How to make PS1-Esque graphics with Blender 2.9 (Trimsheets and Enviroment Modeling)

While seamless textures are good for covering large swaths of mesh, not everything consists of one uniform material or texture. There are better ways to texture our meshes, and here's a video showing you how to do it.
Thanks to PixelDough for the thumbnails and assistance with Unity
Link to the Silent Hill Level Viewer mentioned in the video: • Silent Hill 1 Level V...
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[@GiorgiNatsvl]

For those who are wondering, the Vertex Color node has been renamed to Color Attribute in Blender 3.0

[@lucasbastosrodrigues140]

oh thank you

[@smc3453]

just grabbing the games files and processing them and then dragging and dropping them in and exploring the levels made me lean forward in my chair a little bit, that was cool

[@Goalatio]

I’m so glad I found this because it solves a problem I’ve been having with the Bevy engine! Thanks!

[@emeraldeelentertainment8988]

Excellent video wizard! For a future video, I'd like to know how to create PS1 water textures. I've tried creating them but it's been troubling to create the water surface caustics and the like.

[@tonyromero2013]

Wow, you are quite good at this. I love this series, really hoping you keep making PS1 style tutorials.

[@MastermindAtWork]

Idk if you read my mind but I was trying figure out how to this for my project. Thank you so much.

[@Pengoony]

Commenting to influence the algorithm lol

[@TheSicklyWizard]

doing the lords work

[@lukas6600]

Great video as usual!

[@maximsharipov982]

Thank you, awesome atmosphere

[@darkflamesquirrel]

ah i could have used the advice at 9:40 when I was younger "Why didn't you do your homework?!" _"It's a bit disruptive to my workflow"_

[@sealsharp]

Nice work!

[@cothromgrimr161]

thank you so much!

[@jaymadethat1362]

how did you make that 4x4 tile in the gimp when making the dirt texture with grass texture

[@robertnewman4854]

This is superb! I am absolutely going to use this in the near future! I do have one question though... in terms of scaling, how does the lack of units effect exporting to UE4? is there any way to use a common scale between the two to your knowledge? thanks!

[@TheSicklyWizard]

I have absolutely no clue for unreal. Ive only ever worked with unity. I know unreal uses centimeters as their unit so maybe you could swap the units system back after your done modeling.

[@Nasdeh]

Tree Tutorial please goat 🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

[@Nasdeh]

Nvm i found it ty bae

[@Low_Fidelity_3D]

When assigning the faces to the atlas, some of their UVs are just randomly rotated. like i could just have one grid plane but in seemingly random spots, the textures are upside down or on their sides, this can be fixed by manually rotating the UVs for each incorrect one, but that gets annoying fast especially when I'm trying to texture a pretty big area. Is there any way I can fix it so all of the faces are aligned the same way automatically? EDIT: so it turns out the rotation is caused by extruding faces, their UVs will be rotated to the direction they were extruded, not the direction of every other face. good to note for the future, but that makes modeling much more annoying, and I would still like to know if there is any way to align all the faces of a model to one direction.

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Yea, I'm aware of that problem. Im not sure how to handle it. I think I just did them manually, unfortunately. I can't think of a better solution atm

[@Uradamus]

You got your terminology a bit off. What those PS1 games used are texture atlases, trim sheets are a much later subset of texture atlases that are typically made up of tiles that are repeatable along 1 axis, most typically used for things like repeating trim, hence trim sheets. If an atlas isn't set up to have 1 axis repeats, then it is just a plain old texture atlas.

[@DukePipeGG]

Is there an addon for those trees?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

No I made those, but I have a tutorial in how to make them

[@rubiksstudios4584]

I want to make the grid bigger, what formula could a use to calculate de subdivisions I need?

[@chxtaigne]

thanks for this video! what's the game extract name at 12:03 please?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

The game is Zera: Myths awaken by Cyredies

[@biriani2855]

How would you go about transparency?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

you plug the texture into a mix shader node, plug a transparency node in, and mix with the factor of the texture alpha.

