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[Saturator]

Hi guys,

I'm a total beginner at 3D modeling and got interested in emulating that PS1 lofi style. I use 3ds Max for modeling. I'm wondering how to get those super sharp edges on stuff and how to triangulate my quads. All other tips are welcome as well!

Here's an example for the style I'm trying to go for: https://24.media.tumblr.com/c37044d8617b2245aa3a68441f2764ed/tumblr_mzrozsNwCR1r43xj0o1_1280.png

Thanks and peace out

[RidiculousJohn]

Hi guys,

I'm a total beginner at 3D modeling and got interested in emulating that PS1 lofi style. I use 3ds Max for modeling. I'm wondering how to get those super sharp edges on stuff and how to triangulate my quads. All other tips are welcome as well!

Here's an example for the style I'm trying to go for: https://24.media.tumblr.com/c37044d8617b2245aa3a68441f2764ed/tumblr_mzrozsNwCR1r43xj0o1_1280.png

Thanks and peace out

Don't use soft shadowing and stick to basic shapes.

[arceon]

I'm a total beginner at 3D modeling...

Feel ya, been there, brother.
Usually you won't be triangulating the quads while modeling. You can leave that part to the exporter. Those sharp edges are done by using primitives with as little subdivisions as possible to get a basic shape. Textures on PS1 models are extremely low-res without any additional maps meaning that all additional effects are emulated on the diffuse map (like ambient occlusion in the image you've given as an example). Hope this helps a bit! Happy learning experience!

[Hawt Koffee]

nice to see my zombies are still floating around

[muki]

don't forget the perspective-uncorrected texture mapping emulation 

[Saturator]

Thanks for the answers guys!

don't forget the perspective-uncorrected texture mapping emulation 

Hmm.. How would I go about doing that?

[Polly]

Hmm.. How would I go about doing that?

No idea if 3ds Max has a option to disable perspective correction, but in case it doesn't you can use a HLSL shader with a "nointerpolation" ( "noperspective" in GLSL ) flag on the texture coordinates.

[Saturator]

Hmm.. How would I go about doing that?

No idea if 3ds Max has a option to disable perspective correction, but in case it doesn't you can use a HLSL shader with a "nointerpolation" ( "noperspective" in GLSL ) flag on the texture coordinates.

Whoops, I forgot to mention a pretty big factor. I'm gonna export all of the 3ds Max stuff to Unity and build/texture the game there! I guess I should do the perspective stuff in Unity then, right?

I did a search and found this, but I'm not sure at all how and where to input that code into Unity.

And if people have additional lo-fi tips for Unity, they're all welcome too!

[Polly]

Whoops, I forgot to mention a pretty big factor. I'm gonna export all of the 3ds Max stuff to Unity and build/texture the game there! I guess I should do the perspective stuff in Unity then, right?

Both in 3ds Max and Unity. Having to export from 3ds Max to Unity every time you want to check what your model(s) look like without perspective correction isn't very convenient.

[Sik]

Is it even worth reproducing this limitation though? It looked horrible and annoying even back then. I'd say that emulating a low resolution and all the pixel jumping that resulted from it are much more important to simulate the original feel (and you can do this by just rendering to a low resolution texture with antialiasing disabled).

[Polly]

I'd say that emulating a low resolution and all the pixel jumping that resulted from it are much more important to simulate the original feel (and you can do this by just rendering to a low resolution texture with antialiasing disabled).

Simply rendering to a low-resolution texture / frame-buffer won't cut it though. The artifact you're referring to occurs because ( for instance ) the Playstation GPU uses ( integer ) vertex coordinates in pixel-space. So on modern hardware you'd need to "snap" your screen-space vertex coordinates to the pixel "grid" in your vertex shader.

[muki]

Yeah, my uncorrected correction suggestion was a half joke. I guess if you wanted to be totally authentic, you'd do it, but I wouldn't personally. It looks hideous.

[Hawt Koffee]

Don't forget discoloured texture compression, for those zombies you have in the op I used the posterize filter in photoshop on a pretty low setting to set that subtle noisey lossy compression.

[Sik]

Those games used paletted textures actually (16 or 256 colors), so rather than posterize you should reduce the total color count instead (in fact, this is probably not far from pixelart). This was done to reduce the amount of memory used by assets.

[Saturator]

Cool, I'm actually texturing some stuff right now. I'll give those tips a try!

[muki]

Lots of vertex color on top of (mostly) greyscale textures, too.

[Carrion]

Hi guys,

I'm a total beginner at 3D modeling]

Okay, keep it that way and you should get the results you're looking for.

[cvasquez]

There are some cool things on sketchfab you can use for reference, I'll take a look later and post some here (currently on my phone). But just model something real simple with a good silhouette, which is whats more important. UV, than use low res textures, which I think were around 128 x 128 or 256 x 256. Also engines like Unity have self lit option that brings out colors.