Blender PS1 Foliage tutorial (PS1 Style Vegetation)

as usual the first step is to find textures I use a website called textures.com and I get a lot of image textures uh also the transparent ones and a lot of them just by searching them up and I will leave the link in the description for you to see the website for yourself delete the default Cube we don't need that add a plane and simply rotate it to your liking you also want to scale it up and down to make it look something of a like a bush or something whatever you're trying to create you want to go ahead and turn on backf coling from this option because most game engines don't re render the behind side of your mesh so you want to turn that on or unless you're going to be facing some pretty difficult issues after you're done creating a model you want to go into the modifiers and you want to add solidify modifier search here solidify and you should get it for the thickness you want to apply something like 0.1 because that or else your model will look thick and you don't want it to look thick and make sure to apply it and your back face coling issue should be fixed okay time for a material you want to add a new material Ren name it so that you don't lose it and then you want to change the uh surface type to an image texture and go ahead and grab one of those image textures that you downloaded this is why I told you to download only transparent ones because they're easier to work with I'm going to select this boost textures textures because texture texture go into material preview to look at your gorgeous Bush okay maybe it's not that gorgeous but we're going to make it gorgeous hit to the uh UV editing and from here on you also want to change it to material preview hit you on your keyboard and you should get this menu and from here view to project from View and from there you should be able to do this and and this actually allows you to uh project the uh project change the projection from um whatever the hell to whatever the hell you're looking on The View this is easier to work with once you do that then you should be able to edit the individual vertices on your model Each corner has a single verticy that's why you have four vertices here if you subdivide it more you should get more vertices but more on that later you want to edit it until you just find something that looks just about right and you also want to uh you know scale up the model of your mesh like your mesh to you know remove the excess part or something from for for me I think this looks something nice this is about I'd call this a bush it's a 2d Bush but it's still a bush H something's not right oh I know bushes don't have these weird black edges around so yeah let's make this thing texture let's this texture transparent because it's a transparent texture now in most game engines it's done by default but since we're in blender I'm just going to do it manually you want to go here and also set this to closes the filtering this will give you the classic PlayStation one style filter rather than blurring out the texture it will just create these individual Blobs of pixels which looks better because the PlayStation one didn't have texture filtering you can also down sample the texture but on blender you can't do that but on game engine you can so I'm just going to skip that from here on the U this thing you should change the U uh blend mode to Alpha CLI or Alpha hash both work fine this is what we will do to make our texture look transparent in blender like you said it's done automatically in the game engine you want to go into the shading tab over here and you should see something like this don't worry it's nothing just drag the alpha to the alpha alpha slider and that should give us our transparent Bush now as you can see it's still a 3D it's still a 3D Bush but it's still 2D it's in a 3D space but it's St you want to shift d to duplicate the bush that's originally there and then from there you want to go to the rotation Tab and rotate the bush so that it creates something like this you want to rotate you want to duplicate that again by shift d and then then you know scale rotate that to this as well and as you can see it looks kind of 3D and you want to change this surface thingy to zero which uh makes it look like this and like again it's only for blender you don't need to do this on the game engine because we're going to be using a Shader on the game engine any anyway but if you're rendering a SC in blender this is what you should do to make it look just better to make it not shiny and not reflect light the way it did on the original PlayStation and you want to select everything contrl J to uh parent like connect all the objects together because they were individual things but now they're all together you want to select One MH then select hit a on your keyboard to select everything and then you just want to you know contrl J and complete together merge them together you want to do this same same exact same process for another one but this time we're going to create the uh mesh a bit longer because we're going to create we're going to be creating a tree and trees are longer than bushes yes add a material and rename it so that you don't lose it select the tree texture that you downloaded oh look we have an upside down or a sideways tree now you want to do the same thing again you want to go to the uh y view or the X1 whichever it is I don't know then you want to hit youu and project from View and then you then again you want to project the texture properly you want to addit the vertices