I wouldn't recommend making the Utah teapot low poly. Primitives in early 3D animation were typically rendered with a lot of polygons so you wouldn't see them in the final picture. I'd also recommend saturated colors, checkerboard patterns, and having only one pure white light source.
how do mean? cad surface were soft rendered because they are interpolated geometry (NURBS), but polygon modelling was always choppy since they used lot less polygons but appeared smooth due to phong shading. When you say early animation, I'm taking it as 80s when Renderman was still in infancy. I base this on an article I read somewhere that ed catmul wrote the character geometry for the toys in Pixar's earliest short film (featuring a creepy baby) by defining NURB himself. Please correct me if I am wrong. You are spot on with saturated colors and the lighting (i'd even recommend baking the lighting in textures).
you may have just changed my life, thank u. i've realized recently as i get into 3d stuff that that early 80's and 90's aesthetic just unlocks something in me. idk what it is. anyway, dope tutorial
It's always amazed me how Gmod could find a way to relevancy in every internet era, but if you think about it. Gmod was released in 2006, a whopping 18 years ago. One more year and we're going to be as far from Gmod release as Half-Life 2 (2004) from original Super Mario Bros (1985).
There's some fun stuff here, but as the legendary Andrew Price aka Blender Guru says, learn realism first! You'll find this a lot more interesting and you'll have a way easier time with it. I'd recommend popping over to his channel and learning what he has to teach since you're starting out, he's fantastic
I am really thankful for your tutorial, but can you help me with something? For example, I don't see the Light Unit or Stop Adjustment in the interface of the Point light...
Hello Sir! Could you help me to know how would I approach old reflections? Those sharp accurate ones without the phisically based properties, actual reflections and not just textures as it was on the old Blender Renders.
I liked how you setup specular color in your nodes as this was often the way the earlier software did things. You'd have specular hardness and specular color. Radiosity/light transmission was like the holy grail back then, left only to the ultra expensive packages and the high end workstations of the day. One other thing you'd have to limit is the color depth. On earlier consumer grade systems like the Amiga, unless you bought a fancy graphics buffer card for hundreds of dollars, you were stuck with 12-bit color or 4096 colors, so you'd see notable dithering instead of smooth gradients in the shading. Not sure if there is a way to do this directly in Blender, but you could pull the image into a photo editor like GIMP and reduce the palette to 4096 colors or even 256.
I just remembered something I wanted to ask about this material: is it possible to add normal map and/or bump map functionality? I've been trying to figure out how to add bump detail without having to mix or add a principled BSDF, thus adding bounce lighting/reflections.
Yes. Trying to remember what's in the tutorial here... You could just take the normal inputs for any nodes you want to be affected and plug it into the "Group Input" node to expose them. Then use the bump node (or normal map node, whatever your purposes require.)
@@ChristopherFraserVFX So I added a bump map node in the group node, connected it to the group input, then connected a voronoi texture to the bump input of the group node. It doesn't show any bump.
Ah the phyiscal light options are from the Photographer addon! Truthfully though, I never figured out the diff between those and the regular lights. Either way, highly recommend photographer
curious about how one would go about adding an alpha input to the group? I'm trying to convert a plant model I found into a retro shaded object, it includes an alpha map but I'm not savy enough to know how to integrate that into the Retro Shader.
very helpful but one thing that I recommend is to turn up the scale of IU interface, As owner of bad cheap 720p panel laptop, I can't see things so little, and not everyone has fast and cheap internet so thanks for reading my comment
Excellent tutorial, thank you for making this. I'm experiencing a problem, however. Upon plugging in the "Is Camera Ray" node to the mix shader, I still get reflections and bounce lighting. Edit: My floor plane had a default material on it. Switching it to the retro CGI material removes the reflections seen in the teapot.
