Pixel Joint Forum: Playstation One quality textures

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Hi,

Currently i'm developing a demo-game in a 3D engine. I'm just a one man team doing all the designing, modelling and coding to get things going a bit as of now.

I have set my heart on bringing back that PS1 style feeling in my 3d models. generally that means not too detailed models with detailed textures. Now my google-fu is quite strong but i couldn't find any resources on how to build this kinds of textures. I'm capable with the standard isometric way of doing pixel art but when it comes to building textures for objects with pixel art i'm at a loss.

Now i'm asking you if you have any tips or insights on how to build these sorts of textures.

I got some models up at http://labs.superflat.nl, i might have a playable demo up somewhere next month but the texturing is gonna be harder then i thought if i want to keep it all in the same style.

Any help would be most welcome!

Edited by Zophiel - 06 September 2009 at 2:55pm

Author	Message
Zophiel Seaman Joined: 06 September 2009 Online Status: Offline Posts: 5	Topic: Playstation One quality textures Posted: 06 September 2009 at 1:45pm
	Hi, Currently i'm developing a demo-game in a 3D engine. I'm just a one man team doing all the designing, modelling and coding to get things going a bit as of now. I have set my heart on bringing back that PS1 style feeling in my 3d models. generally that means not too detailed models with detailed textures. Now my google-fu is quite strong but i couldn't find any resources on how to build this kinds of textures. I'm capable with the standard isometric way of doing pixel art but when it comes to building textures for objects with pixel art i'm at a loss. Now i'm asking you if you have any tips or insights on how to build these sorts of textures. I got some models up at http://labs.superflat.nl, i might have a playable demo up somewhere next month but the texturing is gonna be harder then i thought if i want to keep it all in the same style. Any help would be most welcome! Edited by Zophiel - 06 September 2009 at 2:55pm
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Blueberry_pie Rear Admiral Joined: 24 July 2015 Online Status: Offline Posts: 2176	Posted: 07 September 2009 at 1:17am
	PS1 textures aren't all that different from textures of other systems of that time. The main characteristic is that they're fairly low-res (64x64 pixels at most, I'd imagine) and that they're not filtered when rendered at a size smaller or bigger the original. Instead of: Also, while PS1 textures are small and blocky (pixely?), they usually aren't pixel art. (Actually, I can't think of any 3D PS1 game with hand-pixeled textures) It's up to you to decide whether you want to go with pixel art or just low-resolution digital art. The latter would probably be the quickest and easiest way, as you can build your textures from photos (cgtextures.com is great for this) and use some shortcuts make things look better. Pixel art gives you more control at the pixel level, which is ideal when working with small image sizes. It does require more skill and time, however. Another option would be to go for a hybrid between the two (start out with edited photos and then zoom in to manually tweak parts of the image, basically). Edited by Blueberry_pie - 07 September 2009 at 3:09am
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Zophiel Seaman Joined: 06 September 2009 Online Status: Offline Posts: 5	Posted: 07 September 2009 at 6:02am
	Bedankt ;) Basicaly i could just grab a photo, tweak it in PS and slap a pixel filter on it and go from there to get the look that i want? Did a test with that earlier and it looked a lot better. Setting the engines quality and compression to low worked wonders too. [Edit] Don't you think it would be a cool style to do a casual 3D game with pixe-art textured objects? I'm 'hiring' ;p Edited by Zophiel - 07 September 2009 at 6:05am
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Blueberry_pie Rear Admiral Joined: 24 July 2015 Online Status: Offline Posts: 2176	Posted: 07 September 2009 at 7:18am
	I wouldn't go with the pixel filter approach. It would make the textures very large despite the low amount of actual pixels. Ideally, you'd keep the textures low-res and let the game engine give it the blocky look by disabling texture filtering. Can you do that with Unity3D? I think any 3D game with pixel art textures would be cool. I'm currently not interested in pixel work though :)
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Zophiel Seaman Joined: 06 September 2009 Online Status: Offline Posts: 5	Posted: 07 September 2009 at 8:34am
