How to Create PS1 Style Characters in Blender

I've made a bunch of low body models but I've always loved the PS1 aesthetic so today I'm going to be going through like a couple different tips and tricks to be able to take your low P models and make them look PS1 let's go the first thing you can do is just start simplifying your model a little bit so the very easy things to do is kind of like separating limbs so usually what happens is like you can have two different typs you can either have it where they separate like every specific type of limb so you can do like they separate your hand and your forearm and your bicep and your like chest whatever you separate every single thing and then like you don't even have to like kind of rig it it's kind of just your model doesn't have to bend at all then you can have the other tab which is like would be like the entire upper body and then like the lower body and legs are joined together so then upper body and then like your arm your whole arm is joined together with your hand being separate so stuff like that you can separate it a bit of a different ways but that's kind of what happens with your models then also just making them a bit lower poly like just making it super super low poly if you want to like stay true to the original thing just lower your resolution a lot you can find some models online of actual games I think it's something like the model resource or model warehouse or something something like that there's one site out there that has a bunch of different games and you can find PlayStation One games so you can actually download those and like analyze them and see how those models were done so yeah first step just simplify your models get them like nice and simplified so that you have something to work with later on and then we have the UV unwrapping wrapping is basically taking your model and turning it into like 2D so you can start adding textures to it now there's two different types of doing this it's either like normal UV and wrapping or smart UV projector this is just the fast way and the long way if you have the fast way then it's bad quality but if you take the long way then it's good quality so it just depends on how much time you have and how important this character is so if you don't care too much I'll show you how to use the smart new project to get your characters Okay so here is my model over here so firstly what we have to do is we have to go add some materials and add some images so I'm just going to click new this is forar just go base color click on the dot click image texture new yui it always comes out to a 128 and I like putting a little color grid just to kind of see when I'm youv and wrapping how everything is actually turning out you can also give us a name so let just go like change it doesn't matter especially if you're work a lot of characters then you actually want to name it something sign significant then um just going to add this cuz like as I want to see the face I've removed them but yeah now if I go to material preview mode you can see this is what our B looks like right now and the reason is cuz I've actually UV unwrapped this thing before with the smart U project now basically how this thing works if I Got U smart project you can see it kind of comes out to this like mess of vertices and whatever you have a couple different things you can play around with it is the island Marin uh which is basically like how much space is in between so if I set this to zero you can see everything is kind of like right up to each other you don't want this the reason is with your pixels they'll start overlapping and then on like one part of the body you'll see like random colors from another part of the body so drag up this Al margin a bit I think I was using like 08 or something uh 8 there we go smart you check it's not great just because you can see like the colors are just kind of random you can see like this whole part of the arm kind of just like splits off it's all great if you want to follow properly I have some UV unwrapping tutorials I'll leave one up here or in the description so let me just talk quickly about a couple tips when you're working with it make sure that the most important parts are bigger on your UV map using this like thing that we've done is very useful because you can kind of see like how big and how detail is in relation to each part so it depends you can either have it so that every part has the same level detail so then the pixels won't change size but if you want like something like the face if you have a face on your character that means more detail than something like a foot or the bottom of the foot so you can kind of change it to where stuff that doesn't matter are smaller so I mean as the bottom of the foot that could just be Shadow so you can make that just really small it covers like a couple pixels the bottom r or something it doesn't have to take up much space cuz it doesn't have to have detail there so make sure that you kind of like optimize your UV Maps a bit so that you're not wasting space for your textures and all of that if you haven't already go check out my Discord link down below you can come chat with me or other people about you're BL a problems or anything yeah see you there so if you want to see your image actually without like it blurring I'm just going to change it from linear to closest on the image right so you can see it's like it's a decent level of pixels uh but yeah let me kind of show you a couple different tricks for texture painting so I'm just going to go to texture painting mode and you can see we already switch over you can see all your like kind of vertices of your image and yeah so the quickest way and the easiest way to paint your characters are using textures so what I mean