How to achieve PS1 style Lighting | In-Depth Tutorial

back in 1994 when PlayStation 1 first released it was a revolutionary console for its time and honestly I can see why the console itself was rather expensive and even the games and the titles that came out for the console were also quite expensive no joke the devs had to work with very limited amount of Hardware in order for them to be able to publish the game like you know everything starting from polishing the game to making it look believable to making it look good so the PlayStation one only had one or around two megabytes of RAM and one megabyte of RAM for the video memory which we called vram nowadays so with this limited amount of Hardware the developers had to cut some Corners in between so where were the corners cut exactly so the most of the time the corners were cut in the textures and the resolution you may say but one of the key places where the corners were actually cut was the lighting now if you actually took your moment to analyze a simple PS1 game then you'd realize that it didn't really have any actual real lighting or you may say that yeah there is Lighting in the PlayStation 1 games well you'd be kinda wrong and kinda right at the same time because uh back in 1994 when this thing came out there wasn't really a way to actually add multiple likes in a scene or at least even if there was the PlayStation one possibly couldn't handle that so what the devs instead had to do was go creative all around the place and try their best to replicate light as accurately as possible because they had to make the game realistic and believable at the same time so that they can you know sort of convince people to buy these games because no joke they were really expensive at that time at least so yeah the lighting was one of the crucial Parts where the devs had to like you know be really creative which gave birth to some of the best and some of the very unique and creative lighting techniques and which the devs had to come up with so that they can make their game look really good and Stand Out Among all the other games so yeah let's talk about how lighting worked in the PlayStation 1 games and well this video is going to go a little bit in depth in between these gray areas it's it can't be completely accurate but I'm gonna be trying my best to um explain it as much as I can so let's take a look at this game called siphon filter it's a PS1 title and this game actually uses one of all of these lighting techniques that devs had to come up with so let me just real quick address a few of them so first one which was the most common one and the very first one that the developers used was vertex lighting if you take a look at these areas then you'd realize that these particular areas are lit or they're actually colored in white or a bit of a lighter color and these areas are completely like they're not actually affected by any kind of light or anything they're just basically areas which have a on top of them have a different color just painted on top of them so what is this technique this technique is called vertex coloring and by doing this they color on top of a pre-existing vertices like the textures or the models they just put a thin layer of color on top of the existing models to replicate light the way light reacted reflected or the way darker areas became darker and the lighter areas became lighter if you take a moment to inspect it a little bit then you'd realize that these are not real lights just the areas which are supposed to be lit are colored with a lighter color of lighter shade of vertex coloring and that's how developers most of the time replicated lights in these types of games okay so the next one is called light map making or baking lights into the texture itself this is another technique that the devs used later on to support the other games and by doing this they could actually bake lights like on top of pre-existing textures and this would result uh creating some of the best photo realistic looking like um textures and stuff this game Alien Resurrection uses this particular technique on lots of its places and that's what allows this game to achieve some of the best looking uh visuals on the PlayStation 1 game or the PlayStation 1 console this had a lot of upsides to it one of which being that it really wasn't that Excel like it wasn't really resource hungry because baking lights directly into the textures meant that you don't have to waste any other extra processing power on any types of lights or anything and second of all it was really effective and it made things look really good but it also um couldn't be used for moving lights such as you know lamp posts or flashlights for those types of things you could only use certain things such as vertex coloring techniques and speaking of flashlights and lab posts and other stuff the flashlight that you see in um Silent Hill one for PlayStation one is actually using the same vertex coloring technique it's not real light it's just sort of like um displaying a sort of a lighter shade of color on certain areas when you turn from here to there and this would allow the devs to actually manipulate or just make you feel like that there's actual lights in it but in terms of real um real uh real life or so there wasn't really any Playstation only had one light which was the directional light and the devs use this uh combined this sort of vertex coloring and baked lights on all together to create uh the illusion of Shadows the illusion of muzzle flash or the illusion of lights and other things and basically that's how it worked okay now what does that mean for you or for me who's using the unity image well Infinity actually has a built-in way of doing it it's pretty