What was the modeling/texturing workflow and tools used during the Playstation era?

Kyrah Abattoir

(not entirely sure if this is the right section, please move if i'm wrong)

The end of the PSX (Playstation era) of 3D graphics holds a very special part in my memories and I am currently attempting to produce some assets that are faithful to the style and limitations of that time. I started getting interested in 3D modeling back in the half-life days, but even then console and PC assets where very different and subject to different production rules.

I get this impression that, back then console development studios where extremely secretive about what they used and how they worked. If you study models from that time (if you can get any at all, getting assets out of PSX games isn't easy) you recognise some things that are very unconventional by today's standards:

• Because there wasn't any texture filtering, the textures appear to have been designed in a style that suggests that they where either hand painted at a higher resolution and then downscaled, or that they where essentially drawn like pixel artists would draw a sprite sheet.
• Console textures look suspiciously square and/or tiled, I'm not sure how to explain and only have a few models to draw references from, i assume it has something to do with memory optimization and being able to load partial sections of textures, that or maybe it is another things that transpired from the days of 2D tilesets?
• A lot of textures where 16bit "ARGB1555", which gives only 32 tones per color channel (5bits) with a 1 bit alpha. I can fake this texture compression scheme relatively well, with a posterize filter, but i haven't managed to find an 2D art package that would allow me to directly work with 32768 colors only (photoshop palettes are 256 color max).

Recently I stumbled upon a neat little art package called "crocotile3D" which appears to be a mix of pixel art and quad modeling and, to me, it sounds like something like this might have existed in the old days.

This is not really a basic modeling question, i've been modeling for quite a while, is there anyone out there who could give me some advice and/or point me towards ressources and documentations from this period of time that explain how PSX developpers used to work?

I know no one has worked on PSX titles in over 11 years now but there has to be something left especially now, considering how easily information is shared nowadays and considering most of it is not really relevant anymore for modern game assets production.

AtticusMars

Lightwave and older versions of the same software we're still using today, Maya, 3DS Max, Photoshop, etc. I doubt they really worked much differently other than yes doing pixel art style textures due to extremely limited resolution. The biggest gamechangers in the way people have worked have really been ZBrush/Normal Maps and Substance Designer imo.

Edit: Should note also that a lot of studios relied heavily on inhouse software and tools

Kyrah Abattoir

in the case of the psx not having floating points, i've seen that most model uvs have whole pixel placements, so that's one thing but still they usually looked very weird, today most modelers will try to aim for least deformation on the UVs while back then, by the look of it it was "try to pack it as a square".

Unless i'm missing something obvious.

AtticusMars

People still sometimes try to unwrap things as rectangular as possible, World of Warcraft did this for a long time (may still do it).

When you're working under strict memory limitations utilizing all of your available texture space can be worth the sacrifice in some distortion. Just speculation on my part but probably also important for the PSX due to the lack of texture filtering, having the edges of pixels crossing seams at angles probably makes them a lot more noticeable.

Kyrah Abattoir

Yeah I figured that might be a thing too.

There isn't that many PSX models available on models-resource.com unfortunately so all i can really base myseld on for humanoids is what was done in FF8.
On the flipside i suppose that, since UV seams along a pixel lines makes them pretty much invisible, so you can have a lot more seams?
I wonder if back then modelers where also texturers, some of those textures have those things that make it look like the model was adapted to the texture sometimes, and in others it was the opposite.

And any way to force Photoshop or another art tool to 5 bits per channel?

pior

some of those textures have those things that make it look like the model was adapted to the texture sometimes

When working with very low polygon models and very low resolution textures there is no way around it, both go hand in hand and have to be tackled non-linearly, all at the same time. It's actually very satisfying !

Bellsey

Well back in the day it wasn't that games development was secretive, the amount of websites and social media wasn't at the level that it is now. Many like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc didn't even exist.

I was working at Psygnosis at the time. We used Softimage3D and Alias PowerAnimator as our main 3D packages. But there was alot of 3ds Max being used at the time. There wasn't really a great deal of tools either, the art creation was kinda 'pure' in that you modelled, UV mapped (no real auto unwrap), textured and exported the data to a programmer who would make it work. It was only when we go to PS2 did the need for more varied tools arose, and a more significant bridge between art and code was needed.

The PS1 could do 8 and 16bit textures, but we mainly stuck to 8bit. One of the biggest issues was the PS1s VRAM, it was only 1mb, which didn't give you alot of room to play with. 
You could do 256 x 256 textures (which was the maximum texture page), but it was actually more economical to make smaller textures of 16x16, 32x32, and with a smaller number of colours. Those would then be used for different parts of a model. This pretty much became standard practice.

Photoshop was ok-ish for doing textures, but I know many guys used bitmap tools like DPaint or Animator Pro, because they were very good at doing animated textures and sprites.

Poly counts were low with characters only being 200-400 polys. With things like levels and environments, we'd have to make use of huge polys instead of subdividing down. But then when you took smaller textures and then used them on huge polys, you get a 'warping' effect. If you look at some PS1 games, you'll see it, there wasn't much we could really do about it, but as time went on, towards the end of the PS1s life the visual quality of many games was getting to be really very good.

Loboto3

I know no one has worked on PSX titles in over 11 years now but there has to be something left especially now, considering how easily information is shared nowadays and considering most of it is not really relevant anymore for modern game assets production.

I still work on PSX titles, my engine directly targets that system. It's an interesting console, with its own set of weird stuff to work around limitations of all sorts.

This is not really a basic modeling question, i've been modeling for quite a while, is there anyone out there who could give me some advice and/or point me towards ressources and documentations from this period of time that explain how PSX developpers used to work?

You can still use most modern software to produce faithful PSX assets, assuming somebody can also provide converters for the task (kind of trivial, there are plenty of open source libraries and documentation).
As for what developers used back in the day, it was mostly commercial software with a few huge plugins provided by Sony (for LightWave, 3D Studio Max, and Photoshop iirc).
In a few cases developers would come up with entirely custom solutions, like CORE did with Tomb Raider games. CORE had editors for pretty much everything, even animations, no matter what backend converters/plugins Sony provided with their SDK.

Kyrah Abattoir

You still target the PSX? Can you tell more?

Also are there any internal documentations from back then (squaresoft, konami or others?) that are okay to share now tho? I've never seen anything of the like.