great videos btw

[@WhitelistedTheRetarded]

Yo where did you get the first meme from?

[@someoneontheinternet3090]

I can still remember popping Mario 64 into the N64 on Christmas morning and watching it load for the first time. Magic. Mario in 3D! Wait, why does it look like that? That's not what Mario looks like. Why did they use these ugly mismatched pictures for everything? Now I know. Eventually the aesthetic grew on me but I hated it at first.

[@_ytuser]

👍

[@filipemecenas]

⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡

[@JKSmith-qs2ii]

The meme shit really ruins the video.

[@gamingtoday1418]

L

[@spencerdiniz]

The video content is great and the explanation is top notch… but inserting random internet meme videos every other frase is a deal breaker for me. Gave up watching before halfway through the video.

[@mynamesmario]

Rip

[@George-xm8bo]

I totally agree. Is this children’s content or developer content? This video makes me feel so stupid and disrespected 😂

[@OmegaSan]

Do not Cry

[@HenriqueLoesch]

​@@George-xm8bo Don't worry, is not just a feeling

[@DioJeans]

womp womp

[@hirskyiTikych]

2:06 Im just so glad that it didn’t happen

[@ConswaMcGaga]

this editing is headache inducing

[@baldpolnareff7224]

🗿🗿🗿🗿🗿

[@mitchellrogers5130]

Great video but my god why does every youtuber feel the need to fill every second of every video with memes related to every single thing they say. It was good for a while but now everyone does it. Otherwise really good video

[@chaosordeal294]

I feel like you picked an arbitrary fact (the state of technology at the time) and decided that this was yet another thing that made Nintendo great because Nintendo is sooooo great.

[@g.o.9513]

probably an underrated comment.

[@Kosin-zs9il]

Yeah i also thought that this was a weird video, too many memes and too little actual content

[@jo-fhreycorpuz]

Optimize

[@Kjeppen]

9999 mb cd's? more like 650-700 mb 😂

[@claudio7010]

console's boudablou

[@milkyrinoa5921]

Well nothing special tho, guess no magic involved sighhhhh

[@Cookieman245YO]

Well the graphics stand the test of time but the controls were just yeeted to 200th dimension

[@cjjuszczak]

great video, but please, the eye-tracking zoom shots of your face o.O very nausea-inducing.

[@anmolagrawal5358]

3:27 That close up auto face tracking movements look very weird and cringe pls don't do them

[@bobalinx8762]

The use of unrelated memes seems a bit much.

[@smittywerbenjj1]

Very informative content. But the memes are so annoying. Please reduce

[@iamawatcher9201]

cringe memes

[@angelrubiov]

Why is this 8:43 minute video giving like 30 seconds of real info and 8:13 minutes of edits and memes. There’s so much filler omg

[@grkb]

blame our generation

[@Tyler-qh9jm]

IM BOUT TO BLoOoOW

[@Smeaf]

Some grab him a tissue!

[@YuriNoirProductions]

well that's quite the oversimplification xD