The Simplest Guide to Ps1 Graphics In Blender

Both beginners and intermediates can struggle with finding out how to replicate the Psx and Ps1 render styles in Blender because a lot of that information is hidden away to sell addons and plugins, so I figured I'd make a video running through everything you need to know for this PSX style in Blender.
My Socials! 😁 - linktr.ee/sunnyisonline
Links from the video!!!:
Gimp Download Link - www.gimp.org/downloads/
The Models Resource - www.models-resource.com/
Vertex Wobble Addon - lucasroedel.gumroad.com/l/psx...
PSX Efx - blendermarket.com/products/dr...
After Effects Dithering Tutorial - • FREE Pixel Dither Effe...
00:00 - Pre-Requisites
00:38 - Modeling
03:15 - Texturing
06:36 - Vertex Colors
08:08 - Fake Lighting
09:42 - Vertex Wobble
12:31 - Important Settings
14:33 - Compositing the Finished Render
15:51 - Outro

[@SunnyIsOnline]

This is a super scuffed tutorial that I just felt the need to upload since I did a lot of PSX renders, if you have any questions feel free to ask away, I'm gonna go back to animating more silly things for you great great goobers 😱 Edit: I did NOT expect this video to get so much attention, I promise I will respond to any questions you guys have even despite the viewcount, I like this stuff fr

[@fab246]

How far does it squirt?

[@SunnyIsOnline]

@@fab246 7 miles minimum

[@fab246]

@@SunnyIsOnline dam bbby let me see 🤭

[@mogo-wc7xw]

clicked because music posting

[@0ver1de89]

never been too interested in this style besides for every time blender crashes anything high res. Super cool seeing a tutorial on a smaller topic that i always hear people saying they wish existed

[@sbboh-kcin]

me staring at the pre-req saying "intermediate" and knowing full well I can barely delete the default cube: yeah this is the tutorial for me baby

[@redssign]

clicked and watching exclusively because of alex and astrid in the thumbnail, glorious glorious human

[@Karter55]

blender knowledge "intermediate" okay bye

[@skalor231]

MUSIC POSTING PODCAST!!

[@astrut]

mikasacus

[@TitozThing]

YOURE THE GUY WHO MADE THE FEMTANYL ANIMATION thats so sick and this tutorial is so helpful omg

[@Rayo75]

Femtanyl mentioned 🗣🔥🔥

[@jmalmsten]

A lot of PS1 games kind of circumvented the problem of deforming by just doing action figure like segmented models. For example, the arms and head of Solid Snake were their own geometries that clipped into each other. Using clothing as guides is probably a good approach. And you still need to keep a an eye out for surplus polygons. Like, bottom of the neck, never gonna see it. So why waste polygons on it. And flat image planes with alpha textures means you can do a fairly detailed knife blade of one or two polygons. Another popular trick is to use a flat plane with a circular texture, if you always orient it towards the camera, you get a perfect pixellated sphere with just two triangles. If the hardware can remap the texture coordinates on the fly, you can fake a highlight, glare and shadow on that "sphere". And, I guess they could also write some compensating code that moves the edge loops during deformation to preserve volume. Another approach, I guess, would be to detach the vertices of the back of the knee at high deformation animations, so the leg bits can keep their volume and just clip into each other. But. If you know there's gonna be a lot of knee bending, it might be worth the extra polys to just get one extra edge loop at the knee. Especially if you can fake geometry somewhere else on the model to compensate. There are a lot of very clever ways these modelers and animators used to fake geometry and details for low spec hardware.

[@Hatsworthful]

There's a fair number of tricks you could do with textures aswell, Megaman legends had plenty of face textures made just to "cheat" out more angles out of simpler charcter model structures. Also the way ND made crash bandicoot look as good as it did is an interesting dive for this sort of thing, but definetly out of the scope of most folks trying to emulate ps1 graphics.

