Trying to create 90s PC Game styled renders in Daz Studio

ghastlycomic

First attempt at doing it. Anyone had good success capturing that old school look?

Drip

Hmm, if I recall, 90's games had very little detail, normals-mapping (for smooth curves) was only introduced in the late 90's, while nurbs were introduced in the early 90's, but more used for raytracing than for gaming. This meant that curves on models required an insane amount of polygons, and since that was a problem as well, the usual approach was low poly, using painted shadows on textures to give the impression of curvature. A designer who came up with a 600 poly bench, was, without exception, sent back to the drawing table, to get it below 100 polys, and that was already a lot..

So, you'd need even less polys in your scene, and make things a little bit more "blocky".

For characters, many "3D" games actually used a technique very similar to the Now-Crowd Billboards. That, or they used something low poly and blocky.

Mind you, because of the much lower resolution (800x600), edges looked less sharp than they would have looked on a modern rig.

The chibi-bot looks cute, by the way. That head slightly swinging left and right reminds me of Twiki from Buck Rogers. ^_^

ghastlycomic

I should probably turn the smoothing off on the models too. I bet baking the lighting to a 128pixel texture would help too except Daz antialiases the textures. I lost a lot of the jagginess just because Premier Elements antialiases the video when it upscales it. I wish bicubic scaling was an option.

outrider42

Actually, games in the mid 90's could pack in surprising detail. It was the low res models that hurt most. Models had like a couple hundred polygons at most, which is super pitiful. I don't know how far Decimator will go, but you could try that if you have it. A lot of games were not fully 3D, they used 2D sprites in places. Doom is a perfect example. All the characters were sprites. Quake came along and blew people's minds by being mostly 3D. But models were super low poly. You can practically count the polys on them.

Baked shading is a good idea.

You could render at SD resolution, not 800x600. This might help pixelate things more. Does Photoshop have something that can replicate CRT scanlines? That might work, too.

ghastlycomic

I was rendering at 320x240 then letting Premiere rescale it to get the jaggies.

 

mwokee

It'd be a lot easier to go back a few more years and emulate Zork or Infocom games. :-)

Type 0 Negative

Render as usual then run the finished image through this. https://nevercenter.com/pixelmash/

ghastlycomic

mwokee said:

It'd be a lot easier to go back a few more years and emulate Zork or Infocom games. :-)

What? And risk getting eaten by a grue? I don't think so.

 

Type 0 Negative said:

Render as usual then run the finished image through this. https://nevercenter.com/pixelmash/

Now that looks interesting.

nomad-ads_8ecd56922e

ghastlycomic said:

mwokee said:

It'd be a lot easier to go back a few more years and emulate Zork or Infocom games. :-)

What? And risk getting eaten by a grue? I don't think so.

That is why you always bring a good, powerful flashlight or lantern with you. :D :D

 

Type 0 Negative

ghastlycomic said:

mwokee said:

It'd be a lot easier to go back a few more years and emulate Zork or Infocom games. :-)

What? And risk getting eaten by a grue? I don't think so.

 

Type 0 Negative said:

Render as usual then run the finished image through this. https://nevercenter.com/pixelmash/

Now that looks interesting.

there is a free trial, I don't have time for it now, I hope in the near future to try it, if you give it a try please post your results here

ghastlycomic

So I did a double experiment today. One was a little more retro styled graphics rendering. The other was musical.

There was a Google Doodle the other day to celebrate J.S. Bach's birthday. It was an AI where you enter in a melody and it generates a Bach styled alto, tenor and bass part for it. You can download the result as a MIDI file. But it only lets you generate 2 bars of music. So I entered in the melody two bars at a time, downloaded them all and then spliced them together in a MIDI sequencer and sent the MIDI file to Caustic (a Synth Rack emulator for Android, Windows and iOS) and asigned the parts to different synths and saved it as a WAV file.

So if you want free music soundtracks and don't mind a bit of splicing the Bach AI Google Doodle is fun. https://www.google.com/.../celebrating-johann-sebastian-bach

And now the results of my experiment.