How to Make an Environment Inspired By Spyro The Dragon (A Blender 3.1 Tutorial)

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Vertex Color Tutorial: • How to make PS1-Esque ...
In this video, ill be analyzing the classic Spyro the Dragon to try and break down some of the technical and aesthetic choices that went into making the game. Then, ill be taking that information and using it to create my own scene in the same style. In the end, you should also know how to make scenes like this too!

[@AlfredBaudischCreations]

I don't even have words on how to describe how awesome and unique work this is! You outdone yourself in terms of PS1-like content with this one.

[@n3onkn1ght]

The garbled green textures are just what raw VRAM looks like. Read the Q-Gears PDF on how Final Fantasy VII worked if you want to know more.

[@boowhomusic]

god this is nuuuuuts, that LOD system you figured out is genius, end result looks spectacular! thanks for the shout out too man!

[@insomniac_lemon]

6:49 Looks to me like those magic particles are textures (they even are changed by texture upscaling), very likely they are use a grayscale texture to define the image, allowing for the different color particles just by a quick change with a color value (maybe even 4 if it's a quad, assuming they want a particle with a gradient). However, there is a sold-color mesh star used as an effect when you free dragons. Also the forcefield hit effect (in worlds that have a world boundry area) it appears to be using vertex colors to draw the circles. Also in one level there are some cauldrons that you can flame to get a gem, those change their vertex colors to have a glowing effect. Unless I'm missing some technical difference, there are also various vertex color effects on existing models in the game too (including the dogs shown in the video).

[@MasterAkiDraw]

Your expertise is UNMATCHED. You deserve way more likes and views! JUST SPEECHLESS.

[@crebafurros]

I can't believe this video has less than 10k views, this was super helpful and interesting, thank you!

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Thanks! I appreciate it! Hope to make more like it!

[@SamsTheBams]

It would be a really helpful if you added chapters to this. Lots of fast information and lots of video to scrub through. Fantastic video btw, super helpful.

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Yea I don't normally have the patience, after I finish a video, to set up chapters for the videos, if someone made time stamps I'd put them into the vid, but normally I move on

[@apigeon4192]

Duckstation is the best. Also great tutorial, I've learned so much from your vids! BTW if you ever want to grab gfx from Spyro again, but don't want the motion sickness, you could try out the Japanese version. It has an overhead view instead of over the shoulder, which is a bit less nauseating. The camera controls are awful though, so I wouldn't recommend it for a casual playthrough, but it might be more comfortable for your uses.

[@MyNewSoundtrack]

Discovered your channel yesterday and I've been super hooked since, thank you so much for the insane amounts of work and love you put into these videos 🙏

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Holy shit! I absolutely love your music remakes! I listen to them all the time. Also thank you very much I appreciate your kind words alot! 🥰

[@brawlmaster7]

absolutely amazing!! ;D incredible tutorial man! hahah, i can't believe how much ease of access blender can have; like placing all those tree with different colors and shapes to ' em n stuff, it's amazing!

[@projectavalongame]

I found the part about combining textures with vertex colours very helpful, thank you!

[@pv8685]

you could render with just vertex colors. choose workbench insteed of evee.

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Yea I saw that was a possibility, but I never really looked into playing with workbench rendering.

[@reneastle8447]

Hey pal, I like your video, it's pure genius. I might hire you to help out with the backgrounds and animation for one of my Playstation 1 games.

[@Macuyiko]

Me looking for a simple Blender low poly tutorial. Sees this video. You did ALL OF THAT in 16h?

[@royal_crown99]

Having trouble finding this program anywhere. Do you know where I could get it?

[@DatCatchyTune]

this video was willed into existence by me specifically

[@gamesbyaaron]

Would it be possible to make a transition from grass to dirt/sand brush and just paint a path instead of having it in the trim sheet?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Yes, I had an entire tutorial wrote for it. What you want to look up is something called a splat map.

[@gamesbyaaron]

@@TheSicklyWizard Thank you! I honestly didn't expect a response on a video put out a year ago, I'll look into it :)

[@NielsBRahbek]

Amazing work! really like these videos, very inspiring 👍

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Glad you like them!

[@The69Health]

1:59 I've ran in to a similar issue before using a similar program. In my case the issue was fixed by telling the software to extract the texture after checking a 'pal fix' button. It must be an NTSC/PAL issue. If renderdoc doesn't have this functionality, it might be worth trying a rom with a different region. I don't know if this will help, but you never know.