[@nidgithm]

I never thought of that when I was making low poly models, thanks for pointing that out

[@SquigglyP]

So a lot of old software engines would store the vertex locations for each vertex in a model for each frame and just lerp between them by looking at the ms difference between the two frames and the time elapsed. That's how a lot of older engines did it (and a lot of the games that used non-segmented models on the PS1-era consoles), but by the early 2000s it started becoming much more efficient to just do the skeletal animation as part of your engine's animation system. It tended to look better and the mesh densities were getting to a point where it was a major resource inefficiency to store the positions for each vert individually and instead just do the math compared to the skeletal deformation. You just store the skeletal info and maybe some vertex animation to tweak things. There are some later-era PS1 games that actually do a really good job of making every frame of vertex animation count on the PS1, like Soul Reaver, the Spyro games, etc. I always preferred that method of animation for lowpoly, but it's one of those techniques that's so outdated that doing it today is actually kinda difficult cause the tools don't really support it that easily anymore. Like, "Why would you want to do it that way!?" sort of thing. But then you lose a lot of the ability that you have with skeletal, like being able to do procedural or physics-based animation, re-using animations over multiple models (and modular models) etc. Our tools are generally better now, but unless you tweak lowpoly animations a lot, they will tend to look way worse in motion today than they used to.

[@Aztrosist]

VERY COOL VISUALS

[@Floreum]

You can do dithering in Blender compositor as well, you just need to get a dither texture image. How I do it is after Pixelating the image I use a dither image node (4x4 bayer pattern looks great) > Translate node (Wrap set to Both Axes) > Translate connected to Mix RGB Factor and set to Add. Top color input slot is your render result, bottom is your render also but with a HSV node to control how intense the dithering is. Then connect the Add to another Mix RGB color top input and set to Mix, bottom input is your render result again. The factor is your opacity for the dithering. Then connect to whatever color clamping setup you've got or your final render result. Unfortunately this will look scuffed in the real-time compositor, so make sure you are looking at an actual render to preview the result.

[@SunnyIsOnline]

I could not for the LIFE of me find a way to do this natively in blender, genuinely thank you 😭😭

[@daveloomis]

Was just about to post the same thing.

[@victorianomas89]

Music Posting and Femtanyl fan spotted! Good tutorial, very helpful!

[@jamzee_]

Im still in the process of even making a first model, let alone trying to animate or anything else. Definitely a motivation booster.

[@pixelzwithaz]

I LOVE LOW POLY

[@carlomazzoli]

The vertex wobble is amazing

[@madrod228]

Music posting mentioned 🗣️🗣️🗣️

[@orbitaloutcast9878]

0:21 IS THAT FEMTANYL???

[@Expired_rice]

Low poly gang rise up

[@F_E_U]

you can get away with shitty geometry if you overpixelize everything

[@WeaselOnaStick]

5:41 in this case you can just select all faces and use UV -> Reset

[@Nositrek]

im still learning blender and i know next to nothing but im super thankful i can use this guide in the future, thanks!

[@lofeAbred]

You know what you're doing, period. Links in the description including one to gimp, never expected that, and just an awesome rewatchable video. Thank YOU.

[@jass783]

thank you so much for this. there are a lot of videos out there going over this topic but none really explained the depth behind the techniques that you did with this amount of conciseness, and the reasons why some things look the way they do. i'll be having this open the whole time i do my first project like this :)

[@ThisIsDownstate]

very nice. i have been doing these graphics for a year now but still learnt something. i always wanted to mimic the vertex shadows so thanks for showing that so clearly. i would also give a shout out for the dripspsx add-on, its really good value for 18 bucks. cheers

[@DurumAmigos]

I have to start getting into shading and modeling and I loved this vid, im kinda scared about everything I have to learn but this video made me feel more interested in it. Congrats, keep it up!

[@LostTerminalVideos]

This is a really well produced and high quality tutorail! Keep up the great work as always!

[@qualityhardwarestore1676]

this is such a sick tutorial!!!! I've been wanting to know how to vertex paint for so long, so thanks for breaking it down in such a fantastic way :D you are a legend

[@horndog-p]

great video, i’ve been down the psx rabbit hole and this is easily the greatest and most straightforward walkthrough !

[@pinkbalem]

Incredible video man, just helped me a ton. Thank you, the research behind it does not go unnoticed.

[@rosevolkov1943]

this is AMAZING im so excited to get better at blender just so i can learn these skills ty!!!

[@boscorner]

Im buyin that plugin at the end Affine texture mapping is what makes ps1 look ps1, imo.

