Graphics noob question about making a game with a retro aesthetic

MamboWitch

Hello friends,

I'm working on a game and I have very little technical knowledge about the 3d modeling/texturing part of games and was hoping one of you might be able to point me in the right direction. I would love my game to have a mid to late 90's PC era look. The graphics look I'm particularly nostalgic for is seen in games like Thief 1 or the original Everquest. Primitive and low res to a degree but not as warped and buggy looking as something like Playstation 1 graphics. I recently played the demo of a game called Hellhunt on itch.io and it looked great and was close to that graphics style.

I'm wondering where to start on making my game look like this. Let's say I used more modern mixamo like models with higher polys could I just downgrade textures and put them on newer models and get some of the effect or would that look terrible? I've seen post processing effects in Unity that will pixelize your game but that seems like it's just changing the resolution. Is there some kind of post processing that would allow you to take a game with modern models/textures and turn it into that 90's blurred texture look? If I just wanted to start with retro textures what would be a good approach? Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

I've attached an example below:

poopipe

You can pixelate with a post process shader pretty easily in ue4/unity  but a lot of the look of ps1 games is in texture filtering (or lack of) and in the mesh compression(that's what causes the wobbling). This stuff is relatively easy to implement but you will need to dick around with vertex and pixel shaders to make it work. 

I've seen a few videos on YouTube that explain how ps1 graphics work so might be worth you having a bit of a search for that sort of thing.  

pior

"I'm wondering where to start on making my game look like this. Let's say I used more modern mixamo like models with higher polys could I just downgrade textures and put them on newer models and get some of the effect or would that look terrible?"

Well, why would you want to overcomplicate things to such an extent ? You might aswell just take some time to learn some modeling and texturing basics to create assets directly in the intended style, matching the specifications of the models from the era you want to emulate the look of. The numbers are likely going to be very low - and you might end up thoroughly enjoying creating models in that style. See Devil Daggers, Dusk, and so on.

Now that said there are definitely ways to bake down any model to something way more lowres - but ironically, the technical knowledge involved in doing so largely overlaps what one would need to know to create the models from scratch in the first place anyways. So overall your best bet is still to acquire some modeling skills first and foremost.

MamboWitch

That's good to know that the skill needed to downgrade is about as much to make a model in the first place. It's been hard to figure out where to start because I'm learning about a lot of new concepts at once(modeling, texturing, materials, shaders, rendering) and I'm trying to figure out where I'll get the most bang for my buck and where I can make a quick pass over things. I will start playing with some modeling though as that seems key. I have played with some of the PS1 post processing effects and they're fun but I'd like to bring the other elements of the game in line with that feeling.

There are some strange effects that old games seem to do and I can't figure out what's causing them though. For example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4W1JaWEYgyE&feature=youtu.be
As the Doom Guy moves down the hallway things appear to get brighter with him which I'm assuming is just a light source. But the textures seem to reveal strange new details as he gets close and become primitive at a distance. Is this mimapping? Shaders? Or just some strange relationship between the textures and lighting?

poopipe

I don't think doom had true dynamic lights so I suspect there's some sort of screen space effect being applied to create the effect of light around the player - that interacting with palletised images and primitive (or non existent) filtering probably accounts for a lot.
I started modding on quake  so I don't have any practical experience modding doom but theres still  a  of modders out there  so you should be able to dig out some information on a forum somewhere.
Replicating the behaviour In a pixel shader or post process shader would be relatively straightforward once you know what it's doing.

MamboWitch

Did just that and got a good answer over on some Doom forums. Apparently it's due to the lighting on the player combined with the 256 palette that Doom used. When you're right up close to the texture you're seeing it in it's full detail but as you back away the limited color palette struggles to find the range of colors it needs to make smooth transition to dark and so you get that strange artifacting. Now I just have to figure out how something like this can be done in Unity.

RN

@MamboWitch a starting point is what most game engines call the "fog" effect:

https://threejsfundamentals.org/threejs/lessons/threejs-fog.html

poopipe

I suspect the easiest solution will be to palletise your final image in a post process shader. 
That should be pretty simple to Google a solution for. 

If you combine that with palletised textures I reckon it'll get fairly close