by that if I go texture and you can see I already kind of have one here but if I just click new click on this little settings button uh you can see over here just click open and I'm going to go grab some images from I think so you can see here this little cloth thing this is basically just a stencil that we're going to use to kind of color our thing so on this texture make sure you have stencil on I think by default it's like tiled change your stencil now what happens with this uh click image aspect but yeah um once you've done this you can see you have an image here now you can move it around with right click uh control right click to rotate and shift right click to scale um so you can see here this is kind of what happens so what's cool with this is when we can like put it CH if we give it a color and just paint you can see it kind of already G gives us like a texture to our thing now this is a bit too dark you can see the black so just a bit too black and my color is even just like quite contrasty but whatever um you see it doesn't give me that original color that I kind of want I just want to have like a slap variation not that much variation so what I can do is go back to the texture tab go colors and the contrast tab I'm just going to drag this down and maybe drag out the brightness a bit uh I think it's a bit too much let me drag the contrast back up but basically saying just like make the colors more similar and you can see here now it's more like it's very similar colors it's just adding some slight variation now especially if you have high resolution or just like you have two UV maps for your character and you UV un up it properly then you can start using like other images to add even more detail to it so say for example that you just have like a leg and it's a plain but who cares so what we could do with this is we could start grabbing different textures so if I just go get rid of that click new make a new texture and then open up another image I'm going to grab a cloth now with this we can actually start using this to paint our own cloth on our character so you can see I mean this is like quite a example because like um you'll be using less pixels in this but like if you just to there changes from linear to closest you can see like you can start stealing images actual texture now if you want you just to make these like black and white you can even just change it from here the saturation just drag down to zero um and then mess around with brightness colors or contrast U just to be able to use images but you can start using images to build up your texture very quickly instead of having to paint it in yourself so grabbing images and stealing the texture from them is very useful so like for example let me do a face so I mean his face is all green right now uh but if I grab this go use SM U project and make this like super big let's just set test it out another quick tip before we do that is if you select something in edit mode and then go back to texture paint and then just click on this little square you can see now you can only paint directly on this Square uh or this like specific part you won't be able to paint on anything else which is quite cool but yeah let me grab another texture new open Okay cool so I have a face you can see it's very squished so I'm just going to go back to here change the image aspect res to transform there we go image and you can see now the face actually right SI but you can see here if I change my color back to what like that I'll just grab all these there um we get the right size like here that paint you can see here his face gets automatically apped like yeah it looks terrible but who cares like you can see we can basically just start stealing textures and apply it very simply if you need so something like there you can see the not being applied correctly you kind of just like zoom in and then start using this to kind of like fill in sides you can see so even just grabbing like some skin just grab like a picture of an arm or something but even just something like that um can just be used very quickly to kind of give it a bit of like shading L uh all of that but yeah you can see looks kind of wonky but it's a bit better when you do with some other textures so let me grab some more let's go click new going grab some metal so here's actually just a picture of nails and I'm going to use this just to kind of like paint on like you can see here if I just pulled this here it can give us like an interesting texture obviously the image is way too low red so like if it working with something with higher to say you needed like even know like a rip in the out of's face if we have some sort of like thing in the out of's face you can see there we can give like some texture to it very simply with the most random images like possible like just looks like he's ripped into his face and then you can you go out even if you go switch back to the face and then just use um his lips as like a red color to go around or just use something else you could use just like a flesh kind of texture you can see there so just giving like an edge to it so you can start building up your colors very easily with these different textures uh just start building a library of textures or just before you start working just go to Google Pinterest something and just start like grabbing a different like random images that could be useful to you

Channel: Thomas Potter

Views: 8,061

Keywords: Blender, blender tutorial, b3d, ps1, game, character, guide, ps1 game, ps1 model, modeling, UVs, PS1 Characters, Blender Modeling, Texturing Tips, Simple Tricks, Character Creation, Modeling Guide, Texturing Techniques, Easy PS1 Models, Blender Creations

Id: dzkGLBM11qc

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 15 2023