Hey Blender Community! I have a question and I hope you can help me out i’m done pulling my hair out. I apologize in advance if this is the wrong place to be posting this but this place seems fairly active. I will try to provide as much information as possible.
I’m sorry for the noobish question but I wish to recreate texture maps that were used back in the N64/PS1 Era days (Mostly N64). Again I’m sorry if this sounds like a “nooby” question but I can’t seem to find any information online on how they managed to get good looking textures back in the day. I’ve been searching and researching for a week now on how they made the texture maps and what the production pipeline/workflow was. If anyone worked on an N64 title back in the day could you please shed some light on this?
Most N64 textures are on average 64x64 bitmap images (Sometimes smaller or slightly bigger). However what I want to know is how big company Texture Artists/3D Artists back then made the textures, were they drawn pixel by pixel? Did they just downsize high resolution texture images? The N64 also used Mipmapping.
Here are some examples of what I’m trying to achieve, the bush and plant textures seem to be well done for their size. These are texture maps from N64 games:
https://imgur.com/a/tZrg5
For character textures what’s the point of this texture? I highlighted around the section with green. Was this made to “cheat” light reflection/gloss when applied to the 3D model?
What you are looking at is the texture for Donkey Kong from Donkey Kong 64:https://imgur.com/a/qlfBe
The Nintendo 64’s hardware had Bilinear interpolation which essentially “blurred” the texture maps, if this was not implemented the textures would essentially look like an unfiltered PS1 game, however the PS1 could store higher resolution texture maps due to the storage on the system. I don’t think production modeling software support this. How would I apply a texture map and obtain the same rendering results of the N64 instead of it looking like a pixilated mess?
If I am wrong about this please correct me. Here are some pictures and more information on Bilinear filtering: http://forum.devmaster.net/t/bilin-filtering-with-3-samples/18338/8
Here are examples without Bilinear filters:
https://github.com/gonetz/GLideN64/issues/306
Here is an image with the filter shut off on a game:
http://i.imgur.com/alKCKFT.png
How were shadow and lighting done with vertex lighting? Is it possible to recreate the look anymore? Someone made a post on this a year ago but not much was explained.
OP in the post included images:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/4wl7wo/help_resources_for_n64_style_lighting_and_shading/
Here’s some of my own that I took. Is it just standard point lights?:
Look on the floors that are “lit up” and back wall that is “dark”:
https://i.imgur.com/mA4Rct4.png
Another example, lit scene and dark scene with same assets:
https://imgur.com/a/TDxUZ
Lastly how were “reflection” effects pulled off?
Here are some examples:
Legend of Zelda Ocarina of time Mirror Shield and Majora’s Mask’s (Shield border):
Paper Mario Bush Details, Looks more “glossy” around the borders (Bushes in the background near the tree.):
Would we now in modern 3D applications just “cheat” this with glossy and reflective materials?
I apologize in advance if this is straight forward. I might be over thinking this. I hope someone can shed some light on things and help :(. Thank you for reading, I tried to be as descriptive as possible.
Also back in the day they apparently used these programs, I 110% understand it’s not the tool you use but the creator:
3D Software: Multigen, Ningen, Power Animator, Wavefront, Softimage, 3D Studio, 3DS Max/Maya, Lightwave
Texture Art: Photoshop (Very old version) and Dpaint.