/vr/ - Retro Games

Those SGI Workstations had a style all their own. The attempt at creating something "real" but still very much limited by the technology caused the end product to fall in the crack between cartoon and real life, resulting in something uniquely whimsical. And since nobody is trying to recreate it like they are 8-bit and 16-bit sprites it's an artform that existed for only a few years.

Unfortunately you can't maintain the feeling by making it more and more realistic. You have to stop at some point. That plastic sheen is critical to making it feel right.

>>7338521
The fact that it's old and you remember it.
Some feel the need to call that combination "soul" for some reason

>>7338521
Dark shadows high contrast, casting self shadows, lighting are easy on the eyes and didn't have some bloom filling the whole screen, perfectly antialiased. All lighting and shading are baked in so you don't have to rely on pathetic modern game engines to shit out blocky shadows, texture compression, artifacting and dithered alpha transparencies, shit TXAA implementation that blurs the fuck out of everything. Prerendered SGI graphics are just perfect.

>>7338521
Unironically the lighting. What most people don't realize is that prerendered graphics from back in the day used lighting effects like ray tracing that are still too computationally expensive to use in realtime games today. Maybe by the 10th generation consoles we'll have advanced enough tech to have lighting as good as these pics in modern games.

>>7338651
>>7338658
Those are just traits of the images for what the tech was able to do back then. It's not what makes them "charming" as OP labels it, but it does neatly date them in a very specific frame of time which you remember fondly for unrelated reasons.

>>7338521

>>7338521
Because they were more stylized and less focused on "ULTRA SUPER REALISTIC"

>>7338658
i think theres a bit of uncanniness that i appreciate, beyond just nostalgia, theres also the element of naivete and seeing the seems of the creation process because its rudimentary compare to the hiperreal stuff we see now, i always have an exra level of suspension of disbelief when something looks cartoony rather than realistic, as if that is its own world with its own rules.

>>7338521
The fact that they had to try harder to get the scene looking good because they were working with less. If Nintendo were to make Ocarina of Time in 2021, it would look far better on a technical level, but the lighting, fog, and color palette wouldn't hit the same vibe at all.

>>7338521
Each one had their own engine, making it genuine and unique.

>>7338707
>more stylized
That's largely unintentional though, only perceived as such with the perspective of how the technology has advanced. They made the lighting and shading as realistic as they could at the time.

>>7338712
I wouldn't call it naivete 2bh. There were people able to make the most of the limitations much more gracefully than others working at the same time. The best didn't get too excited about the technology just because it was knew and uderstood its limitations while making the most of them.

>>7338521
No subsurface scattering, material properties, low res materials etc coupled with ray tracing give this look.

>>7338679
If you want an explanation of the "charm", it's because of the imperfections and making the most use out of lo-tech

>>7338658
I think its the combination effect of really good lighting being used on comparatively shitty models and textures. It's a weird mix of tech because as real time lighting got better so did the rest of the visuals. Like when FFVII came out I remember talking to friends about how in the future imagine a game where the whole game looked like the FMVs. But by the time that was technically possible the game wasn't going to look like FFVII's FMVs anymore.

>>7338679
I don't think it can just be written off as nostalgia. PS1 era CGI isn't just an older version of PS5's in the same way PS2 era CGI is. It's fundamentally different artistically. Like comparing paintings of the same thing by two different artists.

>>7338872
But that's what's being done now. We just don't know it yet.

>>7338763
>That's largely unintentional though, only perceived as such with the perspective of how the technology has advanced. They made the lighting and shading as realistic as they could at the time.
The failure to fully accomplish that goal is crucial though. They created a niche of CG artwork by accident only to promptly abandon it once more accurate realism became possible. That abandoned branch of artistry, where the tech advancements enhanced the style without fundamentally changing it, really only was maintained by the Toy Story sequels.

>>7338735

>>7338582
This.

Also creativity bred through limitation, yadayadayada.

>>7338924
I'm not sure where this notion of the CG work done in this period of time being encapsulated as "its own thing" (as also suggested here >>7338912) comes from.

It was just literally the state of the art at that time; the principles and technology that came afterwards are an evolution of it, and in turn the whole thing comes from principles that go as far back as the 70s . I think the most notable global shift, common ground-wise was phasing out NURBS curve-based surfaces in favor of mesh model-based Subdivision Surfaces, but that was already happening by the late 90s. I don't remember when the SIGGRAPH paper the Pixar people wrote about it was published, but I don't think it was much later than 1997.

All of the traits that define the look of these images are not a result of a radically different paradigm that was abandoned for a different path. It IS the same path, but waaaay further along.

