How to make PS1-esque graphics with Blender 2.8 (Basic Modeling)

[Applause] [Music] the playstation one is known for its low poly models and and looking at some of the famous characters at the time you can almost count how many vertices are being used characters in these games could use anywhere between 500 to 1200 polygons which may seem like a lot but when you compare them to modern character models they're easily dwarfed in comparison this one models may look incredibly simplistic however sometimes simplicity is deceptively hard to achieve however with a little bit of know-how practice and some tricks you can learn how to get started and hopefully create any low poly model you want in blender and today I want to share with you some of the tricks that I use this tutorial series is going to assume that you don't really have any experience using blender or 3d modeling at all so I'm gonna go into detail about certain commands how modifiers work and really basic stuff like edge flow and good topology we're only gonna be concerning ourselves with basic technique today we don't need to worry about advanced modeling texturing UV mapping animation or output as of yet and if I did that this video might go on for eternity now the first thing to consider when it comes to any model of your project regardless of whether you're doing something as high-quality as an HD animated movie or low fidelity render of just a single image the first question that you should ask yourself is how important is this object going to be for the final product main characters and video games normally have more detail than any other elements in the game whereas some things can literally just be represented by a 2d sprite and just left at that and since we're replicating the PlayStation 1 we can't really get too complex but we can decide whether or not something needs that just extra touch or not before we actually get started modeling I want to go over some fundamentals briefly as well need to establish some limitations to keep in mind moving forward modeling is simply recreating real objects with points that are connected in space these points are called vertices and they're essentially the atoms of the 3d world an edge is a connection between two vertices and a connected set of edges form a face these faces make up the surface of every object in a 3d world the most basic face is a try consisting of only three verts in a game objects are rendered in tries and when it comes to count these are what we're looking to reduce now I'm not an expert but wikipedia says that max the PlayStation and hardware can only handle 360,000 flat shaded polygons however I've read on forums that people say that due to a lack in memory it could only really hell handle up to about a hundred 50,000 Poly's in any given render which still seems like a lot to me however that number actually gets even smaller when we incorporate texturing and shading to about 90,000 Polly's per render maybe even less if the memory is still an issue also due to a fine texture projections which work the textures due to camera perspective environments I believe were often modeled with higher poly count to keep textures from stretching to infinity even with all that in mind I'm in my renders I've hardly ever even gone past 5,000 the scene here is only about 2700 tries this character right here is about half of it 1070 Poly's I'm not done with the scene at the moment I'm probably gonna add more later probably about a tree or another character to set on that bench there but even after subdividing my meshes to get a more realistic number to account for a fine texturing it only ended up being about five thousand nine hundred Polly's and that's still way way less than the limit that the PlayStation one could theoretically handle so when it comes to environments and models we really have a lot to work with but part of the look comes from the minimalism alright enough talking about theoretical crap let's get to modeling when it comes to almost any given object we see or come across on a day-to-day basis I feel that almost any of them can be represented simply as a series of cubes spheres and cylinders very very few if any object is really trying you there pyramid s can shape so you will really largely only need the cube sphere and cylinder and if you want to get really simple the plane in circle now I'm feeling kinda hungry so let's make breakfast there's a lot of simple objects in the kitchen that we can use to get started in modelling and we're gonna end up with a scene that looks like this this was a build that I did live on Twitch but I feel like it's streamlining the whole build and condense it down to a small or tutorial series so with that let's get right to it I'm going to assume that you have your render settings set up like I showed you last time so I'm not going to mention it again the first thing that we need to do we set up our units as much as I would like my bacon strips to be 0.15 meters long I'm neither an engineer nor am i European enough to know whether or not that's an actually correct length we want our objects to be believable and by using correct units in the world space it helps us model them by giving us context and something to go off of if you don't use the imperial system I'm gonna be providing on-screen measurements if you want to follow along that way so first we're going to go over here to the scene properties tab the one that looks like a drop of water and some dots and open it if you're rational meaning you are familiar with the metric system like the rest of the world all you need to do here is check the separate units box and when you look at the transforms of any object it will