remember if there are more vertices there going to be more areas you can cover but for now this is what it looks like I'm just going to you know make it just look just about right as I think this looks like a tree I want to scale it up a little bit so that it's a little bit longer a few inches longer and then we you know do the uh texture transparent thing you want to go into the shading and change the blend mode and stuff and now you want to shift d and again duplicate the entire thing you want want to create multiple iterations of the tree uh mesh the single singular plane and then you just want to give give it that depth of sort of 3D that it's completely not 3D don't worry we're going to be creating completely 3D trees just in a second but this is the most basic way that you can create a tree that looks just about right from the distance and I would recommend you using this because this looks much more authentic compared to fully scaled actual 3D uh trees if you're like making a forest that has a lot of trees then this is the better way to go you can select singular mesh and then then you know direct click select the entire one and then control J to combine them all together you want to do the same thing create multiple meshes multiple um 3D uh meshes M with add multiple texture you can just copy the same one again and again and just make new materials for them and this is the most simple way you can create fully Edge entries I'm going to be going into much more complex ways but for now this is how you can do it I'm going to create another one real quick just by duplicating the previous one and this is about it now it's time time for creating the distant foliage that you saw in my previous video so for that you want to create a uh cylinder you want to change the fill mode so that the top parts are not filled you want to scale it just make it just about big because it's going to be having a panorama texture that's going to wrap around your scene so you want to make it big but for now for the scene on blender I'm just going to keep it something that looks about right on the game engine we're going to you know scale it again but I have no idea how much you're going to be needing it so just scale it accordingly I don't know just keep a you know keep a constant idea that this is something I like for me I think I'm kind of fine with whatever I got right now so I'm going to select a material for this one I'm going to apply the Panorama texture that I downloaded and realize it looks like so go into the UV editing mode again now don't hit project from view anymore just select everything by hitting a and then scale it on the x axis to just you know make it look right I think I scaled it too much I'm going to select a to on this side I'm going to hit a to select every everything again and then again I'm going to just scale it until it looks nice I'm also going to scale it on the y axis to you know sort of do this and then I'm going to take it upwards by selecting everything make sure to hit a on your keyboard to select every single thing or otherwise you will not see that if you want to do it again go to edit and then again just edit you can go into edit by hitting tab that's a simple way and as you can see this is just about right this is a good enough looking Panorama you can create multiple versions of this with multiple panoramaa textures you can get from texture.com or Google but this looks just nice for now okay following these techniques I created these um other things I'm going to control J this and other like other foliages different foliages for example this wheed texture um this grasses flowers and stuff okay so now we're going to be taking a look at how you can create a bit more advanced looking uh Playstation One style Tre so there are multiple versions you can do but I'm going to show uh show all version that's going to look similar to the previous one but it's going to have individual uh Tree Trunks and you know uh like the full Leaf parts and stuff uh for now let's just get started so the first thing is to again create a plane mesh I'm going to again rotate it by 90 I'm going to take it on the top here a little bit going to go onto the scaling tab I'm going to scale it up and scale it on the y axis a little bit uh I think this looks about right again I'm going to go into the modifier tab I am going to add in a solidify modifier to fix the back back face coling issue and this should be about right I think this looks just about right go on the top duplicate that rotate it on the 90 again looks fine again do that um I'm going to create some intersections here and there locate that as well and do this yeah this looks just about right so oh no oh my God I shouldn't have done that sorry so okay so once the plane is ready we're going to add in the texture to it we're going to create a texture colors tree I'm going to call this Tree Top actually then I'm going to go into this hit an MS chure open up an MS texture so um I'm just going to try to find where I kept my stuff I'm really not sure where I kept it though uh where Fage PS1 on G location f h PS1 there we go okay so here's my texture set I'm going to select a tree texture to be used um there are a lot of here I'm going to pick something that looks about right I'm going to pick this one up so uh now you get a material preview it looks weird we're going to go into the UV editing Tab and then we're going to hit uh go into the x view again we're going to go into material preview hit U while everything selected hit a to select everything then hit