How To Make Retro PSX Weapons (Blender/Photoshop Tutorial) transcript

So, I've been a 3D artist for about 3 years now. As I find myself improving, being able to model and texture more complex things, my appreciation for retro style graphics grows deeper. You see, every year new games were released that push the boundaries of realism. You have games like KCD2, which can easily be mistaken for real life. But as someone who has almost little to no hope ever to work in a AAA studio, and has a budget of exactly [music] $0 for my own projects, it wouldn't be realistic for me to even think about competing with that level of detail.

But the indie games community is stronger than it's ever been, and a notable style that is present in indie games is the retro PSX art style. In this video, I'm going to show you how you can make your own retro PSX game assets. We'll be creating this Desert Eagle handgun right here, from modeling to texturing. It's very easy to learn, it's very fast to create compared to modern [music] assets, and it's an absolutely timeless art style.

Now, there's two things that you'll need in order to be able to create these types of assets. Number one being Blender, and number two being Photoshop, or any other 2D image editing software. I'll leave a list of free alternatives somewhere on the screen here. No matter how low poly your model is going to be, it's always a good idea to start with a reference image. This is especially true for retro PSX style assets, because we're going to also be using them to texture.

I found this image right here on Pinterest, and I'll just be bringing it into Blender. Reset the rotation, flip it 90° along the X axis, so it's front facing, move it out of the way, straighten it up, and scale it to your needs. Now, there's many ways that you can go about modeling this. I'm just going to show you the way I do it, which is probably the wrong way. Bring in a plane, rotate it 90° along the X axis, scale it, jump in a wireframe mode, and line it up with a section of your reference.

We're going to be focusing on the bottom half of the gun first, so in edit mode just follow the general shape of our reference image, adding loop cuts where needed, extruding and moving vertices around so it gets the basic outline down. Because this is going to be a PSX asset, it doesn't have to be, you know, perfect, just be minimal with it. Once the bottom half is done, bring in a new plane for the top half, size the plane to fit, add a loop cut and drag the bottom face along the Y axis to create that angle that is on the gun.

Continue moving the verts around, adding loop cuts where needed, and again just follow the outline of the reference. After all that, you can see that my surface is a little bit uneven, looks like [ __ ] so let's fix that. So Blender actually has this built-in tool that allows us to flatten faces. You may have to enable this manually under edit, preferences, add-ons, and just search for loop tools and enable it. Now you can select the faces that you want to flatten, right click, and under loop tools select flatten.

Pretty easy. Rinse and repeat until you have every section of your gun modeled. When complete, select every part of your gun, control plus A and apply rotation and scale. Then go through and add a mirror modifier to each mesh, setting it to the Y axis, move all your parts along the Y axis while in edit mode to spread your mirror out. Then one by one, select the outer edge of each mesh, enable clipping and extrude the edge back into itself.

Enabling clipping is just going to prevent your vertices from moving past one another on the mirror modifier, so now you know. Resize the meshes that you want to be narrower in edit mode by selecting all and resizing it along the Y axis. Fine-tune any parts of the mesh that you need, then add a loop cut along this part of your gun. Select these edges here, double tap G to slide, and then slide them in a little bit. Do the same for the front of the handle and enable shade auto smooth.

This is going to add a smooth by angle modifier. Find an angle that smooths out some of the edges, but not the very sharp ones. Then move and slide some vertices around to reduce those shading artifacts. Mark any edges that you want to remain sharp and just play around with it. Now it's important to note that you can entirely this section. A lot of old retro games are notorious for having a lot of sharp edges. I just do this because I think it looks cool.

So, this is how my handle ended up after all of this. I think it looks pretty good. I added the shade auto smooth to the rest of my assets, marking out any edges that I didn't want to be smoothed out. I quickly added an eight-sided cylinder to the front of the gun just so it can act as a barrel and then delete the back face that will never be seen. You can also delete the front face, select all the front edges, and then grid fill so your Discord community doesn't roast you for having end guns.

Thanks, guys. Step three is UV unwrapping. Now that the modeling's done, we want to look to try and get some textures onto this model. But, first we need to UV unwrap. I won't go too much into detail on this subject as I've covered this in a previous video. I'll leave a link to it down in the description if you want to get to know how UV unwrapping works. But, basically when you UV unwrap, you're trying to take a 3D object, little cuts by marking seams along some of the edges, and then unwrap your mesh so that it lays down flat.

We'll then be exporting our UV layout into Photoshop, then placing our textures with UV islands are so that we can project that onto our model. Cue the 2 and 1/2 minute montage. >> Step four is texturing. Now, texturing these assets is easily the most fun part, at least for me personally. To make this step a little bit easier, we're going to be using an add-on for Blender called Auto Reload. Basically, what this is going to do is we're going to be building our texture inside of Photoshop, but at the same time we want to see if this looks good on our model while we are in the process of creating these textures.

Now, we can manually export this out from time to time and apply it to our model inside of Blender, see if it looks good, and go back and keep working. But, with Auto Reload, we can just apply our Photoshop file as a texture, and it'll sync our changes every couple of seconds. I'll leave a link to the extension in the description. Simply hit get add-on, drag and drop into Blender, enable it under edit, preferences, add-ons, Auto Reload.