Is this what I've been looking for all along? Which blender version is this btw - nevermind, anything above 2.80 crashes on my potato *But* I have a tip for the output: Old programs were pixelated, yes, but also had dithering and blender can't dither. Render and export the image at a high resolution and then open it in photoshop or gimp and dial down the resolution to your preferred pixelation (use nearest neighbor!) and compress the colour-depth to 8-bit (256 colors) or lower with pattern or diffusion dithering, or none for that banding look
This is prob the furtherest thing from 90s CGI and if it gets close its only like 10% or 20% 90s CGI looked alot better then what you showed case, and i even make 90s CGI alongside having a folder full of old promotion art for games back then and stuff that used CGI Art made on the old 3D Workstations from back then, more specificly Silicon Graphics workstations, usually running the Program Power Animator/Alias (known as Maya today) or Softimage Considering i myself make 90s CGI if you are curious why am even on this video i wish to use the new blender so badly but i am stuck on 2.79 for what i do, since the Internal Renderer of 2.79 is litterally an old 90s Raytracer that still has phong and lambert shading and the stuff you'd expect from that stuff, Problem is i need features from the newest ones but of course, Things have been removed or made more time consuming like requiring all People to use nodes for Everything and not have all settings available from the start, and only requiring nodes for more complex materials, which yea.... having to waste 2 or 5+ mins each time to remake the settings instead of taking like 5 seconds to do what am needing to do is not worth it, as i'd rather take the 5 seconds, instead of 2 or 5 mins or more wasting my time trying to remake the same settings or features i need And Then Ontop of that having to redo it for each and every material, and Blend file, Plus not having the phong or lambert shading, and Colored Specular being removed well yea Forced to stay on 2.79 because of that unless someone ports 2.79's Internal Renderer with all of its features untouched (except for maybe making the raytracing not dependent on the CPU and actually use the freaking GPU, since its that old it still uses the CPU like it did on SGI Workstations rather then the GPU)
Hey man, I'm really sorry to hear the frustration you're feeling. I've been there it sucks not having what you need when all the pieces are right there. This was more of at attempt at recreating a vague early cgi style, not really an accurate emulation of anything specific. Hopefully you can take some of the techniques from this video and apply them, but if not I'm certain there are other resources out there, it's just that this was sort of a one-off, so unfortunately I don't think I'll be approaching this in a video again, at least for a very long time. I seriously wish you good luck though, and good rendering!
@@ChristopherFraserVFX btw, i do wanna say one more thing old CGI tbh, it doesn't really look ugly, i mean sure SOME of it can, but most of it doesn't really, sure if you compare it to reality then it may look like crap but if you just take it as it is, its actually not that bad looking, and can be interesting just try to take it how a painting would look, since paintings don't look like reality really, they may attempt to, but never do, but yet they still look nice anyway Also if you want a better time recreating the art, heres some things to know Raytraced Reflections and stuff did infact Exist back then, as raytracing is very old, you just couldn't run it in real time back then and could usually take hours, to days and even possibly weeks depending on the complexity of a render, now with current blender attempting to do that may not be easy duo to the fact that specular currently effects that, but your method works too as that was infact another way of doing that Shadows could either be hard but they could also be soft shadows And Bumpmapping did infact exist back then too To recreate the specular, Try plugging in a Brightness/contrast node into a Glossy node, since it can effect the brightness of the specular, and then just play around with the roughness and the parameters of the brightness/contrast node, it basicly creates something thats between a Wardiso, and Blinn, which is good enough since Blinn did exist back You also may want to add color to the specular too using the color of the brightness/contrast node, tho be warned if you mess with it in wrong ways it make the actual color act funky until you change one of its parameters to where the color can show up properly, this is mostly if you put something up really high you shouldn't of without changing the other You can also use a colorramp after the specular to cut off parts of its brightness, and to color using that too, just make sure you use a RGB to shader node or whatever its called again You also don't need to make the colors strange really, but that is your preference, since people were able to make things with nice vibrant colors, infact, if you take that node method and hook it into a diffuse instead, you can get some more interesting stuff that was also possible back then using colors You also weren't limited on lights really either, i mean, you were if you didn't use a 3D Workstation (Normally SGI Workstations) or if the software just didn't support it, was also likely a matter of how long it took to render them possibly so yea, use pointlights, sunlights directionlight and stuff But yea, now if you do want True vintage CGI, look for blender 2.79 and use internal renderer, if you'd rather use real vintage stuff, since the internal render is basicly not that different from blenders 1.0 irix release Also, You can use polygons, but you could also use nurbs which would be more accurate
man who taught u that i wanna get into ts so bad but damn its so difficult i done created a donut but i still dont know how other things work smhhhhhhhh
It's been a lot of time spent learning and messing around. The most important thing is to pursue it relentlessly and in new ways always, and you'll be better than i before you know it
I wouldn't recommend making the Utah teapot low poly. Primitives in early 3D animation were typically rendered with a lot of polygons so you wouldn't see them in the final picture. I'd also recommend saturated colors, checkerboard patterns, and having only one pure white light source.