>>7339092
The goal didn't change, true. They were always just trying to make things look as real as possible. But the limitations where they existed, things like poly counts and texture fidelity, caused them to produce something that wasn't fully cartoon or fully real. Obviously they just kept making things look more and more real from there and we're where we are today. But hypothetically it would have been possible to maintain the artistic consistency of those renders while also making them look better as technology moved on. Like it would be technically possible to remake Final Fantasy VII and make it look like the original FMVs even in real time with even better lighting, animation, etc. without also making it look increasingly realistic like Advent Children and FFVII Remake did.

The best analogy I can think of is PC-98 anime. It's trying so hard to replicate an actual cartoon but it's held back by the resolution and tiny palette. Nobody does this anymore because now they can just do the thing as intended, no need to hold back. But it leaves the product of those original limitations as an orphaned artform. A "real" anime is not going to be able to reproduce what PC-98 games looked like. Sure, you could say "well it's the same thing except now it's better" but that "better" necessarily deviates from the sentiment that is generated from the original artform.

>>7338521
Cost and time.
The expense meant they used it when it would work well.
Then there was the dark age when they make everything 3d no matter how bad it looked.
Now we're in the darkest age where everything is 3d and people more or less successfully apply textures to make it look like 2d animation.

>>7339184
>they used it when it would work well
This is the optimistic general principle, which was almost NEVER true. They used it because it was a novelty and novelty attracted attention.

>>7338521
no light bouncing means you have to manually place the light on any part of the scene you don't want to be black.
Thereby creating the difference between taking a photo in a room that happens to not be dark, and designing all the lighting - i.e. what makes a movie frame look good and a random pic of the same location look mundane.

>>7339151
>poly counts
you're talking about a style that has a million times more polys than game graphics. the whole deal with this style is ultra-high polycount, ultra high-res, ultra-lowres textures and simplified lighting

what made 1996 so charming?

I feel it was more the sudden leap from 16 to 32 bit era into 64 bits and beyond. It was such a technological marvel to suddenly see real 3D in games after seeing 2.5D or lower resolution. For so long. It was a huge leap forward, and we were in awe of that.

>>7339348
I don't know the specific specs of the end product. The best I can do is point at an image that resembles what's being talked about and saying "that."

>>7339463
Did that cathedral get further away?

>>7339463
Prague is so fucking comfy

>>7339549
Different lenses crunch perspective in different ways anon

>>7338582
>>7338604
>>7338651
>>7338658
So, how could one emulate this art style using something like photoshop or digital painting? Are there any sites or resources out there? Surely some people have to know how to recreate this style somewhere. What would we even call this style? 90s 3d?

>>7339601
Could probably just call it Silicon Graphics since it was their workstations that produced it 99% of the time. I'm sure reproducing it is as simple as figuring out what the SGI Workstations of the era were limited to and how much rendering time the devs of the day were willing to allow for. Then an artist could just hold themselves to those limits even in current software like Blender or 3D Studio Max.

The primitive textures, models, effects, physics, polygons, vibrant color palette, blurryness, etc., they all do it for me. They all contribute to a unique artistic experience. I think the aspect of limitation plays a big role in that.

I find joy looking at the jaggies and pixels in MGS. N64/PS1-style graphics are my favorite by far, it's a special aesthetic. I wish more people would appreciate it.

>>7339601
A lot of the things of that era have that same look because they all used the same SGI workstation

>>7339620
I love how 3D on all three systems each had a different personality. The Saturn looked janky as shit and couldn't be confused for something on PS1 or N64 and vice versa.

>>7339620
IMO, Pokémon Stadium is a bad example of that aesthetic because the N64 basically only had to render the Pokémon models, and nothing else, so while these graphics are definitely dated, they are closer in spec to 6th gen. This is something that is peak OP's mentioned aesthetic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSweaD7PWqw

>>7339601
they are low poly renders, still more polys than in game models but not enough for real deep texture or alphas. The lighting is also very direct, they were still struggling with universal illumination so theres low detail in terms of ambient occlussion, sub surface scaterring and bounced lights, what they couldn't do with lights they just used on the model itself as a photo texture wrapping around the polygon face. Each one of these things must have taken quite a while to bake back then too so it was all about being clever and minimalistic with forms

>>7339654
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYZKbznl0Ds
Pandemonium originally had a gloss lighting effect that looked better on saturn.
It's the little things, man.

>>7339665
sorry but this is retard babble. you literally have no idea what you're talking about

>>7339601
just use phong shading and single light source

>>7339672
Dilate

>>7339549
focal length

>>7339658
It's like being in a yuppie's home theater as he shows off his new Laserdisc player.