You can change the refresh frequency here, as well as come over to this drop-down and hit refresh. Now, every time we make a change and save our PSD file, it'll refresh and apply inside of Blender. Now, inside of the UV editing tab, we're going to select our entire model. We're going to hit tab, and we're going to select all of our UV islands. Then, under UV, just go to export UV layout. I like to work with 1K, then drop the resolution down when I've finished up with the textures.

Hit all UVs so that it exports all the UVs, export it, and bring it into Photoshop. I'm just working on a 1024 by 1024 canvas for the time being. I'm just going to bring my UV map into there. Now, if you've never used Photoshop or any other 2D image editing software, let's do a quick crash course. We have our toolbar on the left-hand side here. There are five main tools that we're going to be using quite regularly. Number one, we have our marquee tool, which allows us to box select.

Number two, we have our lasso tool, which will allow us to cut out sections of our images. We have our magic wand, which allows us to select based on color. And number four, we have our brush to draw with. Then we also have our clone stamp tool. This allows us to sample an area of our image and draw it to another area. There are a couple of others such as blur and things like that, but they're pretty self-explanatory and easy to wrap your head around.

If we click and hold these options, it'll come up with a sub selection most of the time that we can choose from. So, the magic wand, we can go to object select mode, which will try and select an object, and just a bunch of other ones for other things. Just check them out. Now, I like to delete the background layer and replace it with a solid color. We can easily change the color of our background by double clicking the colored box and changing its color.

We can select a layer and press control and T to resize it and move it around. We can also hold alt, control, or shift while resizing it to use different sizing options. While in sizing mode, we can also click whatever the [ __ ] this thing is to subdivide it and give us more control to size more precisely. We can subdivide it again by clicking this thing over here and clicking back on our image somewhere. We can also adjust our colors by selecting the layer and pressing control plus U or control plus L, or we can come over here and select a filter.

Clipping it to the layer below will only apply it to that specific layer. You can also add a filter by selecting layer, going to filter, and then finding a filter that you like. If your layer is not a smart object, you will not be able to adjust or remove any of the changes or filters that you add to that layer. It'll simply just apply it. You'll know that it's a smart object because you'll have this little icon right here.

That's pretty much Photoshop in a nutshell. Everything that I just went over is pretty much everything that you need to be able to create retro PSX style asset textures. Now, let's make some actual [ __ ] textures. Save your Photoshop file, create a material, and apply it to all of your objects inside of Blender. Load the Photoshop file into that material, and then auto reload should refresh to auto apply those textures.

Periodically, just save the file switching back and forth between Blender and Photoshop to see how everything's looking. I'll bring in my reference image, I'll straighten it and resize it so it fits my canvas. Then I'll grab the magic wand, select the white area and hit delete. Sometimes you'll get an error if your layer is a smart object, just rasterize it and try again. If your background isn't selecting properly, play around with the tolerance or you may have to manually erase around your background.

It isn't uncommon to delete the background and then quickly go over and erase around the edges anyway to clean it up. But now I'm just cutting around sections of my gun and placing it under my UVs. Turn your UV opacity down right here if it's too distracting, but with the lasso tool just click around your handle closing it in and clicking on the starting point. Then hit control and J to duplicate your selection into a new layer, hide the main reference and position your handle in the handles UV islands.

Remember to save and refresh it so you can see how it looks in Blender. Now we have something going on but we need to be a little bit intentional of where we're putting our textures in relation to the UV islands. I would like these UVs to be the grip. I would like these UVs to be the metal. I'm just going to select the metal section from the reference with a marquee tool, copy and paste it, resize it, rotate it and drop it over the UVs that I want it to be on.

Now it's a bit of a messy process and depending on what I'm working on, I'll find myself like deleting and restarting sections quite a lot of times, but it's just one of those things where you just have to trust the process. Now I do a combination of techniques where I copy and paste sections of my texture, I'll mask out or erase sections so it fits only on the UVs that I want it to. I'll use the clone stamp tool a bit just to fill in any empty sections.

I'll cut my reference image up into like 30 different pieces and place those around. Just trying to make them fit and then try my best to blend things together. I'll play around with the brightness and levels on different sections to help things match closer. I'll turn the contrast down if I need to. Kind of realizing how difficult this is to just explain in a short video without, you know, needing to make an hour and a half long video of me just doing this in real time, but you You it's just one of those things, trust the process.

As you start filling out your UVs with textures, you can drop the image resolution down to 128 by 128 or even 256, save it and check it. Then I'll just hit control Z to undo those changes and just keep switching back and forth. But once you've finished texturing your model inside of Photoshop, you can switch the canvas size down to 128 or 256 if you want, merge all your layers and then I like to just chuck a light noise filter over the top of everything, usually at about 1 to 2% strength.

This just helps give it a really nice crunchy look. a solid color over the top, switch its blending mode to multiply and then I'll just play around with the color and opacity just to add a bit of color filter to it. But when all that's done, save your file, switch back to Blender and you should be left with a cool PSX texture. Don't forget to change your pixel interpolation down to closest inside of Blender so you get that pixelated look.

But yeah, you've just modeled and textured a PSX gun. Pretty [ __ ] sick. If you enjoyed the video, you know, leave a like, hit subscribe if you found this content helpful and also shout out to my one and only channel member, Max Painter, you mad dog. I like to keep asking people to like sign up for channel member on this channel, but I also think it's kind of hilarious just shouting out one single person at the end of all my videos, so you know, do what you want.

Go and join the Discord, hang out with a bunch of game dev and game art nerds and yeah, that's pretty much it. Thanks for watching, bye.