break them down into meters and centimeters if you're stupid like I am then we'll need to instead swap the unit system from metric to imperial and now we have feet in inches for our units for my smooth brain to understand next I want to go about setting up my scene I want there to be a global directional lighting source so I'm going to select this object right here which is a point light I'm going to go over here to the object data properties or this green light bulb icon and we're gonna open it up and where I can do some tinkering I'm going to change this light from a point to a Sun light and I'm also going to change the strength from 1000 to 5 because if you were to render a scene with a strength of 1000 you'll probably melt your eyes out now we're gonna go about setting up our table we're gonna take the default cube and give it the love and attention that we all deserve by selecting it and going into the edit mode the dimensions of the default cube is about 6 feet by 7 inches or 2 meters which is taller than most people and is bigger than any table any normal person would ever be using we're going to hit a to select all of the vertices and then we're going to hit s to scale Z to confine the scale to the z axis and then type in 0.02 to scale the cube down to about one and a half inches then we're going to take our table and make it less wide we're going to do the same thing again hit scale and then going to confine it to the y axis and then dividing it in half to three feet and three inches all right we're gonna give our table some legs if we go to the bottom view by hitting ctrl 7 on the numpad we're gonna select this face here and then we're going to hit the eye button to inset this function is basically the same thing as if you had pressed e to extrude and then scaled it inwards on the X and y axis so really we're gonna be saving ourselves some time here by using inset instead it's also more accurate as we can set how far in we want our legs to be I'm going to go down here to this menu here and I'm going to set the thickness to 6 inches now every coffee table needs to have something to support the legs so it doesn't collapse when you put anything on it so this new face here is what will be our wooden support area we're going to click on it and extrude it down by about 3 and a half inches and since we're externa so that way it goes downward now we're going to take the same face and inset it again by one and a half inches then we will take this new face and extrude it inwards about another three and a half inches these dimensions that we put in means that these supports will have about the exact width and depth of a standard 2x4 that you can find at a lumberyard now we're going to add some legs we're going to exit edit mode and we are going to add a new shape by hitting shift a we're going to create a plane and when we do let's go ahead down here to this menu and we'll set the size to about two and a half inches now we can go into edit mode and drag it down so we can see it this plan will be the start of our leg and we want it to be perfectly flush with the support structure that we just made so if we go up here we can find the snapping options drop down we want to select the edge select mode here and then click the magnet button to turn it on now when we move the plane if we drag our cursor over an edge you will see that it will snap to the edge of that mesh I'm going to drag this plane over here to this corner and make sure that it's nice and flush in that corner now with that plane selected we can then extrude this down by about let's say 28 inches now that's one leg down but we really don't want to have to do that for three other legs so we're gonna cheat and we're gonna make more less we're gonna go over here to this little wrench icon called the modifiers property tab and here we're going to add a modifier when we open this menu we're looking for what's called a mirror modifier when we add it it will reflect our work to the other side of the table and to get the other two legs we'll also need to select the y-axis and with that that's all the legs we need and if we make changes to our current leg we can see that it is actually reflected any other legs as well now the mirrored legs that we just created aren't actually real as of yet there are only projections with the me or modifier if we try to join our new legs to the table by going into object mode selecting the legs then shift clicking to select our original table and then hitting ctrl J the other legs would just disappear this is because we have to confirm and apply the modifier before we join it so in object mode if we click apply and now select them and hit join will now have a finished table and the first model in our scene is done let's celebrate by renaming our model over here at the table so that way whenever we want to find it later in the outliner we can let's have some coffee I always start my morning out with a coffee so since most coffee mugs are cylindrical we can just add a new cylinder here for anything round I prefer to use only six vertices I've seen people use five but I feel five vertices gonna be hard to work with at times because it just lacks symmetry it doesn't play nice with the mirror modifier so I'm sticking with six I'll set the radius to inches and the depth to four and a half which is the size of my favorite coffee cup now to move it around I want to swap the snapping mode to face we could take our mug raise it up slightly then we should be able to move it around the table like so I feel about here is good right on the edge of the table to get yourself a quick set when you want it of course we're gonna need a handle to grab on to so let's