U on your keyboard and you should get this unwrapping menu again project from View and you got it now go over to this side hit a to select all the uh vertices and then s to scale them I'm also going to use G to grab it and then just uh Center it up a little bit you can do that by um the move tool as well but this is this is what I find pretty useful so select it all again this time we're not going to leave the trunk outside but in instead we're going to just take this area take it to the top like this it's also going to select this part we're going to go as top as possible without cutting the leaves off and this is just about right I think this looks just about right and I'm also going to make sure that it's uh transparent we going to the shading connecting the the connecting the alpha okay so our leaves or the top parts are ready uh sometimes you might see these uh looking weird looking artifacts on the top to fix this you might want to go over here and uh see as you can see it's uh it's going outside just a little bit we want to just drag and drag that down a little bit and that should fix ratio for now and looks just about right now what we're going to do is just again duplicate that rotate it by 90° and we have a three-dimensional uh Treet top we're going to again uh duplicate that um create some tiny intersection areas for this uh again do that so once we're done creating the uh top part this looks about right so as you can see over here it looks a bit weird uh because of this area it's uh very uh you know it's a bit weird it's not connecting on the middle so we're going to just select everything we can contrl J it now or we can just keep it down for uh later on but I'm going to just control J to attach it everything together and since all of these have the same UV when you go to the UV editing and hit a on this part to S everything you should still get something like this so now what we're going to do is to drag and select these lower vertices here and as you can see like this we're going to drag them until all of these are sort of like in with it together and as you can see this part just got out a little bit I'm just going to fix that real quick and do this there might be some artifacts here and there over there over there so you want to fix that a little bit um it's again weird looking we can scale it up a you can just scale it down a little bit and do this to the area as you can see uh it looks about right now it's fine this is fine this is uh optimal and also we can go to the uh material option we can turn up the roughness and over here we can turn down this to give it a flat look like I said before um now we're going to go to the layout we're going to select this and uh go to the move tool we to move it up for us a little bit now we're going to add in a simple cylinder so once you add the cylinder we can scale the cylinder down and go to the top view to have an idea um I think this looks about right now um as you can see oh actually no not not not like this we're going to add in a cylinder now and once we do that go over here to the as cylinder option and we can drag this vertices option down I think something like seven looks about right you can also go for like five or six five is also nice I think five I'm going to go for five so once that is done we're going to uh hit s to uh scale it down go to the edit edit mode by using Tab and then we're going to select on this here this option you can also use the shortcut keys 1 2 3 uh hit three on your keyboard and then you should be able to select the faces so once you've selected the faces themselves now you're going to want to go into the x view and then you want to hit e on your keyboard and extrude this up towards the uh trunk area um this looks about right I think yes it's uh about right so uh you can also select the down part if you think that this is Extrusion is a bit too much you can U later down scale it down but for now I think this looks about right to me so we got this extruded area we can scale this just a little bit to fit in I'm going to again do this take it at a little bit top and this this looks uh about right now we're going to again go to the edit mode with the cylinder itself we're going to select the top part here and scale it down like scale that area by hitting s and now we're going to go in here adjust this to the trunk area and I think this looks nice now we're going to select the trunk and give it the tree material the tree top material we can uh create a separate version of it I think I should have called The Tree Top but anyway so we're going to go into the UV editing mode as usual while the trunks selected you tap to get in the trunks um youu editing part so for this one we're going to create in a separate material for this one going to create another one we're going to call this one tree bark now you can either use a different bark texture for this or you can just use the one that's already on your full full tree texture so why I created this one is because I don't want this to be transparent in some game engines if you uh use the transparent Shader without your actual model being transparent itself uh without the actual yes the model not using any transparent thing it might cause some issues so for now just create another one so once you do that we're going to select everything again by hitting a and this time again we're going to hit youu and project from View and that should give us something like this so now grab it and just put it over here so once you do that so as you can see there's there aren't a lot