[@Kn.77]

This is the exact guide I was looking for!!! Thank you :D

[@MichaelLuckhardt]

Golden tut my dude. Thanks for sharing your wobbly secrets.

[@DonChups]

Thanks a lot for this guide. Not only useful in step by step, also explaining why those steps are needed.

[@Happy156]

the last time i tried to use blender i couldn't figure out how to make a texture for 8 hours. but your voice is incredible so i'm watching the full video anyways

[@rockletoouw]

Why do I keep watching blender tutorials... my pc cant even handle blender... i love these though-

[@themextor]

I love everything about this video, thank you! It actually gave me the motivation to carry on with the donut, gotta take the baby steps. I promise myself to comeback to this video! :D

[@myriadrhea]

Thanks for the interesting video! Honestly didn't expect to find content like this and will definitely give the resource site a check. Had a good nostalgia trip a while back to bomberman fantasy race, possibly my favourite childhood game and wanted to remake it in both modern style and also a fan remake in its original style with a new theme. 👍

[@fetch7312]

dude idk how but ur channel is like the convergence of my hyperfixations and its crazy. You got Ultrakill, Femtanyl, Music Posting, and Sleep Deprived related content on your channel and its like the perfect combination of shit im hyperfixating on

[@nidgithm]

ive been trying and struggling to good guides, thank you

[@gohchi]

The nervous silence at 15:35 was priceless LOL. Cool stuffs!

[@Tyliuge]

Very helpful tutorial, Im excited to try this out

[@izaakbecker4263]

Killer tutorial, earned a subscriber, keep it up man!

[@fullcapsethan]

ive started learning blender to model lowpoly characters, this video is extremely useful thank you!!!

[@AmbientWalking]

Thanks for this! Really helpful!

[@ToneMasterToni]

Super cool tutorial thanks for sharing your knowledge

[@eruworld2286]

yay thank u so much- i love psx graphic but always struggle with lighting and vertex colors - you made it easy. very based ty sir o7

[@CalebTibster]

Ayo, this rocks! Totally gonna try a PSX style render!

[@beeast4853]

super helpful tutorial thank you!

[@drakbak9107]

That's insane! You explained the baked lighting super well. Are you going to cover how they animated the characters next? I saw you explained how the model deformed incorrectly but I am very much interested in how you could animate such a low poly model properly.

[@SunnyIsOnline]

I haven't actually looked too hard into animation, the scene I created was animated like i'd animate anything else. If I had to guess though, I'm assuming they probably animate the least axes of rotation as possible. So if you needed a character to raise their arms, instead of animating the intricate shoulder movement and maybe the torso stretching, you'd just animate the arms rotating straight up on the Z axis. If it was up to me though, I'd just animate like I normally do! It's more fun ;)

[@markusbonnet439]

Even the greats didn’ use their own textures , they bought texture packs , don’t be afraid to source !

[@cleopatrxb]

holy shit i've been looking for something exactly like this for months!! thank you amazing

[@ThatNoLifeArtist]

Actual legend I didn't even think to use vertex colours for the shadows

[@kddkkd64]

Thank you so much!! Very helpful video!

[@Adelious_]

Hey, thats awesome and made me wanna make some project ! Also I'm very in love with you scene style in 00:32.

[@SunnyIsOnline]

You can thank @SplendidMeepers for the absolutely wonderful original art I based that render on, they created so much of what makes that scene appealing!

[@Doom.Slayer]

Thank you for covering how to get rid of anti-aliasing :)

[@josephshimek5207]

Top notch tutorial, cheers!

[@AtanoKSi]

for the deformation on bending legs and such, a lot of times legs and arms and such are separated in different parts, so when one moves, it doesn't actually bend, it just moves a piece, like an articulated toy

[@Ojama_]

rad introduction to the subject

[@duhhbread]

Great video! Mannnnnn we need another one!!!🔥

[@DommoDommo]

I was hoping to see how you modeled that couple sitting together instead. Video was fine, but totally do one on that though!!

[@mogo-wc7xw]

das aztrosist and mikasaurs from music posting

[@8tober]

Reallu awesome video. Helped me out a LOT.

[@GHOSERDUDE]

I din't even plan to make any 3d stuff again, but this video is so good. Now I'm actually considering to come back to 3d modeling.