[@akio1st]

How did you do the math calculation for the faces on grid? what if i want the size to be 8? so i should do 7 + 2 =10 ?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

It's based on area, so the sheet is 256x256, so it would be 256/8 = 32. So with a tile of 8, you would end up have 32x32 tiles, or 1024 individual tiles. I try to keep my tiles about 32

[@akio1st]

@@TheSicklyWizard Thank you, sorry if it sound a dum question but i am not well on maths so thats what i needed, thanks again

[@hennessy100k]

@@akio1st You're better than I am. I still have no clue what the math means..

[@daveb7596]

how did u select the flat faces of what becomes grass? is there a special selection tool that lets you select the whole surface like you did?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

It was less that i selected what would be the grass, and more selecting what wouldn't have been. I face loop selected the edges where i knew i wanted the grass transitions and then hid them. This the allowed me to Link select the areas i wanted with L and then hide the rest.

[@daveb7596]

@@TheSicklyWizard ah ic

[@Atomic-toons00]

This is not good

[@retroinspect]

As an aside Silent Hill had to devote vertex coloring exclusively to the flashlight so shadows are painted into the tile sheet. It’s the only ps1 game I’ve seen do this which adds to how eerily realistic it is.

[@1gnore_me.]

I can't imagine how much effort that must have taken. I was messing around with the silent hill level viewer & there's a surprising amount of detail in the game, for example every building in central silent hill has a unique billboard & name. there's even different posters plastered everywhere, one in particular referencing portishead ... then all the different eerie posters and art in the school ... to manually draw the shadows into everything as well must have been insane.

[@LarryHazard]

is there a video that explains this? I still dont understand how it worked

[@---Nikita--]

@@LarryHazard +

[@Uradamus]

The Mega Man Legends game also used vertex colors for dynamic lighting effects. In that case they used it both to give the environment the sense of directional light, where the top and west facing side of buildings/terrain walls/etc were made to appear as if they were receiving light and the bottom and east facing sides looked like they were in shadow. Then on top of that they faked distance fog by fading the vertex colors to white in the overworld, and black in the underground, the further a vertex is from the camera.

[@lukabrasi001]

Metal Gear Solid 1 actually has the lighting baked into the textures

[@aahilalwani5019]

Straight to the fucking point and also manages to be concise? Only this guy is allowed to make Blender Tutorials from now on.

My man. Your tutorials are perfect. You don't waste time, you talk about a subject I can't find anywhere else, and on top of that, you offer enlightening and well-made visualizations to explain 3D concepts that I'd never quite understood. Your content has been extremely helpful to me in my 3D gamedev journey, and if I ever manage to ship a 3D game, no doubt I'm gonna credit you. Were it not for my poor brazilian third world ass, I'd be showering you with money. You certainly deserve it. For now though, i can offer just a big heartfelt thanks. This video made my day.

[@scruffyscruff]

Godot users (as I'm pretty much exclusively using Godot now): the glb/gltf file has the vertex painting saved inside the file, so you just need to hit the "albedo vertex" options to show the vertex painting. You can use all sorts of colours and paint your scenes, so you could potentially skip creating additional textures.

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Ooh, nice!

[@zombizzle_]

Can't put into words how much I appreciate your videos.

[@TheSicklyWizard]

I appreciate that!

[@alienpolygon6926]

Another great video, you are seriously doing a huge service in making these.

[@falkreon]

What you're describing isn't really a trim sheet, it's a texture atlas. Trim sheet is like an atlas for normalmaps or decals, so that you don't have to rebake normalmaps for five models with the same geometry detail in their highpoly.

[@user-og6hl6lv7p]

It's also worth noting that baking anything using the method in the video is ill advised since the UV polys overlap one another

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Indeed, baking is not possible using a texture atlas like this, if you intend to bake anything into the texture, like lighting, its not going to work. But out of curiosity, do you have an alternative method that would solve that problem?