>>7338582
Don't get any ideas about collecting SGI stuff, those workstations will still break the bank and the kind of nerds that are into these, have unlimited tech money.

>>7338521
Developers wanted to do more than the technology would allow, and since necessity is the mother of invention you got a solid decade of incredibly inspired work that had to be held together with gum in order to function.

>>7339670
>No transparencies
>"Here's an arrow so you know you can go there"

Is there any reason why indie developers emulate the style of NES/SNES/GBA shit but not this PS1/N64 shit? Are there any new games out there that have this style? The low poly indie shit I see is all modern looking in that generic cell shaded boring style.

>>7339832
because it's easier to make and easier to market and the ROI is about the same

>>7339832
Go be the change you want to see in the world

>>7339832
low poly just started coming back. give it a few years to grow

>>7339832
>>7339845
>>7339851
There's a trend right now to make quake and doom inspired "boomer shooters", like Dusk, Amid Evil, and Ion Fury which is aping roughly the same time period so im sure its only a matter of time before someone makes a PSX looking RPG or a N64 looking platformer

>>7339832
There's some PS1 inspired games but I forgot what they were called. It's mostly early 3D accelerated PC game lookalikes >>7339883
.

>>7339883
there was an asian dude that made a silent hill clone type of game, with woobly textures and all, but the game didn't look very good, The idea was there though, its out there

you will enjoy Videopix C.G.I. Film
https://youtu.be/4GOJgBxMM6Q

>>7339883
is not a bad idea but i think if i made a game i would make an art directing based on how i wanted games to look when i was a kid, not based on how games literally look when i was a kid.

With boomer fps it works better because the boomers that played those games can't tolerate anything else that is not a doom clone that looks just like that, is an autistically hyperfocused scene. So if someone wanted to make a new indie inspired low poly game they should probably try to frame it on a specific niche where autist still crave for that one thing.

>>7339997
I'm kind of in the same boat, but I yearn for a game that looks the way pre-rendered backgrounds did.

>>7339871
This. The 80s is just starting to fade and the early 90s are in vogue now. Give it a few years and we'll see Y2K nostalgia.

>>7338521
The novelty of them since we'd grown up with nothing but 2D art. They look like shit now but with our nostalgic lenses in we enjoy them.

>>7340146
>Give it a few years and we'll see Y2K nostalgia
Many boards currently house threads that earnestly express y2k nostalgia - right now it is growing in rediscovery and new appreciation, right alongside the late 90s cgi, rendered and realtime. It is excellent, to me, because 3dcg should not have end goals for the medium from an artistic approach. the styles carved by past limitations are objectively stylish and valuable with or without the limitation component. 3d is a baby medium, and I look forward to the shake ups and branching paths we will get to see going forward

>>7340162
I think the shitty resolution is what fucks them over since upscaling always makes it look like shit. Had the devs kept the original assets instead of discarding them we'd be having a totally different conversation. Seeing the pre-rendered games of the day get reskinned at modern resolutions would be mindblowing. Imagine Donkey Kong Country or FFVII backgrounds in high res. DKC would actually look like the marketing materials. I think there's an AI that's supposedly reconstructing FFVII but I'm not sure how good it is.

>>7339601
Better question: would it be possible to make a game that's fully playable in that style with modern computers? (As opposed to that style just being used for prerendered backgrounds and cinematics.)

>>7340226
Yes...sort of. You'll be able to tell the difference but it can get damn close. Toy Story in Kingdom Hearts III is a good benchmark.

>>7340226
just use the same polycount limitations those devs had. The in game model on a modern mario game probably has millions of more polys than the model used for those old renders

>>7340072
just make sure you understand the difference between an 'image' and a scene. a screen in a game with a free camera can never look like a composed image - because even if you the player spend the time to compose by camera placement, the lights in the scene will never designed for that one camera angle, the way they are in an image.
so fixed camera games is the only possibility for it to actually have the magic look of a pre-render, in which case it might as well be pre rendered.

>>7338521
They weren't charming, we went from identifiable cartoony drawings to vague origami shapes. It was miserable for like the first half of 5th gen at least.

