Turning 2D pixel art into a 3D diorama using Blockbench

[Music] hello there my name is Brandon and I make pictures out of tiny squares and in previous videos you may have seen me playing around with blockbench which you can use to make 3D models and paint pixelar textures onto their surface when you do this that painted texture gets saved as a PNG image and it's kind of like this unfolded view of all the faces of those 3D forms and it occurred to me that there's actually an opportunity here for us to manually edit the PNG texture file and pop in some already finished artwork and have that map onto a 3D surface and kind of create like a bit of a scene from it like a diarama so today I wanted to explore that workflow using a couple of screenshots that I've grabbed from Kirby's Dreamland 2 for the Game Boy and we'll get started with a really simple proof of concept just to even show you what I'm kind of talking about here so I'm going to set up a simple model to have that title screenshot appear onto I'll create a new mesh and I'll select the plane option uh for the size or the diameter as it's called here this is measured in pixels so I'll put in 160 since that's the larger dimension of our screenshot and then click confirm so you can see now we've got a 160x 160 plane which is basically this flat sheet of paper kind of thing uh I'm going to rotate this up by 90° because I want to have the game screen kind of propped up like that with the object selected we come over here to the create texture button and this is going to allow us to paint on the surface of this plane I'm going to leave everything just set to the defaults and after clicking confirm this is now ready for artwork uh we can't really tell right now because the default uh appearance here is mostly white but if I grab the brush tool you can see that I'm able to draw on this now and the resolution within that plane is 160 x60 so what I'll do is click here to save the PNG and then I can hop over to photoshop and open that file so the entire canvas we got here is 256 pixel square but we can see that the actual a area for that map plane itself is that 160 that we measured out for the model now I'll pop over my Kirby title screenshot and select the entire thing and copy it and then paste it into the texture PNG and when it's lined up in that corner you can see that there's a little bit of excess at the bottom here and that's just because the height of the Game Boy resolution is only 144 pixels so there is a 16 pixel uh extra like difference there but that's all right if we actually just delete that spot or turn off that layer of the file then this piece won't actually even show up in the final model now I'm going to save this as a new file uh you could overwrite the original but just as a general practice I like to have access to previous versions so I'll save this as a PNG and name it as version two back over in blockbench we can right click on the texture file name and then select change file from the list I'll locate version two and we can see that it updates with that title artwork now now this in and of itself isn't particularly interesting um but it does kind of show just like the proof of concept for how to work with editing existing artwork into a texture file so let's try to make it a bit more interesting and dimensional from here back in the editor I'm going to repeat the same workflow as before by starting with a plain object with a 160 pixel diameter except this time I'm going to resize it first to be the exact dimensions of the Game Boy screen and we can do that easily by changing the selection mode to the edge option and then clicking on the bottom Edge and dragging it up by 16 pixels so I'm shrinking that height from 160 to 144 while leaving the width unchanged at its original 160 next I'll duplicate this shape a couple times and offset these from the original and that way we've got a total of three planes now kind of spaced out from each other and these are going to represent different layers that we can separate the title artwork onto to give it some Dimension after creating the texture you can see that we've now got three of those layers represented it up there and just so that I know which one is which I'm going to use the brush tool to label them as the front middle and back layer um I guess numbers would also work here I've gone for BMF but you know whatever you want to do here back in Photoshop we can paste in the title screenshot again and this time we get to decide which elements will appear on which layer so I think for the back layer I'll just do the plain white with the credit for the middle maybe I'll isolate that Kirby Sprite and the push start to together as one asset and then that leaves the full title artwork to pop out as the front layer for each of these I'm also making sure to delete all the excess white space around and in between the Sprite work and the letters all right so if we change the file out now uh we've got this slightly more dimensional version of the title art I was thinking looking at this that it probably doesn't need the solid white backdrop if we were to just make the entire background that color so I've made this new version which does does just that uh and also uses a total of five planes and this actually allowed me to separate out some of the stars and the other shapes there to make it feel a bit more Dynamic and filled out and also obviously just having a bit more fun uh with a more fitting color palette as well so that's all well and good to play around with the planes but now if we actually think about that screenshot from the level itself uh it'd be interesting to create some of this terrain as actual 3D boxes