How to make PS1-Esque graphics with Blender 2.9 (Trimsheets and Enviroment Modeling)

[Applause] [Music] while seamless textures are good for covering large swaths of area not everything consists of one uniform material or texture and while we could go into our materials tab and add a new material whenever the surface of our objects change this in my opinion is wasteful messy and ultimately unnecessary but with that said what would be the best solution for this situation how would we get both of these areas textured without having to use a different material to do this let us consult an actual playstation game for reference on how they handled this silent hill silent hill goes without saying is one of the most iconic games on the playstation as well as being an incredibly detailed game almost everything it seems is textured just look at this map you can explore this entire city with plenty of things to find within so the question is how did they do it well i did a bit of searching and dug through the game's data and i managed to rip the texture files and the map files to play around with well more accurately i ripped someone else's rip of silent hill a youtuber named gyromancer had a few videos of a unity project called silent hill level viewer so i took a unity project extractor ripped all the files out and here's what popped out i got a lot of texture files 691 files to be exact and i got all of the level files that came with the project here is old silent hill the first area that you have access to in the game here's the diner that you first meet sibilan and here's the school it's kind of there but enough exploring we're here to take notes if we kick on shaded wireframe mode we can actually study the structure of the level itself and immediately we can see that the level is almost perfectly grid like the map is also broken up into small chunks for rendering purposes with the help of unity we can select these chunks in the scene display and using the inspector find the corresponding materials and textures that these chunks use and looking through the directory this is the texture file that came back now i'm going to explain some things about texturing in the playstation 1. while it is true that the maximum resolution for textures are 256x256 it was a far more common practice to pack said image files with other smaller textures to save data in space this is what is called a trim sheet if you're familiar with rpg maker it's similar to a tile set in the sense that it stores reusable image assets all in one place it's basically the exact same principle here with texturing every quad on the ground is mapped to a specific tile on this sheet this one image stores 64 different 32 by 32 resolution textures on them this is how environments are textured with trim sheets like these so with that knowledge out in the open let's actually do something with that information let's open a blender and make a micro scene that we can build a trim sheet for it would be a bit silly to make a trim sheet first before we even know what we're making it'd be like picking paint for a house that isn't even constructed yet so with the new blend scene we're going to set it up for environmental modeling we want to emulate the gridded nature of silent hills of level design and here's how we're going to go about doing it we're going to go here to the scenes property tab and we are going to open up the units menu then we're going to change the unit system from metric to none we're going to go up here to the overlay menu drop down we're going to open it up and we're going to find the value sliders labeled subdivisions and scale scale determines the distance between the grid lines if the scale was set to 2 then every line represents 2 units likewise if we had it set to 1 4 then every 4 lines would represent 1 unit and the subdivision's value determines how finally those grid lines are broken up with a current value of 10 the grid gets really small if we didn't set the unit system to none we would not be able to influence this value and for our purposes we want a really rough grid so we're going to set the grid scale to 1 4 and the subdivisions will be set as low as they can possibly be one final thing we can do is to go over to the snapping menu and make sure that it's set to increment snapping then toggle the little magnet button this will make sure that when we're editing our mesh our edits will be aligned to the grid that we just set up with our workstation now set up to use our grid system we can actually begin to make something i'm gonna make a sort of generic nature scene nothing too fancy the first thing i'm going to do is bring up the add menu go into the meshes panel and i'm going to add a grid object which is a pre-subdivided plane upon being added to the scene it's probably going to be rather small so in the new panel that popped up when i edit the grid i'm going to set the scale to 20 units the next thing that i want to do is set the subdivisions of the mesh to line up with the grid that we established unfortunately the subdivision sliders in this menu do not represent the number of faces on each axis like you would hope the subdivision values represent all the edges that run along the mesh including the outside edges if we were to set the x and y subdivisions to two this grid would just become a basic plane so with the power of tedious math to get our grid to have exactly 20 faces we would need