of space for us to work with there aren't any uh intersections any intersections for this to work with so for now what we're going to do is to hit a on everything controlr take your cursor in the middle of it controlr and you should get this and now you want to do is to increase your U cuts by scrolling your mouse wheel I'm just going to get this much I think this is about right so once you do that you should get this just um hit your left right right click on your mouse button you should get something like this oh wait I'll be back in a minute so as I was saying select everything uh go go onto the three again hit three on your keyboard hit a on this side and you should get this now what you want to do is Select it all you want to scale it and just get it just about the right size and now you want to individually select these hit G on your keyboard s to scale G to position them and so on you want to just um you know make sure that it fits the area it doesn't go outside of the trunk area uh this can be avoided just by using like a dedicated trunk texture but I just find this to be a bit more better looking cuz it already has all the things and characteristics to match up with the branches themselves so for now all you have to do is to just basically make sure you align these properly and like this and until this very part or so I thought you can might want to do this a little bit so once you do that you may realize that some parts don't look correct some do some don't but this is this is very much um doable for me I think this looks just just about right some parts might not look good but I think this is a very simple way of it's it's a bit Advanced but it's a bit more simple on the uh uh on the more um beginner friendly line I think this looks good this is going to be a enti tree you can select this you can just poke poke it around like this it looks fine going angle it up a little bit until I find something that looks just about right you can also go into one buty all Z to go into the um transparency mode then shrink this part down like this to again just just angle it up a little bit okay this looks good I'm going to again scale this Branch itself down a little bit so that it just fits so yeah everything looks just about nice as you would expect this is good this is good select everything control J and you should have yourself a very uh sort of like a basic looking tree that looks um you know doesn't look necessar barely that bad it's just uh it's good looking it's not that bad it's um about as basic but Advanced as you could get I'm going to show you another method which is the best one so far and I personally use it for my game but this is a very good looking tree this is good you can export it use it on your project this is great so for the final tree that I'm going to show now delete everything this time we're again going to add in a simple uh like a cylinder or maybe you can actually add a anything you want a square would be fine too but I'm going to just add in a cylinder so with five veres packed we're going to not going to change anything to shrink it down not that much though so we're going to hit edit on the tab we're going to hit three on our keyboard to get in face we're going to also turn off the uh x-ray thingy so now go on to the X X part and now what you want to do uh extrude it up a little bit to just get start it shrink it down now you want to just hit control uh press on control and right click around like this to create individual branches now to be able to continue this you want to do is to hit two on your keyboard to select the edge Loops you want to H hit alt on your keyboard and Z all Z together to turn turn on that on and as you can see it is working you can see through through them it it's working so hit two again and now while uh tapping on alt hitting holding alt you want to left click on this uh area to select the entire Edge Loop now hit you want to hit F on your keyboard you might not think that nothing happened but it just filled up this area so when you go to three now you should have as you can see there is a particular area that you can select here so when you select this area now you can hit um the same control and uh right cck left right click on your mouse to extrude from this area as well you also want to go again onto two alt select this scale this Branch down you know because it's way too U big also do this just want to adjust it hit alt select like this like this like this scale it down and you can also hit uh G hold G uh tap G and and just you know uh fix that if you don't find it to be on the right place also go into the uh Z on your view and do this to create some you know individual areas like this has some variety on your tree like this you can create multiple uh different uh versions multiple different areas you can also do this hit F to fill that up three and you should be able to select this area now um I'm again going to scale this up a little bit that hatch going to go to the two again do this so like this you can create a very uh basic looking tree which can be then later used as a particularly uh interesting Tre itself so again go into three go select this area alt C to again turn off the uh xray you can also do it from here soel like this control R and make some other areas that you can select you just hit that then you can you want to go into three again select this again or you want to select this one again in particular do this have variety G2 grab it and then you know make make more areas more tree like thingies coming out of it I'm again