[@falkreon]

@@TheSicklyWizard yeah, any time you wind up trying to combine a texture atlas with a mip or normal scenario, you get problems. if you leave a 1-pixel moat around each tile, times two for each additional mip level, that'll give you the room you need to interpolate properly while still saving you the cost of texture binds.

[@Supervocetubeia64]

I'm making N64-inspired graphics. I've been experimenting with strip-shaped texture atlas, like 32x1024 resolution. By doing that, I keep lots of textures on the same material but I'm also able to use texture tiling on the X axis of the texture, repeating specific texture patterns over large areas without having to model individual squares. The game will not use advanced lighting and visual effects. It's been working so far but my question is: will this kind of atlas cause development problems later on? Am I safe using a strip-shaped atlas?

[@falkreon]

@@Supervocetubeia64 The main issue boils down to whether you're using mip mapping. If yes, you'll need a textured moat separating elements on the Y axis to handle color bleed from pixels "outside" your texcoords. If not, you should have no problems packing your texture like this. Most N64 games did not mip due to the very small texture cache.

[@josepina4419]

Udemy courses?

[@thesolitaryowl]

This is honestly applicable to modern games too, thanks for explaining trim sheets!

[@xodiach]

I literally screamed and woke my friend up while watching this video, because this dude just casually pulls out "and next we're going to do this specific thing that you've literally been trying to google how to do for like forever and haven't gotten any results for". Not once, not twice, not even three times. I'm not shitting you, this happened like SIX times in this single 14 minute video. I don't know what deity or algorithm decided to bless me with this golden nugget of a video, but holy shit thank you so much for making it, you are an actual genie.

[@saultoons]

Very useful, I might give this a shot in the future, it could be very fun :D

[@morganlak4337]

Ok just want to say this technique for modeling is GODLIKE and solves so many problems I've run into while trying to achieve this style personally, but my small complaint is that this is a texture atlas, not a trimsheet. A trim sheet stacks multiple textures vertically, while allowing them to tile horizontally, it also usually packs normals, AO, roughness, etc in another texture that goes with it. Atlases don't provide any enhanced performance on modern hardware, and actual trimsheets, while not PS1 accurate, are still really useful to the style. For the game I'm working on I use both as needed, sometimes an atlas just makes things get that old school look that you need, but sometimes it's just way more convenient to have a tiling trim. This is really some of if not THE best PS1 content on KZbin though so I'm subscribing for sure, thanks for the video!

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Ive heard that twice now about trim sheets, shame since i couldnt readily tell the difference

[@augustjschroeder]

You have one of the most underrated channels on KZbin!

[@Iglum]

First! /igl

[@silentslayergaming8469]

Thank you so much, i'm trying to make a "Ps1" game in unity but I really have no idea how to start or where to begin. This video is handy and a good start to learning

[@btttrn6]

Полезное видео. Все по делу и без лишней воды. 🙂 Useful video. All on the case and without unnecessary "water".

[@gameing2014]

the texture mapping tutorial part in gimp is outdated

[@lukabrasi001]

the Medal of Honor games taught me the texture atlas approach and i can see why it bogged down the performance so much when you had to work with a grid instead of modern vertex tools

[@RosieSapphireMusic]

That's a mighty weird looking Minecraft world. lmfao Love the video btw!

[@JohnDoe-pk8lc]

I'd really be interested in how to import vertex colors with texture into unity, could you do a tutorial on it?

[@igormaxisims7116]

I had no idea how to make the shadows of the scene until now. You are very much needed in the blender community.

[@sleepwalking117]

Just curious but how would one go about making a capcom or square soft style game from the Era? I've been looking into making a game that uses pre-rendered backgrounds but I'm fairly new to all this and Can't seem to find a video on how to make pre-renders and objects that move along them with invisible collision.

[@Jerricoking]

7:32 I'm sorry :( kind of stuck on here, because well you kind of started pulling random stuff from places. I noticed that you have three models with textures already on them. Do I get these manually? Also, how do I make these textures that you're making. Getting them from the Internet is one thing, but then you're using an entirely different software I think.

