#holopink text

[holographicpiink]

Hi! im starting in this world of pixel art in 3d, ive seen your work like the eyes you posted today and i wanna know if you can sahre a little bit of knowledge of how can i make organic model without stretchingthe pixelated texture! cuz i cant find a good workflow to deal with this :( thank you and love your work!~

ABSOLUTELY I WILL TELL YOU!!! i love talking about 3D!!!

for example, this is the model i just posted-- minus the eyebrow mesh and the transparency! everything that's an obnoxious color isn't being handled by a texture, and everything else is usually just molded around until it looks right

ideally we'd go through the whole modeling process with references and stuff, but that's an ENTIRE new can of worms and it's a lot of pushing verts back and forth, so for an example, let's say i'm ready to apply a texture, and i'd like to start with the eye. what i would do is select the entire eyemask area, and project it from the camera, and then turn the texture back on.

now that we've got this piece of the mesh isolated, we can work on getting it to match up with our texture! the area is purposefully square since we know the eye is going to be pretty square itself, so we go in and resize the UVs to match the texture!

the camera projection gets super close, but not quite all the way there, since the mesh wasn't perfectly square to camera. so we go in and line up the UV edges to pixel edges. you DO have pixel grid snapping options, but if you zoom into your UV window far enough with grid snap on, it should snap to pixels pretty effectively.

and then unfortunately, this is the part of the recipe where they say "add salt to taste," because there's not really a right solution to it-- so i recorded a quick gif of me just doing it. you just have to kind of smudge the edges and get the UVs and the mesh to agree on a place where the pixels look just square enough to get away with trying to say it's pixel art.

but that's the basic principle of how i approach textures like these:

-decide what's very important and has to be straight

-get the rest close enough and if it looks right, it's right

-rules are fake

[holographicpiink]

Hey Kelsey! I was curious, since you're a low poly / pixel art wizard, I was curious if you could help me out with something I've been thinking about with my Azumi model. Right now I'm using a simple UV Mapping node to swap between a texture atlas for her expressions. It's simple to set up, but not very dynamic. I'd like to try something a bit more flexible, but the fact that her eyes are just whites against a mask is a bit different than a traditional eye setup. Do you have any ideas on how to make this a bit more flexible while still staying in the ballpark of the PSX look?

aw jeez, i wouldn't call myself a wizard though any stretch of the imagination 😫 but you could always try some techniques that come from games like crash and spyro? especially since your renders end up resolution crunched, it should still fit the aesthetic you want!

i grabbed these from the models resource just to demonstrate-- from crash 1(who looks to be ENTIRELY vertex colors) on the left and crash 2(very visibly has cool new texture eyes and eyebrows) on the right: if i remember without doing a bunch of research offhand, "Crash was animated entirely in-engine via vertex animation" in this twitter thread!

all this to circle the drain around the idea you could replace the white texture eyes against her mask with mesh planes and really not be straying too far away from the idea of PS1 limitations.

PLUS! if you look at things like MMD models, you can shrink some extra pieces inside the head if you decide you'd like little extra over the top comic book emotions; i can't find any good screenshots but if you open MMD models in blender there's a bunch of good examples all driven by shapekeys(you can probably do the same in maya, but i don't know the exact process to open MMDs there)

i also just woke up so like if this makes absolutely 0 sense, lemme know and i can try to make a more visual explanation of what i'm trying to convey!

[holographicpiink]

pokemon scarlet and violet, more like pokemon dog and more dog