select the edge here it's all it depends completely on how you want your tree to look like you can just uh edit it all you want until you get something that you believe looks just about right you can create multiple Edge Loops here and there create multiple areas that you branches can grow form grow form oh no no and for now I think this looks about right you can get very creative with this but I'm not in a mood for that so I'm going to just hit this I'm going to just call this one a sort of a tree like this select in so yeah I think this looks about right for me I would not definit I definitely will not call this a very idealistic tree but you get the idea this is for now this just for a tutorial itself so I'm not going to be going all out on it like this this this is about right so now what you want to do is just keep selecting on this what you want to do is to get here on the mesh you want to add in a plane so for this particular plane what what we want to do is we want to go into this here scale it up a little bit shrink it down a little bit and before we do anything we want to I'm going to hide this one so that we can see the plane properly I'm going to go in this one move it on the um near the 3D caror this is very important do not miss this step if you do your trees are your tree is going to look very weird we're going to go to the object set origin to 3D carser once we do that it's about right and we're also going to go into here plane modify uh solid uh do this so that the model is solid and the back face cutting issue is not there present there again going to the material this time we're going to create a leaf material and download a transparent Leaf texture from the textures.com website uh I've got one here uh this one this is a very good one I I would like to use this one so once you do that it looks like this uh it's okay if it looks a bit weird you can scale it uh like this and then shrink it down and you ALS also want to change this into Alpha like this go to the uh shading tab um Alpha from here okay this is fine we're going to go into the U editing once more even though it looks fine I'm going to do this select these areas and I'm going to to them till they just reach the branch here uh you can also also to add a bit more realism you can just uh change this Pivot Point to there like you know just um like select everything do This and like that yep okay like that our H tiny little tree branch is ready so we're going to scale it up to just make it look about right so now what we want to do is to select the actual tree trunk we're going to add in here onto the particles we can add in a particle system but before that we actually might want to add in a Vertex group here going to call this one a Vertex vertex group and uh go to the vertex group itself so uh for the vert group um you want to go into the edit mode and then alt Z like this going to the top you can hit doubly on your keyboard twice to get this thing and you can just select the branches like this only the areas you would like the uh leaves to spawn in uh you can also hit shift to select all of them together you can also hit control to deselect certain parts that you would not like the uh the things to spawn in some parts I would like to some parts I would not so I'm just going to do this looks about right so on the vertx group while this group being selected hit assign so it looks about right you can also go into the weight paint section to see this you can also individually paint semi areas on the vertic group as well but I think this looks fine the automatic one looks fine you don't really need to add too many details so now again go back into the object mode go into the particles tab create a particle so we're going to create a hair particle for this one we're going to hit Advanced and from the advanced we're going to go down down to the renderer tab so um renderer from path we're going to set to object and as for the instance to object I'm going to select this plane so as you can see it looks a bit weird but don't worry about it we're going to go to the verx group and for the Des for the uh this thing we're going to select the group one as you can see looks about right oh no I think we did a mistake we're going to go to the vertex paint no no wait let me let me just paint so as you can see not going to I'm not going to I don't want this area to be on the area for the leaves to spawn in going to fix this not make the leaf spawn over there so once that is done we're going to go back into the object mode particle again particle hair uh path no not path object select the plane looks about right you want to hit Advanced so so that we can change it up later on so for this the group yes the group so once that is done now we can just scale the areas also from here the number to 10 I guess 10 looks about right increase it uh something like this yeah that this looks um sort of lar um sort of okay yeah I think it looks fine so over here the randomization for the scale we going do this hit scale randomize it's going to automatically randomize it for us like this um doesn't look the best but trust me trust the process it's going to look good we're going to go over here to some other things rotation random rotation random Z rotation Global Z and then hit randomize and that should give it a more tree looking look and we're going to again set the scale randomization from here scale increase the scale from there and this looks a lot more like a tree than before okay this is better so um I think this is right you can change the seed around