>>7340243
dumb fuck doubling down even though you already had it explained to you that the 90s SGI renders are extremely high poly count. They used absurd amounts of polys but almost no other tech. The anon way up thread is even wrong when he says 'perfect anti-aliasing'. they didn't even need to anti alias because there we so many polys that shit was smooth

>>7338582
Everyone sighs and sobs over images like this but nobody watches Spirits Within which is a whole movie in this style

>>7340243
I think >>7340226 was talking about the pre-render buckshots rather than the models used in the games being developed at the time. Because the buckshot art renders either used much HIGHER polygon meshes, or NURBS a lot of the time, for simpler geometry. the model can be infinitely smooth using NURBS, but it has limitations


Here is a cool tip. Look at the pillar/wall on the metal mario render posted>>7338763
>color
>bump
>roughness
>specular
All using image textures, in a stack. Pixar at the time was using a more advanced variant of this, think of it like the precursor to Procedural materials. A "smarter" version of the image texture pipeline. Noise-based variants of bumps and tiled images. The metal mario render is using non-real time ray traced lighting reflections with no Ambient Occlusion- A bit of bloom. And the colors appear washed as if it were a magazine scan... This could be the case, or it could have to do with the color space used in the render. I'm not sure really.

You can achieve some of this look using Blender's 2.79 Game engine rendering. Some of it can be achieved with Blender's modern Cycles engine. A lot of it has to do with simplicity in your pipeline, And keeping the final render a medium size resolution. There will still be artistry involved in this workflow- All staples of a good render apply to this style as much as any other. But there is no easy one click solution to this look at the moment. You must retrace the steps a bit. And it is not possible in real-time in current date. The ray tracing on display is sampled like mad. Barely any visible noise grain. Absolutely beautiful

Now go watch videopix and then dream of something cool afterwards
>>7339982
>>7339982
>>7339982

>>7340360
That movie's problem wasn't its appearance though.

>>7340368
anon you are blithering.
>NURBS
is correct but all that other shit .. like thanks for your guessing but you are speaking from probably less experience than the people you are holding forth to like some expert.
>a magazine scan
for fucks sake
>non-real time ray traced lighting reflections
you are something like 80IQ, yes?
>ray tracing noise grain
just fuck off. just don't post again

>>7340398
so watch it with the sound off or whatever

>>7340360
that movie was so bad it tanked an entire division

>>7338521
my guess is they had to rely on shapes, color and composition a little more due to technical restraints.

the quest for photo realism is a fools errand imo

>>7340405
Check yourself before you try to check me. Why is it hard to imagine that the image was scanned after publication? Obviously color space of the render is at play, but get a grip if you think all art is a button press away from being born. I have no clue what my IQ is. But the fact that you bring it up at all says a lot about your character. And there is meant to be an "and" between lighting and reflections, I don't think that takes away from any of the actual information I tried to present in a simple way so people could understand it, and hopefully begin replicating the ways it had been done in the past, to maybe see some new art in this style would be refreshing

I don't mean to speak like I am an expert but many of the terms I really don't know the simplified or right way to say them. I am learning like any one else who lurks and posts on 4chan and no one is perfect but it is far easier to nitpick and reject others than it is to try and put yourself out there and give your best shot to explain some of what you know

Now watch my fucking movie and enjoy it and then take a hike (metaphor)

>>7340480

>>7340480
>burble blub
>but get a grip if you think all art is a button press away from being born
I didn't say ANYTHING like that, or which implies that or which has anything to do with that.

>>7340495

>>7340503
You implied that the scanning of a printed image was absolutely insane to even consider.,, When in reality, there are many stages before you ( a consumer with a chip on his shoulder ) consumes the art media, and then attempts to mock the chef after the meal when he explains to you his family recipe

Make 3D art like this in 1990s: YOU'RE SUCH A GREAT ARTIST, HERE HAVE A SIX-FIGURE-SALARY JOB!

Make 3D art like this now: THIS IS FUCKING SHIT, FUCK YOU ASSHOLE, DELETE YOUR SYSTEM32, SHITSTICK

I am not the best at anything and I don't try and fake anything,,, Forgive my original explanation of the render- it was harder to express in words what I know and the information I have. I only meant to share some of the information. I only post my work to show that this misunderstanding was in how I said in language the things I have an understanding of. But this came off as something other than what I intended

>>7340535
i'm not talking to you anymore because i don't want to catch schizophrenia

>>7340554
these images are ok but you need to look into art concepts like composition and harmony. your images have very high 'harshness'

>>7339463
>what made 1996 so charming?

Less orcs

>>7338645
It's also that fake nostalgia for a time you were too young to fully grasp. Like a yearning for the undeveloped brain of childhood you will never, ever get back

>>7340735
I don't think that applies to the 90s. The 80s absolutely sucked for anyone actually there but the 90s saw an economic boom, a plummeting crime rate, no major wars, pre-9/11 attitudes, and the biggest political scandal was a blowjob. If you were a middle class white kid growing up back then you legitimately have reason to be nostalgic.