[@DrThob-]

Amazing!!

[@BowserTime]

thank you for this

[@lakumowo]

I LOVE you, this came at the right time.

[@TheBeLuvdTRex]

I had no idea there was a models resource! I only ever used spriters resource.

[@bijikedelai]

Oooh this is what i need. Bookmark it for later

[@toutbout9941]

Hell yeah good stuff I don’t even use blender but this was cool to follow along you explained it great🗣️🗣️

[@Macuyiko]

Great tutorial, full of good tips

[@staxie]

“Low poly isn’t as hard as you think” it was harder than I thought when I created my first low poly character 😅

[@tendividedbysix4835]

this is really great, thanks a lot :)

[@GinoZump]

the way I researched of making the vertices wobble was to add a displacement modifier set to minimal strenght (texture set to disorted noise: cell noise, make the size big) and make the object coordinates controlled by the camera

[@Zinkquer]

my favorite person to go to for ancient looks

[@jannikf2504]

Lock Camera to View when you're difining your camera composition! It's in the N-menu under view and I recommend you add it to the Q-menu

[@No.0.o.0]

Great video.

[@ineptznonz]

just in case someone else runs into this problem before you can do the indexed color conversion you gotta change your color precision mode to 8-bit integer. Indexing will be greyed out otherwise

[@calimber]

SO GLAD this found me, i love these old graphics so much especially when their used for horror and im trying to learn modeling to recreate these :D is that yume nikki ost in the bg?

[@SunnyIsOnline]

Indeed it is!!

[@dongodongo12]

I swear to got the fucking vertex lighting thing, i have been looking for that for a while and never got a straight answer as to how to do it, i love you

[@TortaBones]

Slammed the Sub the very second I saw Vertex Wobble in viewport 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯😈😱😱😻😻💗💓💗

[@ScotchisOnline]

Oh finally. A tutorial from my fav youtube

[@forkyforklift2924]

vertex colors can be- and are still going strong with game development today. You can do wonders with them like using them as a mask to blend different textures on a wall

[@tapikoBlends]

ART!!!

[@Zinkquer]

also if you don't have after effects a really really time consuming way to add dithering for free is just add all the frames in to gimp and dither them there

[@GeorgiaSmalls3517]

5:32 if you select all of the faces in edit mode, instead of unwrapping each face individually, you can just click "reset" at the bottom of the menu, and it will do the same thing.

[@Pingu568]

Really great video! Also love the music posting models!

[@GorabisnotGorab]

Idk why I watch this video all the way through even though I have never ever used blender and have no intentions to do so

[@marianovicencio9007]

nice video!

[@brandonjauregui2540]

Amazing Tutorial! learned about vertex painting, dithering, and the model resource. So helpful I just have an issue with alphas, does this method not let you include your alpha channel in your textures? Deleting the principle node in the shader editor takes out the alpha input so Im not sure if it's possible with this method but I wanted to ask as Im trying this out for my own model.

[@blacklotus432]

good and entertaining video.

[@timmygilbert4102]

You don't need more edge loop to avoid collapsed volume, make the edge loop a 45° 😮 don't keep it flat

[@SunnyIsOnline]

This is actually a super rad tip! That was part of the silent hill model and I completely missed it 😭

[@Herkolesboi]

Why do i never catch your videos man 😭 i love that you made the music posting scene

[@LandonEmma]

To make a good PS1 model you must make characters like it was the 90s

[@Vondora]

8:08 WOW

[@L0ID_0NLINE]

Most generous mf fr fr, sharing your knowledge to the youth!!!

[@Kassie.K]

YOU SAVED ME FROM MADNESS

[@gabrielangelic8070]

I love sunny online

[@Polychi1998]

You think you can make a video on making Mid-poly models and graphics like the Gamecube era like Wario World and Luigi’s Mansion?

[@POISON_IVWY]

wait. SPRITERS RESOURCE HAS A SISTER WEBSITE?

[@xerzy]

Shit, I *just* thought a few days ago about making a tutorial this extensive someday. Guess I'm not anymore, so thanks for doing my job for free!

[@pixelzwithaz]

Yep… That’s exactly how I make animations.

[@ELTONOMARBOGZHA]

Can you do sky boxes and particles effects next?