to get a little bit of an area here's the hair length which can determine how long your hair is going to be it's not a hair but it's it's basically what it is so is the number you can increase the number I think some like uh this uh looks about right increase the hair length a little bit for the randomization uh a little bit of randomize change the faces until you think you have something that looks just right so once that is done what you want to do is this is done now we're going to go to the modifier Tab and from here select it and make instances real once you do that you will have a bunch of these planes Al together so what you want to do is to select one from here hit shift and select one or maybe select something in the middle and then hit control J and all of these should come together like this oh my God that looks weird okay so this is the one okay these are all together so once you do that you should have this tree uh I'm going to just um just going down here delete that so these are all the particles that came to be real like this and voila that's ready this is the one that we don't need we delete that and like this we have our foliage ready I can select this and the Tre trunk together to uh combine them together but for before that I just want to assign a bark texture to it me bark texture to it uh not a gradient sorry image texture um Fage uh from here should should have a bark here we go and if you see the texture being weirdly stretched out you want to select it all hit a u again Cube projection and that should be just about fine if it looks a bit weird then you can just go here scale it up make sure to use seamless textures otherwise it will look weird and that should be it you have your very own PS1 styled uh very low effort low poly whatever you want to call it type of tree uh this is how far we will go into the tutorial I will will not be showing any more ways because this is uh the very uh easiest way to create a sort of like a retro looking tree and honestly this is the best you can do just to get you know this weird looking um to uh you know get this art style correct okay so that's it you can do more with this you can create multiple iterations of it various different textures can be used but this is the very basic way of doing it you can also change uh you can down sample textures and crunch them up a little bit but this is just about right this is looking good and very much this is fine okay so one final thing that I will show you is down sampling your images you can use Photoshop or any other software for me I'm using this online free uh image resizer and I am down sampling my textures which means basically just lowering the their resolution so that we can have a bit more like that low resolution ution texture so you can use any software you want I'm going to use this one I'm going to just uh download this uh lower resolution one and as you can see this is the one that we're currently using uh this is U the one with the lower resolution so this looks much better than the previous version which had a lot of detail to it so just like that you can do that it's it's it's up to you you can do it by default on the uh game engine itself but yeah you can also do it in here and now here is another software this is the color quantizer and this actually allows you to limit the amount of colors a specific model can have as a specific texture can have and it can also help you adding dithering to your uh certain textures certain you can add dther ring to almost any textures with this software it's a bit old but it just gets the job done it allows you to uh uh limit the amount of colors your textures can have and also like I said allows you to add the dther ring you can just uh edit the dther ring from here it's pretty basic and straightforward do your thing apply and then just go ahead and hit save on the save icon and just U you know I'm going to replace this one and save override that and as you can see it's done now I can go into blender and um find that texture and as you can see it has death ring a bit more death ring and it's also pretty down sampled you can do this with anything you want for example I'm going to change the bar texture as well I can also uh I'm can also um limit the color here you can also uh preview previously edited on an image software and image editing software and increase the contrast or saturation or something like I said this is not that necessary if you're using a game engine but if you're doing it for blender or some sort of uh scene or something then I would definitely tell you to do that so once that's done I'm going to open the uh bark texture that I newly created and it looks kind of weird all you have to do is change the filtering to closest and as you can see it gets that crisp and sharp um Point filtering of the uh PS1 Style no filtering at all so yeah that's pretty much it and you can also uh turn down turn up the roughness and turn this uh specular thing down to give it more flat out flat look and I would tell you to do that or you can just create a custom Shader or something but yeah that's the entirety of it that's basically how you can create a u sort of like a PS1 style foliage tree so yeah thanks for watching I'll see you in the next video

Channel: aidencantcode

Views: 2,417

Keywords: ps1, blender ps1, retro model blender, blender ps1 graphics, blender retro shader, retro ps1, indie game dev, blender low poly tree, blender ps1 shader

Id: ufPBjVrpKaw

Length: 35min 52sec (2152 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 17 2024