	*Originally posted by Blueberry_pie* I wouldn't go with the pixel filter approach. It would make the textures very large despite the low amount of actual pixels. Ideally, you'd keep the textures low-res and let the game engine give it the blocky look by disabling texture filtering. Can you do that with Unity3D? I think any 3D game with pixel art textures would be cool. I'm currently not interested in pixel work though :) I'll have to take a look at the filtering, not quite sure what that means. Since it's a fairly modern 3D engine i don't think size is that much of an issue, although load times are ofcourse very important.
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Zophiel Seaman Joined: 06 September 2009 Online Status: Offline Posts: 5	Posted: 07 September 2009 at 9:22am
	found the filtering options but that differenceis marginal if i compare it to what i want. Isn't stuff liek this pixel art:
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ellie-is Commander Joined: 12 September 2021 Online Status: Offline Posts: 706	Posted: 07 September 2009 at 9:56am
	That image is broken over here. :/
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Blueberry_pie Rear Admiral Joined: 24 July 2015 Online Status: Offline Posts: 2176	Posted: 07 September 2009 at 11:24am
	He meant to link to this image.
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Hatch Admiral Joined: 05 August 2015 Online Status: Offline Posts: 1387	Posted: 07 September 2009 at 5:10pm
	If I had to guess I'd say those textures have had some pixel-level tweaking, but I'd be surprised if they were pure pixel art. It would be a huge timesink in a commercial project for something that's just gonna be stretched and rotated into oblivion.
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AngelOTG Commander Joined: 28 February 2009 Online Status: Offline Posts: 258	Posted: 07 September 2009 at 7:07pm
	I hand-pixel all my textures. I used 3ds Max which perfectly preserves the pixel quality on flat planes. It only messes up on curved surfaces, but still maintains an almost (like, 90%-ish if I had to say some percentile to make you believe me more XD) perfect quality.
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KittenMaster Midshipman Joined: 23 November 2015 Online Status: Offline Posts: 83	Posted: 08 September 2009 at 2:39am
	Pixel goodness without actual pixel art. That was simply how the PS1 was. I can't think of any game that could possibly be hand pixeled besides full 2D (Not even this. Backgrounds tended to be hand drawn/painted or pre-rendered art.)
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PixelSnader Commander Not a troll! Joined: 05 June 2014 Online Status: Offline Posts: 3194	Posted: 08 September 2009 at 7:19pm
	alternatively, render your scene at half size and scale up for pixelfeel. also the objects you have on the site are rather highpoly for the ps1. that bench alone is about 300 polies already, which is what they usually stuffed in characters 180,000 polies in total they give per second. thats about 3000 polygons (triangles) at 60 fps. have a look at modern nintendo DS games, those are about 2000 polygons at 60fps. what do you want to make?
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Zophiel Seaman Joined: 06 September 2009 Online Status: Offline Posts: 5	Posted: 09 September 2009 at 9:51am
	*Originally posted by snader* alternatively, render your scene at half size and scale up for pixelfeel. also the objects you have on the site are rather highpoly for the ps1. that bench alone is about 300 polies already, which is what they usually stuffed in characters 180,000 polies in total they give per second. thats about 3000 polygons (triangles) at 60 fps. have a look at modern nintendo DS games, those are about 2000 polygons at 60fps. what do you want to make? thanks for all the feedback people. As for the models up at the moment, i still need to redo a whole bunch of them. I have little or no experience with this type of game development (read: low poly game play) other then playing them on my PSone or DS. I'm a flash developer making his move into casual game design. At first i used a library called Papervision in flash to get some of the low poly stuff going but it wasn't untill Unity3D came out when i found myself hopelessly addicted. Right now the aim of my little project is to get a 'site' up for the main page. Instead of going for the usual portfolio/about us/please hire me site i decided to turn such a site into a low poly mini game. It'll have an orthgraphic point of view and you can move the main character around with a point and click system. There will be some characters around that you can interact with who will then share with you some info about the site and what we do. After that i'm going to start developing casual games for the Iphone :) Edited by Zophiel - 09 September 2009 at 9:52am
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