How to Make N64 Style Graphics

when it comes to imitating the style of the nintendo 64 there are a few distinct graphical characteristics that you must take into consideration in order to achieve the look most of the games on the n64 have a distinctive blurriness to them and whilst this is often derided by people today it is nonetheless a signature look of the console this effect is achieved through a variety of techniques first let's address anti-aliasing this is a method of blurring the jagged edges of an image creating a much smoother final result during the 90s anti-aliasing was considered a notable feature of the n64 especially as its chief competitor the ps1 lacked this feature however the ps1 more than made up for this in the texture department outshining the n64 whose largest texture size was a mere 64 pixels although most of the time textures were often even smaller than that for example let's compare two textures from two different games on each console here we have the legend of zelda majora's mask for the n64 let's take a look at the face of the clock tower this is a huge landmark in the game and it can be seen from a lot of locations but even so the texture is still stuck at 64 pixels also note how the developers have used a clever trick of splitting the clock face into two separate images and then flipping them to give the illusion of a larger texture now let's look at a scene from metal gear solid on the ps1 this light fixture is just a minor set piece appearing only in this part of the game but despite that it's a whopping 256 pixels you can even see how the giant clock tower face fits comfortably several times inside it that's the benefit of cd storage i guess in order to complete the look of the textures you need to implement what i consider to be the feature that defines graphics on the n64 a technique called tri-linear mid-map interpolation this is the nintendo 64's unique method of texture filtering giving the textures a smooth appearance no matter how close the player gets to them the drawback of this however is the puny size of the textures themselves and it's this beautiful combination which results in the signature muddy look of the system and what in my opinion really makes it stand out from its competitors ps1 and sega saturn because of this you can always tell which game belongs to the n64 sadly it's quite difficult to emulate the n64's texture filtering with 100 accuracy although using regular texture filtering in the game engine of your choice should suffice so far spoken solely about environments but the same techniques apply to characters as well when it comes to animating you have two choices you can either segment the limbs into separate objects for easy rigging or opt to use a single closed mesh for better deformation of the joints i personally like to use a closed mesh as i prefer to keep separated parts to a minimum i also cheat a little with the polycount because it makes deforming the joints easier but most people probably won't be able to tell if your character is a slightly higher poly than the average n64 model depending on how closely you want to adhere to the limitations of the n64 there are several things you can do to optimize your graphics and make working with vast amounts of small textures easier because of the small texture resolution of the system we have the option of combining these together onto a single largest texture for a process called texture atlasing this has a lot of benefits although my favorite is reducing the number of materials and individual textures down to one making your project a lot cleaner and easier to manage this is also a huge boon when taking your models into your desired game engine as you now only have to worry about a single texture map of material versus literally hundreds notice how this building alone is using 15 unique textures and materials in the old days of 3d game development polygons were the most expensive thing to display nowadays however this is shifted to things like number of materials texture maps and their resolution the more of these you have the more resources needed by the graphics processor to display stuff on the screen in this example you can see the same building from before except the one on the left is using more polygons with only one texture and one material versus the one on the right which is using a lower polygon count that has 15 textures and materials the reason for this is that in order to tile the single texture correctly on the high poly model i've had to split the mesh into tileable chunks this can be quite time consuming depending on your level of skill and unless you're a confident modeler already you may want to avoid doing this i've gone into greater detail about this in some of my other videos and if you're interested in learning more you can always follow the links in the video description for the final touches you'll want to bring your models into your chosen game engine and once there it's a case of setting up the lighting correctly to look how it should on the n64 this is where things get perhaps a little tricky as the nuances of the software may prevent you from reducing quality that wouldn't be present on the n64 i'm planning on going into greater depth on this another time but for now i just wanted to cover what i felt were the basic things to address when creating these stylographics if you want more information on things or you feel like there's some important stuff i might have left out please let me know in the comments thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next episode

Channel: Legend 64

Views: 178,205

Keywords: n64, n64 style graphics, n64 graphics, legend64, lengend 64, game, indie game, retro style graphics, nintendo64, graphics tutorial, retro game, n64 game, tutorial, old school graphics, how to make n64 graphics, Low poly graphics, Low poly

Id: 1szw2f9ENwk

Length: 5min 8sec (308 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 05 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/majorzero42]

I didn't know about the small texture limit on n64. I gotta play with the texture filtering sometime.

[u/RepresentativeTop203]

What sort of materials are you using for your environments?