>>7338645
its not nostalgia to note that this image has very high artistry. this has nothing to do with early 3D and everything to do with getting an actual artist to spend like 100 hours on it instead of 1.
You could do that technical shit and pull up histograms etc and see that this has a very 'coherent' color palette, and people could talk about composition, lines of movement, etc. the harsh shadows are a very lurid eyecatching style that's fucking 'balanced' by other elements, it's all "artistry" that takes experience skill talent and time.
The fact that 3D was early just let the bosses allocate that time and effort on a single image

>>7339129
Kino

>>7338645
Disco Train is the most under-rated track on the DKC2 soundtrack and I loved the carnival at night aesthetic so much I was always disappointed there weren't more traditional platforming levels with the style.

>>7338521
Raytracing. This is clearly not a gameplay screenshot, it's something prerendered and raytraced.

>>7338521
>>7338582

Early CG uses high contrast lighting to enhance its relatively simplistic definition, with particular emphasis on heavy shadow. Modern CG models use detail and texture for definition, and the lighting is much more subtle as a result.

>>7338912
> I think its the combination effect of really good lighting being used on comparatively shitty models and textures. It's a weird mix of tech because as real time lighting got better so did the rest of the visuals.
I think this gets the closest to the truth. Those renders were more primitive than modern graphics in some ways yet more advanced in others. Nobody is interested in replicating this style anymore because if you're going to spend the effort of advanced lighting then you're probably going for full realism.

Maturity and experience. 3D Graphics in the mid-late 90s was not "early" 3D graphics. They were late 3D graphics. This is early 3D graphics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xwLFRdewgE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnmnpWKoUS0


People had been working on SGI systems since the early 90s and had a really good idea of how to make the most of them. That is why 3D animations and graphics from that time period have aged so well. 6th Generation console games were developed on game engines that had been used since 1997. That is why certain games like MGS2, Gran Turismo 4 and Nightfire looked so good and will probably always look good. It's not that modern games are "soul-less" as much as the fact that 3D graphics from 2006-2013 were an absolute fucking dumpster fire. Developers had no idea how to work with HD and Post Processing and the PS3 and Xbox 360 were not easy to program for so they just dumped on brown and bloom to hide their shitty 3D models. To me, The Elder Scrolls Oblivion was very underwhealming and laughably ugly when it first came out and I wanted to vomit when I first played Bioshock (what is up with the main character's deformed hand? how did people think that shit looked good?)

I actually think some current gen games are quite beautiful and will age very well.

I think people mean "early" in the video game space. It wasn't until a few years into the 90s that the industry could justify the expense of those workstations.

>>7342278
Hell yeah my man, I'll dump a couple nice Oddworld backgrounds

>>7343546

>>7342408
>80-90s animation: visual images "Beyond real"
>2010s "Graphics": Below real. inferior substitute for real

>>7343936
im saying beyond real btw because that's what the narrator says in the second video (1988). and if you watch all the scenes especially like say the deer at 0:23, they do look like other worlds. stuff actually happening in a virtual reality.

>>7342179
You know, it's like how old anime used higher contrast due the lack of available colors for artists to paint the cels with.

I really miss the feeling of old anime with heaving 2-5 color shading, especially 80's OVAs.

>>7343960
>they do look like other worlds.
This is what it does for me. The style takes me to another world that feels "real" in a way 2D sprites don't but whimsical enough to still trigger that sense of fantasy.

>>7344030
Forgot image

>>7343997
Agreed. I think it was also because of standard definition TV. Too much subtlety in color gradation and thin linework is an HD indulgeance that wouldn't be visible in 480i.

>>7344054
Is it me or animation has also gotten worse in spite of all the crispness and fidelity we have now?
No doubt it's a syndrome of the Economic recession since 2008, now getting worse in the pandemic, but OVAs nowadays aint got shit on animation or detail OVAs had in the 80's (GOOD OVAs before anyone here gets cheeky and brings up Twinkle Me Nora @ 2fps), while OVAs now are just an extra episode of the anime.

These old images should have been called computer rendered whereas what we see now is computer generated.

>early 3d graphics
>posts part of a fucking prerendered goddamn movie
Do /v/kiddies really think early 3d games rendered that shit? Maybe that's why they though it was good when compared to fucking early 90s FMV trash. It's the same goddamn thing. FMV was laughed out of the industry so fucking gaming companies started doing prerendered CGI shit and made dumbass nugamers think it was actually real game graphics.

>>7344362
please don't post again. Actually don't come to /vr/

I wish I would get new games that look like older ps1/ps2 games, stuff like Vagrant Story, FF9, MGS1, Mega Man Legend 1, MGS2, FF12, Silent Hill 2 and 3, Resident Evil 4, Kingdom Hearts, that limited level of detail and art direction is just so right and timeless.