to place 19 edge cuts down either side plus the two on the ends to give us a total of 21 subdivisions with that out of the way i can begin designing our scene i'm thinking i want to have a sort of rough rock face in our scene so what i'm going to do is i'm going to grab the knife tool by hitting k on my keyboard i'm going to begin cutting from one end to the other across the diagonals of the quads to get a sort of edge like this then using the circle select by hitting c i'm going to select all the faces on one side of this new cut and i'm going to extrude them up by hitting e z and then finally one i did this three times to get a cliff that was three units tall after that i removed some of the unnecessary faces on either side of the mesh that we aren't going to be seeing next i'm going to add a little river using the exact same process cutting into the mesh and then this time i'm going to extrude downwards by negative one on the z axis and again remove the excess faces as a result from the extrusion also for this profile view of the riverbed it's very blocky so i'm going to take a second to adjust it to be more rounded by bringing the edges in like this now we're at the point where we can add some depth to our terrain i'm going to go into the sculpting mode and i'm going to access the smoothing brush by hitting shift s then i'm going to check my tool settings to make sure that in the symmetry settings i have x mirroring turned off and in the advanced settings i have mesh boundaries turned on otherwise when i'm smoothing this mesh it's going to shrink inwards like this after adjusting the brush strength i'm going to touch up on some of these areas on the mesh to make it look smoother and less grid like then i'll take the grab brush by hitting g and again making sure that mesh boundaries is turned on i'm going to add small hills and details by pulling the mesh around when i'm happy with the level of details that are created in the terrain we're going to re-snap the topology back to the world grid that we established so we can regain that angular and rough look to do this we're going to go back into edit mode hit a to select our entire mesh and then hit shift s to bring up the selection radial menu then we're going to select selected to grid and this will snap all of our vertices to the grid and with that we have our terrain done i'm going to shade our scene smooth and i'm going to add some trees to make it look a little more interesting for the river i'm just going to make a simple plane that stretches from one end to the other it's not going to be a part of our trim sheet speaking of trim sheets since we are finished with our terrain model we're ready to actually make one for this video we're going to try to keep it very simple we only make a trim sheet that has four textures on it and just like the examples i showed from silent hill each tile of our sheet is only going to be 32 by 32 in dimension so the first thing we need to do is we need to plan for what we need well for starters looking at our model we know that we're going to need grass that's a given we also have a cliff face so grass isn't going to be growing there we also have a riverbed and grass is definitely not going to grow there so why don't we have a dirt texture for both of them and since we have a grass and dirt texture we're definitely going to need a transitional tile since it's just going to look wrong if they abruptly change from one to the other grass is strandy so we can have a dirt texture with grass sort of hanging around on the top and hanging over the dirt that's three textures down we also needed one more uh let's just do a variant grass texture that has flowers on it or something that should be fine so with the plan in mind i'm gonna open up and i'll get started on making the tile sheet last episode we already made a bunch of seamless textures out of different pictures because of this i already have a grass texture and i already got a dirt texture all i gotta do is scale them down and fit them onto the canvas for the grass variant i looked around for free flowers online i could just scale down and throw on top of them with some drop shadows and that seems about fine and for the grass dirt transition i layered the grass tile on top of the dirt tile and with the symmetry painting options turned on i erased some of the grass over the dirt till it looked something like this i added another drop shadow and then the trim sheet was ready to export once it's exported we gotta make a material for the mesh to use so after giving it a diffuse shader we can add the trim sheet and hook it up now it's finally time to start mapping the mesh to the texture itself but before i do i think now is as good a time as any to mention a particular add-on that i could have been using this entire time there is an add-on called spry tile that is designed with tile sheets in mind you give it a sheet and you can directly paint on your mesh as well as build in real time and it automatically maps your mesh to the texture i have a few reasons why i'm not using it for one it creates its own material which is a bit disruptive to my workflow i also find that it runs a bit slow sometimes so i'd rather just not use it at all with that out of the way let's talk about how i'm going to map this mesh first i'm going to jump into the uv editor workspace then i'm going to grab every face on my mesh that will be using the grass texture