[@theshiftybloke4672]

Has Blender changed where when using add grid, it's now based off face subdivisons rather than vertex?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

I'm not sure, I'd have to look

[@theshiftybloke4672]

@@TheSicklyWizard I was just going through the tutorial then realised my grid was off when I'd set it to 21 sub divisions instead of 20 lol :)

[@GrandeGio95]

Can you teach us your water texture ? It looks so simple but effective !

[@jasmyn1258]

Thank you so much for uploading! :) Will try this out tomorrow

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Hope you enjoy!

[@supremebeme]

love this... subscribed from new zealand

[@ForlornCreature]

Awesome!

[@mentallyRdacted]

Had an issue where there was edges on my tiles when I put them in the UV, turns out I didn't change interpolation to closest in blender. Maybe itll help someone, since that change isnt mentioned in the video, and barely visible!

[@mortis-506]

how do you put the knife tool away? blender won't let me do anything else once I use it I can't select anything or even exit edit mode. I had to close everything.

[@ferby5606]

when after i model my enviroment and then go shift s and click selection to grid, my entire thing flattens out way too much and doesnt resemble what i did at all. anyone got this problem?

[@jay_hot]

I get this aswell!! not sure how to fix tho

[@ONIONSLAY3R]

For anyone still having this problem - make sure you're in 'Layout' mode before doing the selection to grid! Remaining in Sculpting mode made everything super blocky for me too... Hope this helps anyone!

[@josepina4419]

I love u

[@nhasirduck3500]

I know I'm 2 years late but some of my texture are upside down even on the same uv wrapping, any reason for this?

[@Xeranxies]

This is so fkn cool! How is it that I'm only now finding your channel? Great stuff!

[@westingtyler1]

also a thing I figured out a few days ago in Blender, where I figured out how to take 3-6 32x32 square textures and make a tilesheet in Blender that shows all possible 64x64 combos and transitions, so it's all in one texture. these vids are awesome.

[@TeamStarlane]

i should remake this on sega saturn

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Go for it 👀

[@bachaun]

nice new mic!

[@TheSicklyWizard]

but... its the same mic >_>

[@PhotoPunk79]

Dude... I'm speechless. Loved it, great tutorial.

[@Cedric_9]

Hi, first off, thanks so much for your videos. They've been a tremendous help to me. I have a question: is this technique for texturing levels unique to this era of gaming, or is it still used today? Or does it really just depend on the type of game you're making? The idea of tiling a map like this in blender then exporting to my game engine sounds way more appealing to me than unwrapping an entire level and hand painting it. I grew up with rog maker 2k and 2k3 and always enjoyed building levels this way, but until now never figured how to implement this in 3d. Curious what's the industry standard...

[@TheSicklyWizard]

This technique can definitely be used in today's games, it so depends on the game your are making. Nowadays I believe a lot of terrain use splatmaps to texture the environment, which is basically a non-color data texture map that assigns textures to be laid over the terrain instead of having to lay every single tile out.

[@bananastudiolife]

Actually, this tuto is the best for beginners.

[@pułkownikkaczodziobyzpodlasia]

Dude, you are AMAZING!

[@PopStrikers]

Seriously awesome UV tricks. Never tried the Reset option before! Have you tried using the "Dirty Vertex Colors" in the Paint menu when Vertex painting? I find it gives a pretty nice jumping off point for quickly filling in crevices with shadow, similar to ambient occlusion. Huge timesaver for large areas.

[@TheSicklyWizard]

i have seen "dirty vertex colors", its a good trick, but i like to have more control over things than letting it automatically do it. I tested it with this scene, but the effect was too strong.

[@glowiever]

what makes this a legendary video is because he used GIMP :O Edit: Holy shit, that reset uv trick is a livesaver. EXACTLY what I neeed!!!! dude thanks a lot!!