[@neillholley5061]

Mr Wizard, I'm getting an error message when i try to use the Data Transfer modifier like you're doing in this video to paint your sphere. The error says "Source and destination meshes do not have the same amount of face corners, Topology mapping cannot be used in this case". So i need to add the same amount of face corners to the flat plane, as the sphere has? How do i do that? Is a face corner the same as a vertex? It looks like your flat plane only has 8 vertices? I tried subdividing the flat plane as many times as possible, to give it more vertices but that didn't work. Is there any way you can make a more in-depth video on how to create a skybox using vertex painting? Or can you upload the original video to youtube that you're showing in this video, of you painting the sphere? Or does the file exist on your patreon so i can sub and look through what you did? Any help you can give me is greatly appreciated. thx

[@neillholley5061]

Mr Wizard, at 8:49 you have a basic sphere, and then at 9:06 the sphere is not the default sphere anymore. It has a lot more faces. What does that mean? We need to subdivide the sphere? How many faces should our sky box have? If i subdivide my default sphere it gives me 2,048 faces. Is that how many you have for your sphere at 9:06? thx

[@neillholley5061]

Mr Wizard, at 10:58 how did you unwrap the skybox sphere like that, in order to render the entire skybox as a flat image? Could you help me, please?

[@albertobuscicchio3915]

Hi there, I really really love your contents, but please try to talk a bit slower because it's really hard to follow your flow for a non-native speaker 🙏 Good job anyway!

[@roro_online]

You should make an entire tutorial for skies. The vertext painting tutorial is difficult to apply to an image being used as an environmental texture.

[@tammysilverwolf1085]

Man this tutorial is so useful and helpful. Thank you for taking the time to put it together, it has me thinking about all kinds of possibilities.

[@pinksatan8321]

does anyone know how to use a plane to control the spheres vertex colors and any fixes for vertex colors rendering as black in cycles

[@DaveUnreally]

Dang, turned blender into a game engine renderer basically. Great work, that was a lot to follow!

[@HatLovingGamer]

You, sir, are a genius!

[@tapikoBlends]

Hi. How did you make oceat animated texture?

[@alessiobenvenuto5159]

Looks like TW medieval 1 but more cartoon

[@winterpixel6813]

Dude your stuff is amazing! Dont know what I’d be doing if I hadn’t stumbled on your videos a few months ago, really gave me motivation to keep blending. You should make an Instagram or something. I’m sure me and many others would love to see your stuff on there. Hope your doing well mr wizard. Thanks for the content!

[@TheSicklyWizard]

I do have a twitter, I post my art stuffs there. I like to consolidate my internet presence and not have to manage a whole bunch of accounts

[@jmanners]

Could you create a tutorial on how you make those trees using splines at 20:15 ?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Not a bad idea, i can make one at some point

[@choosegoosegaming8801]

YOU ARE SO SMART WTF TS CRAZY IM HIGH AS BALLS

[@nikosv7230]

Ah, now I understand why you do all this PS1 stuff- your graphics card is as old as mine :^D I'm so excited this is out! I've watched parts of the streams but it's really nice to see this overview.

[@TheSicklyWizard]

idk how old your graphics card is, but when I said it would take forever, it was because im lazy, and setting it up to be as authentic as possible requires alot of effort

[@lanefaulhaber875]

Hey man, what do you do for a living?? Really curious! Thanks for the video! Incredibly insightful.

[@TheSicklyWizard]

I am a janitor XD

[@lanefaulhaber875]

@@TheSicklyWizard Wow, you are literally Will from Good Will Hunting. thank you for sharing then! I’m sure it’s not easy to keep up with both.

[@Uradamus]

The psychedelic section of the VRAM is the texture space. Most PSX games used palettized graphics, limiting each pixel to only a palette of 16 possible colors which can be encoded into 4 bits of data, allowing them to pack 2 pixels worth of data into a single pixel in memory, which is also why those blocks often look like narrow rectangles instead of squares, since each pixel is representing 2 horizontally adjacent pixels when that data is used to compose a frame. They basically use those values as something of a look up table for the indexes, then they pair that data up with a palette stored elsewhere in the VRAM to decide what colors to use when applying the pattern/palette to geometry.

[@Uradamus]

Sorry, looking back at some of my old notes, I got it slightly wrong. They actually get 4 pixels worth of data into each pixel in the texture space section of the VRAM, as the PSX most commonly used 16 bits per pixel with a 565RGB format (as in 5 bits for red, 6 bits for green, and 5 bits for blue), which leads to those funky colors as the 4bit index compression scheme that most games took advantage of to do palettized graphics. Each level can have basically upwards of 22 separate textures loaded in at any given time, 2 rows of 11, with each taking up only a 64x256 area instead of the full 256x256 that each of them actually represent if they used full color pixels instead of indices. Usually then the remainder of the area on the left edge of the VRAM contains the space used for drawing 2 frames for the double buffer as well as some area where the palettes get stored.