that we can map the artwork on to all sides of it so for this I started by measuring approximately how large each of the assets should be and generally tried to round things off to multiples of eight or 16 just because I know that that's where the tile repeats would fit I'm going to start by creating a large platform for the bottom so I'll create a cuboid with a diameter of 160 and a height of 16 pixels I don't think I want the whole level to recede to a depth of 160 so I'm going to select one of the faces on the sides and contract it by 64 pixels so this is leaving a platform that's 160 pix wide 96 deep and then 16 tall and this is actually going to be like a base and that's going to have the score HUD mapped onto it from here I dropped in other cubes for the actual terrain and again the sizing here is based on the rounded measurements from the screenshot uh the most important thing was just kind of matching the width and the height that we know from the screenshot and then for the depth I just tried to stretch them to a level that I thought looked all right on top of the platform and something that would also fit like a multiple of 16 so that the tile art would fit perfectly to Finish the build I'm going to place in some planes just like before and this is where all the various Sprite art can be placed uh you could also go the route of dropping individual smaller planes for each Sprite uh like a separate one for Kirby separate one for the enemies and the items and all that kind of stuff but I did it this way because I thought it'd be easy enough just to change the position like that just by editing the texture file rather than manipulating the model and I kind of like the Simplicity here of just constraining those sort of details to like one of five predetermined layers now that we're working with more components compared to the earlier example uh it's going to be especially important to label the faces so that we know what everything is supposed to be when it's all flattened out into a texture sheet uh I'm going to do this by color coding each of the shapes so we can choose this paint bucket tool here and then set the fill mode to element and this fill mode is going to drop that color into all faces of a singular object with just one click so I'm going to go through and set each shape to be a different color and that way it'll be more clear on the texture page where that artwork is supposed to go of course this is actually only half the information that we need because we also want a way to tell uh what exact face of the object it is so again I'm going to go through with the brush and just label each of the faces like front left right Etc and that way we have everything kind of coded in this way um the full thing you know maybe looks a bit chaotic but honestly this was the best way I could think of and this worked out well enough for me to just reference where everything was going to end up so taking a look at that texture file in Photoshop we can see all the faces of every object from that build kind of just mixed together here and now it's just a matter of breaking down the screenshot and placing all the pieces into these boxes I'm going to start by grabbing one of the larger platforms which was a 64x 64 along the front and just kind of copying that artwork over into all the green areas because that original one has some overlap with another platform we just need to patch over this area by copying the artwork into that spot and when you're working with the Game Boy stuff this is really straightforward because the Game Boy tiling always sort of breaks down into an 8 by8 grid so it's just a matter of copying those same repeated patterns to patch it over I'm curious to see how the Sprite planes are going to work out so I'm also going to grab uh the Cirby Sprite and drag that over into the middle plane and then erase all the excess and the final one I'm going to try for now are these 16x16 star boxes uh since they can actually just be kind of like a simple copy paste onto every side of it so let's go over to blockbench and just make sure we're on the right track with this all right so it looks like Kirby came in a little bit low I think I dragged the Sprite by an extra 16 pixels than I needed to um but otherwise this is looking pretty promising uh I'm going to keep assigning the textures in the same way uh since we had a few different patterns for the terrain and then I got to toss in that HUD graphic as well and it's just sort of a matter of like bouncing back and forth between the programs to make sure that everything comes in the way that you expect it to so I'm going to keep building this up and maybe finish by tossing in a few of the enemy Sprites as well they weren't on the original screenshot but they are part of the level and yeah so let's just go ahead and take a look at the final thing here we [Music] go all right one of the last things I did was just bring in some of those little star and circle shapes from the title screen I was just kind kind of looking for something that would give a bit more decoration to dress things up and kind of show off the depth of the Sprite planes here uh it's kind of neat just altogether to kind of see this other dimension from that original image and this turned out to be just another fun way to use blockbench as well uh so let's go ahead and close out with some CRT time so thank you for watching and take care and keep it [Music] square [Music] [Music]

Channel: Brandon James Greer

Views: 65,214

Keywords: pixel art, timelapse, speedpaint, tutorial, blockbench, 3d model, modelling, blender, diorama, minecraft

Id: 133Qk9kVyVA

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2024