Oh that's a good point.. Because they used primitives before polygons, there was no detail discrepancy at first. Good observation! 😂
how do mean? cad surface were soft rendered because they are interpolated geometry (NURBS), but polygon modelling was always choppy since they used lot less polygons but appeared smooth due to phong shading. When you say early animation, I'm taking it as 80s when Renderman was still in infancy. I base this on an article I read somewhere that ed catmul wrote the character geometry for the toys in Pixar's earliest short film (featuring a creepy baby) by defining NURB himself. Please correct me if I am wrong. You are spot on with saturated colors and the lighting (i'd even recommend baking the lighting in textures).
you may have just changed my life, thank u.
i've realized recently as i get into 3d stuff that that early 80's and 90's aesthetic just unlocks something in me. idk what it is. anyway, dope tutorial
Good! It's a very fun look
>retrogames
>gmod
>
lawlz
It's always amazed me how Gmod could find a way to relevancy in every internet era, but if you think about it. Gmod was released in 2006, a whopping 18 years ago. One more year and we're going to be as far from Gmod release as Half-Life 2 (2004) from original Super Mario Bros (1985).
@@daniel5730 bruh
I always come back to this tutorial as this is my intro to blender. The most helpful tutorial out there by far! Thank you so much.
There's some fun stuff here, but as the legendary Andrew Price aka Blender Guru says, learn realism first! You'll find this a lot more interesting and you'll have a way easier time with it.
I'd recommend popping over to his channel and learning what he has to teach since you're starting out, he's fantastic
could you post a image of the shader settings? Thanks :)@@ChristopherFraserVFX
Though it is a retro CGi video, it is really in-depth for other important things in Blender, you have taught me things that i didn't know yet, thanks!
my guy, you are a legend, i can make epic cover art now
I am really thankful for your tutorial, but can you help me with something? For example, I don't see the Light Unit or Stop Adjustment in the interface of the Point light...
That transition was absolutely fire
And then add VHS tape video effect in compositing... :D
You are a lifesaver!
Hello Sir! Could you help me to know how would I approach old reflections? Those sharp accurate ones without the phisically based properties, actual reflections and not just textures as it was on the old Blender Renders.
did you ever find out how to do this?
Best tutorial ever, thanks a lot ❤
I liked how you setup specular color in your nodes as this was often the way the earlier software did things. You'd have specular hardness and specular color. Radiosity/light transmission was like the holy grail back then, left only to the ultra expensive packages and the high end workstations of the day. One other thing you'd have to limit is the color depth. On earlier consumer grade systems like the Amiga, unless you bought a fancy graphics buffer card for hundreds of dollars, you were stuck with 12-bit color or 4096 colors, so you'd see notable dithering instead of smooth gradients in the shading. Not sure if there is a way to do this directly in Blender, but you could pull the image into a photo editor like GIMP and reduce the palette to 4096 colors or even 256.
If anyones confused:
The render engine is "Cycles"
and MixRGB Is now just "Mix Color"
I just remembered something I wanted to ask about this material: is it possible to add normal map and/or bump map functionality? I've been trying to figure out how to add bump detail without having to mix or add a principled BSDF, thus adding bounce lighting/reflections.
Yes. Trying to remember what's in the tutorial here...
