Beginning my Blender Blunders
Over the last 2-3 months I’ve been clearing my videogame backlog of big ticket items. Games like Metal Gear Solid, Chrono Cross and Klonoa, all PS1 era classics. I find that these games all have an abstract low-poly charm associated with the models and it got me thinking; how hard would it be to make a model like this for myself? So I set out to acquire and understand the tools needed to create something like this for myself.
This article will condense about a week’s worth of dedicated effort, learning and practicing Blender. If, for some deranged reason, you are playing along at home, don’t expect to jump in from nothing and create something great.
For my first step into blender I followed a video tutorial step by step, applying mirroring modifiers, extrude, “cutting loops” and otherwise manipulating vertices and faces to produce a reasonable facsimile of a human being. Afterwards, whilst working on other models, I referred to models from existing games to get an idea of what was accomplished by mesh geometry and what was done with textures. This was relatively quick, however it led on to the first stumbling block, which was texturing.
The basic workflow. Note: I cheated a bit and created a vest to sit on the model. It was not achieved solely by textures.
The biggest problem I encountered with texturing was the unintuitive series of menus used to apply a texture. Note that this is a Texture and not a Material. What is the difference? I don’t know. You will probably notice in the above image that some of the textures are more blurry than others. This is because I was aiming to imitate (not replicate) a PSX/ PSP graphical style. From my reading, developers using these systems limited themselves to texture sizes of 128x128, with 64x64 pixels being more common. Supposedly the maximum texture size a PSP can display is 1024x1024. For this reason, although my source images were often high resolution (looking at you 4k jean texture), I elected to downsize them to 128x128 - 256x256, which I felt was an adequate compromise. The above image shows a character model featuring multiple textures, each stored as a separate image. I had read that in order to minimise storage sizes developers in the PSX era would often save a character’s textures as a single image which would wrap onto the character model. To this end I created a very simple cartoonish character to attempt this with myself.
The “skin” was created in paint, before I had even started work on the model, which was perhaps a mistake. It was only afterwards that I realised that this texture set incorporates the flag of the Netherlands. I was dissatisfied with the end result, everything looks far too flat, despite my (weak) attempt to incorporate shading into the skin from the beginning. In some of the tutorials I had watched the tutor had drawn directly on the character model, adding detail to the texture as required. It took me almost a full day to figure out how to do this, because blender will not allow you to draw a texture on an untextured surface, you must draw on an existing texture. This prompted me to start a new project file in order to practice drawing directly on a textured model.
As is so often the case, the hardest step is the first and this was picking a colour to act as a base layer for the skin. After a couple of false starts which resulted in jaundice and Oompa-Loompa colours, I arrived at the colour I had in mind and (very lightly) shaded this with a darker tone. Going darker still, I added shadow under the brow, opting not to draw a proper eye. For the hair and facial hair, I initially used a dark brown, but his was again far too flat. The solution was to draw individual hairs of grey, orange, yellow and mauve on top of the brown layer, then using the soften tool, blend them into a colour which appears solid, but is actually a composite of the listed colours. the boundary between hair and skin was smeared and then softened to reduce the Lego hairpiece appearance. Lastly, using the same softening technique I applied multiple shades to the beret, consistent with a light source above and ahead.
It’s still early days in Blender for me, but one of the things I liked about it was that at its most basic level, texturing is essentially virtual miniature painting. I also created some non- character assets, mostly buildings, so expect to see a part 2 in the near future.