[@Uradamus]

Also on further digging the RGB565 part is also slightly wrong. They instead used 15bit high color where each channel gets 5 bits each, the left over bit can either be used as an alpha mask or just discarded, though the PSX used it as an alpha mask.

[@originalcharacter2470]

This is so pretty! Good work!

[@glowiever]

that path mapping technique is fire. dude if you write a book I'll buy it.

[@TheSicklyWizard]

I should frankly, I'll just have to sit down and do it one day. Or make a website, I did already pay for it.

[@neillholley5061]

Mr Wizard, i'm two steps into your tutorial and i'm already stuck. I made a UV sphere. I went to the shading tab... No 'vertex color' shader is appearing when i try to follow your How To Tutorial. Please tell us How To make 'vertex color' node appear in the shading tab. thx

[@neillholley5061]

Has 'vertex color' been renamed to 'color attribute'?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Yes it has

[@neillholley5061]

I appreciate this video, but really wish you would have made it more in-depth with each step. Your directions are far too vague. You make a skybox and then out of nowhere you have a square plane that you're paining at 9:20. Where did that come from??? Why are you painting on it?? I watched the Vertex Coloring video that you tell us to watch.. There's no part in that video where you paint on a square piece of geometry in order to color a a different object. Again, i appreciate the time you took to make this video, but i suspect no one is actually using this as a tutorial and are only watching it for entertainment... because if people were using this as a tutorial, you'd have myriad comments asking for help throughout every part of the video. There are only two comments asking for help to understand what you're doing, and now my comment is the third request for help. Just trying to give you some constructive criticism if you're looking for ways help improve your teaching method. Again, i appreciate all your time and effort to share your knowledge with everyone. Thanks

[@neillholley5061]

Wait, the hours and hours of videos you uploaded before this one has you going through this whole entire environmental creation process, step by step? I wish you would have mentioned that at the very beginning of this video. I only now just discovered them. I'll go through all those. Thx

[@neillholley5061]

This is the first video of the series? There's not a video before this that shows how to make the skybox? thx kzbin.info/www/bejne/l3y0q5RoaZKKeqcsi=Tmk0ivuB7q3-Cd-K

[@dopplegangerdavid]

Ha! It's so much simpler and faster just to paint a skybox by hand in Photoshop. Just because you can do something in 3D, doesn't mean you should.

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Oh I absolutely know, it was just a matter of principle to do so: a demonstration of how it was done one the PS1. I am not a good 2d artist and I'm not good at drawing or painting, so this is my crutch

[@dopplegangerdavid]

Often what we think of as a 'crutch' would actually be a ball and chain. @@TheSicklyWizard

[@aldeezy1]

That screwed up data is RenderDoc looking at the entirety of the PS1's VRAM, and applying ARGB (or RGBA or whatever) to the data it sees. Some of the noise may be instructions, or otherwise not texture data, incorrectly being read as though it is an ARGB value. Alternatively, the noise may actually just be garbage data irrelevant to anything. The miscolored textures you can see in VRAM can be more thought of as pallete maps, enabling the game to recolor things without needing multiple textures. The left side of the VRAM where you can see the game as rendered is what the PS1 actually pushes to your TV, as far as I'm aware.

[@brainer4194]

Such a great look, if only it was simpler to recreate this style for importing into unity, vertex colors and all

[@alessiobenvenuto5159]

Is it not possible to import vertex colored models into unity?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

It is possible, my game dev friend whom I work with has done so, though I'm not familiar with how it was doen

[@imvchannel1]

your work, how you have researched the style of this game,... you've been profesional 💪💪

[@Polychi1998]

Thank you, you don’t mind if I DM you for some help when it comes to making ps1 models? Cause I’m a bit stuck on some parts

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Sure what do you need?

[@Polychi1998]

@@TheSicklyWizard well, I was thinking making a attractive female anthro character in PS1 style graphics. Sort of a mixture of n64 polygons and low poly ps1 models.

[@FlamespeedyAMV]

You should use Lumion or Twin Motion to make them look ultra HD realistic too haha.

[@AlexandroTrevisan]

This images that have strange colors are palleted textures, with 4/8 bits/pixel. The textures that you see correctly are RGBs (16 or 24bits) are the screens, and are double buffer, so thats 2 of them. And the palleted textures are "converted" using this pallets. That is done to save VRAM. The parts that looks like streched lines are the pallets, as you can see, as the move down are getting less saturated to blend with the rest of the skybox or the fog, depending on the game

[@BasedBoomer1337]

There are a few areas where you may still want to use a mesh skybox. Such as if you are using a HDRI that is giving you good lighting results but doesn't work well as a sky. You can use another sky image attached to a sphere with an unlit shader to fake the sky. This works well with indoor environments with windows where you are using a hdri similar to the environment you are creating but still want a normal looking sky outside.