You could just take the normal inputs for any nodes you want to be affected and plug it into the "Group Input" node to expose them. Then use the bump node (or normal map node, whatever your purposes require.)
@@ChristopherFraserVFX I'll it a try and see if it works. Thank you!
@@ChristopherFraserVFX So I added a bump map node in the group node, connected it to the group input, then connected a voronoi texture to the bump input of the group node. It doesn't show any bump.
And connected it to the diffuse/glossy shaders?
how would i do transparent glass? like of that seen in the boot screen of PlayStation 2
how do you get physical lighting? it wont appear for me
its probably cause my version is 3.5.1
Ah the phyiscal light options are from the Photographer addon! Truthfully though, I never figured out the diff between those and the regular lights. Either way, highly recommend photographer
bro blender 3.5 came out? ive been using like 3.2 or something
curious about how one would go about adding an alpha input to the group? I'm trying to convert a plant model I found into a retro shaded object, it includes an alpha map but I'm not savy enough to know how to integrate that into the Retro Shader.
You can always mix with a transparent shader at the end using your alpha mask as the factor
very helpful but one thing that I recommend is to turn up the scale of IU interface, As owner of bad cheap 720p panel laptop, I can't see things so little, and not everyone has fast and cheap internet so thanks for reading my comment
Excellent tutorial, thank you for making this. I'm experiencing a problem, however. Upon plugging in the "Is Camera Ray" node to the mix shader, I still get reflections and bounce lighting.
Edit: My floor plane had a default material on it. Switching it to the retro CGI material removes the reflections seen in the teapot.
Is this what I've been looking for all along? Which blender version is this btw - nevermind, anything above 2.80 crashes on my potato
*But* I have a tip for the output: Old programs were pixelated, yes, but also had dithering and blender can't dither. Render and export the image at a high resolution and then open it in photoshop or gimp and dial down the resolution to your preferred pixelation (use nearest neighbor!) and compress the colour-depth to 8-bit (256 colors) or lower with pattern or diffusion dithering, or none for that banding look
True! I actually thought about the possibility of dithering but you're right that does involve another program, so it's just easier not to.
So much has changed since 4.1, can you do an updated tutorial? Thanks.
This is prob the furtherest thing from 90s CGI and if it gets close its only like 10% or 20%
90s CGI looked alot better then what you showed case, and i even make 90s CGI alongside having a folder full of old promotion art for games back then and stuff that used CGI Art made on the old 3D Workstations from back then, more specificly Silicon Graphics workstations, usually running the Program Power Animator/Alias (known as Maya today) or Softimage
Considering i myself make 90s CGI if you are curious why am even on this video
i wish to use the new blender so badly but i am stuck on 2.79 for what i do, since the Internal Renderer of 2.79 is litterally an old 90s Raytracer that still has phong and lambert shading and the stuff you'd expect from that stuff, Problem is i need features from the newest ones but of course, Things have been removed or made more time consuming like requiring all People to use nodes for Everything and not have all settings available from the start, and only requiring nodes for more complex materials, which yea.... having to waste 2 or 5+ mins each time to remake the settings instead of taking like 5 seconds to do what am needing to do is not worth it, as i'd rather take the 5 seconds, instead of 2 or 5 mins or more wasting my time trying to remake the same settings or features i need
And Then Ontop of that having to redo it for each and every material, and Blend file, Plus not having the phong or lambert shading, and Colored Specular being removed well yea
Forced to stay on 2.79 because of that unless someone ports 2.79's Internal Renderer with all of its features untouched (except for maybe making the raytracing not dependent on the CPU and actually use the freaking GPU, since its that old it still uses the CPU like it did on SGI Workstations rather then the GPU)
Hey man, I'm really sorry to hear the frustration you're feeling. I've been there it sucks not having what you need when all the pieces are right there. This was more of at attempt at recreating a vague early cgi style, not really an accurate emulation of anything specific. Hopefully you can take some of the techniques from this video and apply them, but if not I'm certain there are other resources out there, it's just that this was sort of a one-off, so unfortunately I don't think I'll be approaching this in a video again, at least for a very long time.