[@elcompadiego2854]

i have a question, i use this metod for mi unity proyects, but when i try to make lightmaps does not works because the uv overlap and dosent make it rigth, how can i solve this?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Yea, if I understand light maps correctly, they work by baking a texture over the existing texture, it wouldn't work because the UVs are all stacked using this grid-like method. So you'd probably have to use 2 uv maps? Idk if unity allows that's or what you would need to do is bake the lighting Into the vertex color instead.

[@uwaiswaiswais]

Awesome! Was looking for a simplest way to model and texture environments. Always a good idea to go back in time.

[@Mr.Derpus]

For some reason when I go to do the dirt/grass textures on the river, the texture is upside down Does anyone know how to fix this?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Did you try rotating the UV tile?

[@BelzeOFC]

1:18 what's the Unity Extractor?

[@megazinji]

I keep coming to this video like its gospel, thanks for the these videos! I got a question tho, how would I export from Blender to Unity while keeping the Vertex Painted Shadows?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

I'm not to sure how unity works with it's shading system but I do know that the vertex colors are saved. Not sure how to access or use them in unity's system

[@megazinji]

​@@TheSicklyWizard You were right about Vertex Colors being saved, I just had to make a custom shader using Unity's Shader Graph, by using Multiply between Vertex Color node and Sample Texture 2D in!

[@Cedric_9]

If you had decided to include the tree textures as part of the atlas, what would have been your process for creating the tree? I am trying to understand workflow for more complex objects using this method. I ask because in your speed tree video your bark UV goes outside the bounds of the texture - you would need to UV reset it to fit in the atlas, which would cause major stretching. Would you make a tree out of identical sized planes?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

For the trees they use a looping texture, I didnt want to use an atlas for them because it wouldn't look good or organic in my opinion.

[@Cedric_9]

@TheSicklyWizard thanks for the response!

[@onlyaspoonful9171]

8:27 dude turns into saul goodman

[@MolassesLover]

If you're going to make a scene with retro graphics targeted for modern hardware; why not just use shader nodes to tile the textures? You don't even need a texture atlas/trim sheet, the images can be separate. I feel like this is a really unnecessary and outdated way of doing things

[@TheSicklyWizard]

This was more of an exploration on how games in the past would have utilized textures to create an environment and less on practically creating one. Doing it strictly through the UV map like this is a pain on the ass and inefficient, as other tools exist, like crocotyle or sprytile that can create tile based environments easier via painting/building tools. The more modern approach I use which uses vertex splatmaps is something I'm trying to cover but I I'm very bad at managing my time and I'm divided among my many projects ATM :( I will cover this though, it's just a matter of time.

[@MolassesLover]

@@TheSicklyWizard Awesome! I look forward to seeing it

[@jakeschroeder4874]

When defining the custom grid units, what is the math behind or reason for a 1/4 scale and 1 Sub-divisons?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

It's been a while, but if I remember correctly, the scale set to ¼ was to set so the 1m grid tiles could snap to those increments, and subdivision I believe broke those existing grid units into increments of 10, which meant the grid would snap to 1/40th of a grid unit instead.

[@jakeschroeder4874]

@@TheSicklyWizard Gotcha, is this setting dependent on environment size or the texture tiles being 32 x 32? Or both? If I am making a 4 meter cube as a room do I just have to decide how much a 32 x 32 pixel tile should be in world space and set the grid to show that?

[@AndrewMaksymBrainNectar]

Your discord says invite "invalid"?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Yea it's an outdated link, I think this one's up to date? discord.gg/ME2JaCnUjC

[@Shuabvv]

what can I do If I wanna add lights in vertex colors?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

You follow this tutorial kzbin.info/www/bejne/omaZqHyHr8aDaJY

[@LovetoSplooge]

Can you explain how to scale the images down to get them on the same canvas. I am new to Gimp and stuck at this part of the tutorial. I made the seamless textures in your last video but can't figure this part out.

[@TheSicklyWizard]

I believe you can either do scale edit>scale image or scale layer. That should do it

[@LovetoSplooge]

@@TheSicklyWizard Thank you!