from the sheet once i do this i'm going to go into the object properties tab and i'm going to add a vertex group named tex dot grass then assign my selection to the vertex group this step isn't necessary to the mapping process but if i wanted to select all the faces that were assigned to the graph sometime in the future it'd be as easy as clicking on the select button right here once i have all the faces i want selected i'm going to hit u on my keyboard to bring up the uv mapping menu then go all the way down to the bottom where it says reset this function will take every single face that we had selected and then reset them to an unprojected flat state so with all the faces like this in the uv editor we're gonna go up here to the uv menu and toggle constrain to image bounds then hit s on our keyboard to scale it type in two then hit the slash key on our keyboard to divide it by two instead and now we can move our maps over the grass tiles like so and now all of the grass tiles are now properly mapped next we're going to do the dirt grass transition tiles it's the exact same process select all the faces optionally assign a vertex group and uv reset and place the maps over the tile same goes for the dirt textures now we're ready to assign the grass flower texture variants to do this we're going to go back to our vertex groups and select the text.grass vertex groups then we're going to hide everything else except them what we want to do is randomly select faces from this grass to use for our flower variant so what i'm going to do is go up here to the select menu go down to where it says select random and it'll pop up this menu now all we got to do is set the percentage that we want i think 10 will be a good ratio between the two and then with those faces selected move them over to the new texture variant and boom our entire scene is textured hmm i don't know something about the seam is bothering me you know what i think it is i think it's the dynamic lighting the playstation didn't have this fancy light path calculations that blender is using they had to fake it using vertex colors not to mention it's about time i delivered on that promise i made my vertex coloring video so the first order of business is we need to go into our materials and turn off all of the shadows we will be faking those with vertex colors but first we need to set up our materials to actually use them let's go into the shader editor workspace real quick now what we want to do is we want to add a new node called the mix rgb node this node essentially does exactly the same thing that layers do in or photoshop they layer two pieces of color information over each other based on specific blending modes however unlike or photoshop where the bottom layer is influenced by the top with a node setup it's the other way around color 2 is actually the top layer in this analogy so with this note added we're going to plug in our image texture to the color 1 slot and then we're going to add and plug in our vertex color nodes into the second color slot after that we're going to change the blending mode to multiply and set the color factor to 1. not only is multiply a convenient blending mode to use but if you are making this scene for unity this is the same blending method unity uses for mixing textures and vertex colors together maybe sometime in the future i'll explain all blend modes in greater detail so with our material set up just like in the vertex painting tutorial we're going to select our mesh and jump into vertex painting mode with our brush we're going to get a dark gray and then using the vertex masking mode we're going to start painting areas that need shadows the first place that i want to start to add shadows is here at the bottom of the cliff where it connects to the grass i'm gonna hit that with the brush a few times and then i'm gonna hit all the areas underneath the trees so it makes it look like they're casting a shadow over them for the riverbed it should be darker since it's wet things that are saturated with water tend to be darker and also consider that water absorbs and refracts light and finally for the trees themselves i'm going to add some shadows underneath the leaves and along the trunk right underneath where their leaves are and with that i think our scene is done what i just went through was a small sample of how i would go about modeling an environment and with this video i think you should be able to model environments on your own now i hope you all enjoyed the video if you didn't found the video helpful be sure to like and subscribe as well as ask questions i also have a discord where i can answer questions and hang out if that interests you be sure to check out the playstation 1 graphics subreddit also leave a comment to tell me what you would like to see in the next video and with that see you next time

Channel: TheSicklyWizard

Views: 31,369

Keywords: texturing, modeling, uv mapping, trimsheet, blender 2.9, Environment, design, gimp, scene design

Id: NcmO6Sxmq14

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Beautyislikeyeah]

Didn’t watch the whole thing yet but that’s a subscribe from me. Very cool and can’t wait to watch the other stuff on your channel.

[u/saturdayxiii]

My attempt is ugly as sin, but I found your tutorial very inspiring.

https://imgur.com/a/o5Z9OMJ

[u/Nash_Dash]

Dude! Your tutorial was sent from heaven. Had to subscribe! Can't wait for the next one