make one real quick I'm gonna hide everything but the mug by hitting shift H and then put the mug selected if I hit dot on the number pad it should zoom right in so we can see it nice and good I'm going to go into the right orthographic mode here by pressing three on the numpad and I'm going to make a loop cut along this side here by pressing ctrl R and then clicking away like that now going into face select mode if we select these two faces and hit AI we can do an inset notice how these two faces that we just created are stuck together like this we don't want that to fix this we're going to go down here to this drop-down menu and select individual now we can put in our thickness as we want I'm going to put in about 3/4 of an inch and that should be good now to make the handle I'm going to select our new faces and then I'm going to go to the front orthographic view and I'm going to extrude them out like so I'm going to change my transform position briefly to individual origins this all Alyce's scaled these faces individually as opposed to from the center as you normally would I'm going to swap back then scale them up like this and we're going to now start using a 3d cursor after this point we haven't really discussed it it's that little red and white circle that you move about when you click around when it comes to modeling sometimes you want to have a specific point that you want to rotate around and the 3d cursor is exactly what we're gonna use to do that I want to pivot from the medium point of these two faces with both of these faces selected I'm going to hit shift s to bring up this menu right here and I'm going to select cursor to selected now the 3d cursor has moved directly between our two faces now we can go about finishing the handle for a mug I'm going to swap my transform position pivot to the 3d cursor mode which basically just says now I want to rotate about this cursor I'm going to select this face here and I'm going to hit e to extrude and then right-click to reset its position back to where I had it so now if I hit R and we rotate around the y axis we can now see that we are now in fact rotating around the 3d cursor that we placed I'm going to set our angle here to be about 45 degrees I'm gonna do that to the other side now and one last time we're going to select our two faces like this and I'm going to hit ctrl e to bring up the edge menu and we're going to join these two faces together by selecting bridge edge loop our handle looks a little bit too long it's not proportional speaking of proportion we're gonna fix this with a new tool called the proportional editing tool with the face select mode we can select this ring of faces by holding alt and selecting with our mouse and a quick note about this type of selection you want to select towards the edge in the direction you want to select in meaning if I select near this edge loop the selection will go along this way whereas if I select this way and will go along that way with their ring selected if we just press o you will notice a duck right next to our snapping tool has turned on this is blender telling us that we just turned on for personal editing and what this means now is when I hit G the handle will automatically adjust every version C that is within a certain radius of the transform pivot point or around the 3d cursor as of right now the radius as it is right now is a bit too large so we need to decrease it by scrolling in on the mouse wheel and now we can move the handle in like that we can quickly create the rest of the mug by clicking on top of here and then doing it in set X turning it down a bit not all the way though we want to fill our mug with something so only in about let's say 3/4 of the way down or so it's up to you how much coffee you want now I'm going to make a plate in Bowl really these are just variations on the mug it's just a cylinder that we manipulate to get exactly how we want they're made in the exact same way so instead of going through the whole process of explaining how we go about making them I'll just give you some dimensions of the actual plate involved I'm referencing my plate that's about 11 inches in diameter and about 1 inch deep while my bowl is five and a half inches wide and two and a half inches deep I'm trusting that with some of the basic modeling instructions that you followed up to now you'll be able to make these two objects perfectly fine that'll be your assignment for the end of this video we got pretty far in terms of what we made especially if this is your first tutorial in blender like in the last tutorial video I wanted to end with a question what are we gonna have for breakfast I don't want to just recreate the scene that I demonstrated earlier I want to bring something new and from the last tutorial video a lot of people expressed interest in going towards more of a sci-fi rail and maybe even a touch a survival horror so with that in mind what kind of sci-fi breakfast can we create here I'm hoping someone can maybe stop me honestly myth something really interesting and complex after all the next video will be more advanced in terms of modeling technique and I wanted to discuss the importance of good topology so I want to do something a little bit more interesting than just bowls and plates be sure to leave those suggestions in the comments subscribe for more videos and I'll be seeing everyone next time goodbye everyone

Channel: TheSicklyWizard

Views: 39,984

Keywords: 3d modeling, blender, tutorial, ps1, graphics, Low Poly

Id: 8oMjBSWnPAQ

Length: 16min 22sec (982 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Andrew_Fire]

Good video, you could model a cherry pie with some "Damn fine coffee"