[@jlewwis1995]

Fun fact, if you don't need to paint your vertex colors a specific color you can bake your lighting to the vertex colors with Cycles. You need to switch the vertex color attribute on the mesh from "face corner" to "vertex" though because the baking will be less accurate otherwise. And the baker has an annoying limitation that requires you to remove all the textures from your materials before baking, otherwise it will try to combine the light color and the texture color and your lighting will be off (like if you have a red surface and a white light the light will become red because reasons) if anyone knows of a way to stop that please let me know....

[@KvltKommando]

Can't believe Duckstation was the last one you got around to when its the best ps1 emulator period

[@youknownuno]

This was so stimulating that I spent half a day's brain capacity watching this video without breaks. Worth every second of my time!

[@shindig9000]

Beautiful, as per usual.

[@NeuronPlaytech]

Can you please do this but for quake 1. I would literally pay to see it

[@PopStrikers]

great stuff as always, dude

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Thanks Tom! unrelated I love your PCP lectures on Guilty Gear and Animorphs. I listen to those sometimes when I work.

[@PopStrikers]

@@TheSicklyWizard thanks dude. They were fun to do

[@JakoBI-b1k]

6:03

[@Itsjustavy]

9:20 how did you set that up? the plane, is it applying that to the sphere? not sure what im looking at

[@TheSicklyWizard]

to put it simply, im using a Data Transfer modifier to transfer the gradient im making from the plane to the sphere. since vertex color tools in blender doesnt have this basic function you have to improvise. i explained this technique, and other in the vertex color tutorial listed in the description. or if its faster: kzbin.info/www/bejne/hYnbmoJ9es2lsNE&ab_channel=TheSicklyWizard

[@Itsjustavy]

@@TheSicklyWizard Thanks got that sorted out! Sorry but I got another problem 😅 When I go to render im getting a black screen, when I move the camera outside the sphere it works just fine. not sure whats up

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Is the sphere not using an emmision material? The black screen suggests to me that the camera isn't catching any light

[@neillholley5061]

@@Itsjustavy Can you help me figure out how to vertex paint on the flat square plane, and have it transfer to the sphere? How did you do you? I'm trying and I can't make it work.

[@Kavukamari]

omg it looks so good

[@Kavukamari]

honestly i think on n64 the texture filtering actually hurt it, i always thought it looked muddy and gross to have everything fade together. I like the contrast and gritty texture the nearest neighbor filtering offers

[@pokechamp3987]

Have you tried out Crocotile 3D? Curious what you'd think about it..if you think it'd be worth learning

[@TheSicklyWizard]

I have not looked into it. I don't really like the idea of doing modeling stuff outside of blender

[@bdbjr28]

appreciate the vids, thanks man

[@TheMee147]

9:38 That link is missing in the description. Don't worry, I'll find the video, but you might want to fix that. ^^ edit: I watch the first part and I'm stuck. I can't seem to find out how to project the colors from rectangle on the sphere. is there a second part of vertex painting that I missed? edit2: wait, I think I got it

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Sorry about that, the link to the vertex color Tutorial is now in the description, hope that helps

[@neillholley5061]

@themee147 Did you ever figure out how to paint on the flat square plane and have it transfer to the sphere? I'm trying everything and can't make anything work. How do you do it? thx

[@GorblinRat]

Yoooo

[@zion6680]

I am actually confident those textures were accurate lol, they are 12x12, 16x16 or 32x32 cells, if you look inside the game you notice that the terrain is basically a big stylized blur, there are no complex textures in Spyro lol

[@lifeartstudios6207]

This video is wildly important for developers looking to make content for mobile/vr games. I had to do a lot of this research myself by ripping old Nintendo assets and reverse engineering info from their vertex colors and alpha masks. I would love to see you bring this same type of flow into unreal engine. Perhaps I'll make a video on this as well.

[@mr.m2675]

be carefull not to reuse old optimisions tricks, todays gpus are completly different hardware then ps1 / n64 hardware. can we use them? yes, optimised? big no

[@lifeartstudios6207]

@@mr.m2675 they are very valid optimizations on mobile devices

[@freezingcicada6852]

The screwed up textures might just be the way the game compressed the data and how it gets reloaded into chunks for display when it gets called. Idk, how you go about decompile/recompiling the texures/data to make it make sense though.

[@jomambo]

Amazing video!!