easy actually just have to change the lights rendering mode to Auto from Auto to not import which actually allows you to create um sort of vertex sliding like sort of like a Vertex lighted scene or something like that just kind of looks like about that here's a demo of it which I created over here and for this to fully work you have to actually do a few other things and some modifications to your models as well so for this a particular demo I ended up setting up a simple C with a candle and a uh except for wall and some other stuff with it just to show you how this would look in actual action I set this entire thing up in blender took me around 10 to 15 minutes and then I imported it directly into Unity and afterwards that I went to uh open it up in blender as well once I imported the model in unity and now I started off by fixing the materials and sort of changing the lights and other stuff for this you don't actually need any kind of Shader this will actually work with the standard Shader of unity as well because it's just how you need to handle's lights so um you don't really need any kind of channel for this particular down but I will be using that PSX Shader so once your light has been set up just go into the rendering mode and change it from input Auto to not so important as as you and as you can see there's already um some vertex lighting going on over here as you can see rather than a per pixel lighting it's actually lighting up the individual vertices of your model individually and by this by using this technique you can actually achieve that a PS1 aesthetic lighting thing and it's uh recommended to have like a smaller range so that it doesn't affect all the vertices equally and in order to get a better look of this effect you need to actually add more vertices to your model like I said you have to modify your models a little bit you need to add some extra vertices and geometry to your model if you want to see those vertices properly in action I'm not saying to add too much of it because PSX had a very low uh low poly models but you might want to add a few to the walls and other things which only usually have uh like uh one or two vertices in Middles and stuff so um after applying these modifications let me just show you real quick by adding a lot of vertices to just show you that um it actually uh the way the effect works and this can be done in Unreal Engine as well but I have found doing it on Unity is much easier than that so after saving the model if we head back into Unity as you can see the lighting is much smoother but if you zoom in and get the point light like a little bit closer towards your object then you would see it lighting up the vertices individually let me just real quick show you there we go okay well as you can see it still has that uh Jagged light effect but it's uh since there's a lot of geometry it kind of Smooths out evenly so you might wanna not you might not want to increase a lot of the geometry I'm just gonna decrease it real quick just gonna undo this and I'm gonna keep it at a minimum level so that it kind of gives us that Charming lighting look of the PS1 at the same time just uh you know staying true to its uh Aesthetics so after this I actually played around tweaking changing the light settings I added multiple lights to a sort of you know eliminate multiple angles and I tried my best because you can't actually use it on a like a huge range because that will actually kind of evenly distribute light all across the vertices so rather than that I added multiple lights and made it uh look just the way it kind of looks it ended up looking like this okay so now we're at the end of the video if you made it this far congratulations and well that's pretty much it that's how I uh actually create sort of this PS1 style looking light effect there are other ways of course like I mentioned vertex coloring and other stuff but those are for a different video or different topic I usually use this technique mostly I don't even use bake lighting because when it comes to PS1 game all the assets and all the models that you actually see in the scene are like are so so like friendly towards the performance that you really don't have to worry about the lighting or thing anything like that and I think having the modern capabilities of a modern engine actually it's not a bad thing to use uh Dynamic lights or stuff as long as it looks uh faithful to the PS1 era so yeah that's pretty much how I do it I really don't go for other techniques you can use bake lighting or text coloring that's up to you but this this is the very basic the very beginner level of getting the charm and look of the PS1 satellite and I added some uh random camera shake and I also added that Shader I was talking about and these lines that you see these are the um color uh cover what is it called piece ones color rasterization or something like that yeah but anyway these are the effects and everything on play if you want to know more about these you can just watch my videos over here and there um or I explained how these things work or you can just um I don't know do whatever if you I don't really know why you would watch this video if you don't know how to you know get started but these are very good videos you can just watch these to get started yeah anyway see ya

Channel: aidencantcode

Views: 4,546

Keywords: unity, gamedev, ps1style, indiegamedev, itch.io, gamedevlog, devlog, indieps1, ps1graphics, ps1unity, ps1shaders, unityretroshaders, demake, ps1, ps1 demake, low poly graphics, tutorial, ps1 style graphics, ps1 graphics, how to make ps1 graphics, how to make ps1 style graphics

Id: BtPPK9zh7tY

Length: 11min 53sec (713 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 09 2023