[@TiesOptional]

What drives the decision of 32x32 textures?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

I could fit more 32x on a 256x image. Of course this is arbitrary and you aren't limited to either 32x or 256x

[@NickEnchev]

I don't use Unity or Unreal (I wrote my own), but you should be able to avoid having to paint in the light shading and use a light source in-engine by calculating the lighting in the vertex shader PER-VERTEX, rather than in the fragment shader PER-FRAGMENT. This would give you that faceted shading that will simply be interpolated across the triangle faces and give you that old look.

[@AschKris]

How do you add the trees? Do you just load them from a file?

[@TheSicklyWizard]

Yea I had those made prior to the video

[@XwarslayerXmemechannel]

for some reason I'm getting a 1 pixel overlap from a neighboring texture and idk how to fix it Edit: so I just fixed it like 2 min after this comment lol. I just changed the 'Linear" option to "Closest" on the image texture node

[@PostcardFromADream]

This video is so much more useful than I initially thought. One of the best. I took what I needed to get started, and every time I come back I learn something new that I can implement to take things to the next level.

[@silentslayergaming8469]

my object doesn't have a grid and I can't cut anything when I press K, I followed the video perfectly what am I doing wrong? anyone know?

[@supercolom64]

Man, your channel is some of the greatest and most helpful content I've come across for game dev and modeling Seriously thank you so much

[@leatherandpoemscharmyman5774]

hey there do you use unityripper? to extrac the prjoect in unity? or just drag the folder?

[@knightshousegames]

1:05 I am extremely disappointed that the back of the disk isn't black.

[@TheSicklyWizard]

I honestly forgot ps1 discs were black, its been too long :(

[@knightshousegames]

@@TheSicklyWizard As someone who has been getting my PS1 disks out to do research for my project lately, I can indeed confirm they are black. Plus PS1 was probably my most formative generation as a kid, so I just remember all those disks PS2 disks were that silver/slightly sepia color OR blue if you had one of the early CD ROM games like RPG Maker 2 or Ico.

[@JOEQNICHOLSON]

Great video, but that's not a trim sheet.

[@TheSicklyWizard]

I've been told that a good bit, isnt the proper term a texture atlus? I didnt really learn the term until after I made the videk

[@awhiskin]

Absolutely amazing!! Definitely going to give this a go when I get the chance, the vertex colouring at the end do so much to sell the look.

[@blinkachu5275]

Great video! But I do have a question. How do you now import these vertex colors into Unity?

[@DerClaudius]

That's cool... you're not limited to diagonals witch this technique though...

[@sergeisukhorukov2971]

Hi! If I want to build a big open world in unity using this method what's a better way to develop it? Model the whole world in blender or break it to smaller pieces and then connect it in unity? Thanks in advance!

[@dimitrispontikakisbatana2062]

I stopped making these and just watched the video. Idk y but i find ur videos oddly entertaining lol

[@Rhino1004]

I'm in love with this tutorial! The only issue is that your voice's audio balance keeps wavering towards the right ear, like you keep going 'off-center' at random. It's subtle, but with headphones, it can be jarring. Besides that hiccup - keep it up!

[@kairon156]

This may be useful in the next year or two. I want to start a hobby project that mimics 90's style FPS puzzle action games.

[@3DWithLairdWT]

Loved this video! It's a great resource about a techniques that is *still* used today in modern high fidelity games. I think this would be more of an "Atlas" than a trim sheet. Trim sheets are generally made of strips that tile with themselves horizontally, but can also include some "floaters" like an atlas does as well. Either way, this is a really, really useful technique that can take performance cost down a ton in both low-res and high-res settings

[@vistaboy6523]

NÏCE

[@vacantly]

awesome and shockingly rare information to find, thank you! curious how they handle this in gamecube era in games like okami, where the environments feel a bit less gridlike. i imagine it's similar though.

[@filipemecenas]

Thanks