Making 3D pixel art using picoCAD

[Music] hello there my name's brandon and i make pictures out of tiny squares and in this video i'm going to show you how i made 3d pixel art like this using picocad picocad is a low poly modeling software developed by johann pates using the pico8 fantasy console and it's currently available on a name your own price structure after modeling a wireframe mesh you can import png textures to apply to the faces and the rendering has a really unique look in the way that it continually reinterprets the object's appearance in pixels at each position while rotating let's start with a simple example of how i made this vending machine here the first thing i did was get my texture work ready picocad uses the pico8 color palette and even though it'll automatically convert any artwork into those colors i felt like it made sense just to create my design with those in advance to know exactly how to look so i'm actually working in a sprite today because it's already got picoa built in as a preset color palette [Music] the grid i've got displayed here is 10 by 10 pixels and i was using that to help me visualize the sizing and the way the six faces of the vending machine will fit together i kind of thought i may need to design each of the faces with an odd number dimension so there'd be a center column of pixels to perfectly rotate about but i eventually found it really didn't matter to design that way or not because you end up assigning the texture over a desired artwork area and picocad will constantly be reinterpreting the texture based on the current zoom level and the angle of rotation anyway picocad accepts maximum dimensions of 128 by 128 pixels so just be sure to fit your project within that canvas size so here's the finalized texture artwork which i've saved as a png file so it can be loaded in later i built this one out as if it's a little foldable papercraft project but you could easily just pack your texture faces together tighter than this to be more space efficient over in picocad now i'm starting the wireframe for the vending machine by right-clicking and adding a cube from the list of preset volumes and you can see that we get this orthographic projection showing each face of our object as well as the rotatable 3d model luckily this cube is pretty much all we need for the vending machine except i need to reshape it a little by dragging over the vertices and bumping up the dimension using my arrow keys if you need to move a single point you can also click on it and drag it around and holding x while you click also lets you select multiple points for that too from here i just make a few adjustments and basically eyeball the proportions based on the artwork i just put together once it's in a good spot we go up to the view buttons and click on the texture view which brings us into the mode to actually apply our artwork to the object the mode is still set to wireframe but if we toggle the render mode button we can view it with texture artwork applied and in this case you can see how it's using these default checkerboard colors down below for that right now to import your own artwork you simply drag the png file into the picocad window and as long as it fits that 128 pixel sizing you'll see your artwork appear in the lower area there from here it's a matter of going through to select each face of your object and reposition it to the corresponding location of the texture artwork again just like with the build mode we can select vertices individually or together to move them around and make those tweaks so yeah you can see here it just takes whatever's highlighted and stretches it over that space so that's what i meant earlier with the sizing discussion where you know it's kind of nice if you're able to plant something dead onto the wireframe proportion but it'll kind of occupy that space either way and my experience was that you can usually find a good application area and zoom level to have your texture appear as it does in your artwork and so once everything's mapped on you can just have fun kind of spinning it around and seeing how it came out and if you need to make tweaks to the artwork you can always just drag a revised png to overwrite the current one if we want to change the origin of rotation we can go back out to the build view and drag the entire object around those dotted axes and that helps get the object into frame if it was just getting cut out a little bit [Music] to finish it off you can change the background color and the alpha selection will let you specify a color to become transparent if you need that clicking the little light bulb icon applies the shader and it uses this great dithering effect with darker shades of the picoweight palette to kind of help give that three-dimensional depth and on top of that i think there's just a really nice charm to how it looks with that also when you're finished you can click on the menu and export an animation at one of three different rotation speeds i ended up selecting medium rotation for this one and then you get that nice little summary of the object the project itself is stored as a text file when you save so you can always close and load them up again if you need to [Music] the next thing i want to try is making a sphere to get that started i'm dropping in a cylinder which uses eight faces around to approximate a circular shape then what we can do is click on the top face and select the extrude option which essentially builds up all those same points over top of the existing shape by repeating that again we'll get another cylinder and now we have enough mesh to shape these points into a sphere i saw this technique as one of the demo images on the picocad page and i really like the chunky look of low poly round objects so i wanted to try making a pokeball from this idea once you get a higher number of points in play like this it can get tricky to resolve what you're looking at in the 3d view so it's useful that the vertices will highlight when you toggle them so you can kind of spot where they are in each of the orthographic dimensions from here i played around by stretching the shape out within the work area to get more fine control but now that i think about it i think zooming in will basically accomplish the same thing since the mesh itself is not really a finite resolution you're really just close or far to the same 3d object in a sense either way i kept moving things around to refine the sphere shape and in the end i think it came together nicely jumping ahead to the texturing my approach for the art was just to plan the solid pieces i would need which for most of this is either red or white but then i've also added in a shade tone for each of those as well as the details needed for the centerline of the button so let's just toggle on the render here and even though it's pretty simple i love how this one turned out it's got you know that low poly look it kind of reminds me of like an n64 or ps1 asset or something when i highlight the faces you can see the way that i map them onto the artwork so most of this one was about making sure that i had those faces mapped over some portion of the design elements that i provided and specifically for that main middle circle of the form i tried to keep those selection areas consistent in size so that the line going across you know wouldn't get larger and smaller as it went around here's the final animation with the dithering applied and you might have seen that i decided to shade a few of the faces along the back of the model and gave it that specular highlight up front also so the additional shading probably isn't quite necessary um but i love the look of both approaches so it's just kind of loaded up with all that rendering to have a bit of fun i can feel some of you sitting there wondering what some of the other pokeball designs would look like so here's a few more but that's all i've got in stock for the moment actually what's nice to note here is that on something like the great ball the texture artwork only needs one of the decorative pieces in the png file because you're actually able to rotate the application of that texture so it's easy enough to create rotated or mirror image pieces like this and save space in your texture designs that way so overall you know just a really fun and unique software to play around in and i'll leave links in the description for you to check it out if you're interested and i hope some of the things in this video help you to get started if you do check it out so thank you for watching and take care and keep it square you

Channel: Brandon James Greer

Views: 314,062

Keywords: pixel art, tutorial, low poly, modelling, 3d, game dev, blender, texture mapping

Id: dMX0SI5Av-8

Length: 8min 21sec (501 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021