I seriously wish you good luck though, and good rendering!
@@ChristopherFraserVFX btw, i do wanna say one more thing
old CGI tbh, it doesn't really look ugly, i mean sure SOME of it can, but most of it doesn't really, sure if you compare it to reality then it may look like crap but if you just take it as it is, its actually not that bad looking, and can be interesting
just try to take it how a painting would look, since paintings don't look like reality really, they may attempt to, but never do, but yet they still look nice anyway
Also if you want a better time recreating the art, heres some things to know
Raytraced Reflections and stuff did infact Exist back then, as raytracing is very old, you just couldn't run it in real time back then and could usually take hours, to days and even possibly weeks depending on the complexity of a render, now with current blender attempting to do that may not be easy duo to the fact that specular currently effects that, but your method works too as that was infact another way of doing that
Shadows could either be hard but they could also be soft shadows
And Bumpmapping did infact exist back then too
To recreate the specular, Try plugging in a Brightness/contrast node into a Glossy node, since it can effect the brightness of the specular, and then just play around with the roughness and the parameters of the brightness/contrast node, it basicly creates something thats between a Wardiso, and Blinn, which is good enough since Blinn did exist back
You also may want to add color to the specular too using the color of the brightness/contrast node, tho be warned if you mess with it in wrong ways it make the actual color act funky until you change one of its parameters to where the color can show up properly, this is mostly if you put something up really high you shouldn't of without changing the other
You can also use a colorramp after the specular to cut off parts of its brightness, and to color using that too, just make sure you use a RGB to shader node or whatever its called again
You also don't need to make the colors strange really, but that is your preference, since people were able to make things with nice vibrant colors, infact, if you take that node method and hook it into a diffuse instead, you can get some more interesting stuff that was also possible back then using colors
You also weren't limited on lights really either, i mean, you were if you didn't use a 3D Workstation (Normally SGI Workstations) or if the software just didn't support it, was also likely a matter of how long it took to render them possibly
so yea, use pointlights, sunlights directionlight and stuff
But yea, now if you do want True vintage CGI, look for blender 2.79 and use internal renderer, if you'd rather use real vintage stuff, since the internal render is basicly not that different from blenders 1.0 irix release
Also, You can use polygons, but you could also use nurbs which would be more accurate
i dont seem to have a mixrgb node?
AHHA! TIME FOR SPINNING TEA POT!!!
i dont know why but i cant make it work, self shadows are not black as in your example
THANK YOU!
How did you add that sky in the background of the Mario scene in the beginning of the video ?
beautiful
Where is step adjustment
I remember Gmod for the N64
Thank you so much!
which rendering engine? cycles or evee
I'm using cycles!
@@ChristopherFraserVFX I'm going to use a pile of ashes soon! Thanks!
Thanks!
Thanks, great video.
I have no idea how to make the addons sharp now.
What do you mean
@@ChristopherFraserVFX I geuinely have no idea.. wtf was i trying to say-
man who taught u that i wanna get into ts so bad but damn its so difficult i done created a donut but i still dont know how other things work smhhhhhhhh
It's been a lot of time spent learning and messing around. The most important thing is to pursue it relentlessly and in new ways always, and you'll be better than i before you know it
@@ChristopherFraserVFX i really needed to hear that. tysm big bro😭
so retro
lets make some retro cgi
step 1: make some low poly object
step 2: add some shitty texture on it
done! wonderful.
- looks UGLY - that's GREAT!! :^D
Sorry you cannot make true retro cgi in blender with 16 colors and 4 hour render time for a vga image !!!
Gonna install blender rn
Yes! Got one! ;)
This is more like 2004 pc game graphics than 90s cgi graphics
very nice. now i can make my dream horror ps1-n64 indie game that is totally creative.
Hey, it's a very fun style :)
Ah yes, the good old N64 era real time raytracing with real time shadows and real time reflections. So acurate
You can unplug your gpu if you want it slower
man please give me that hdri
I found this tutorial too fast for a beginner 😭
Did bro just say gmod is retro 😭
>:)
V videu mnogo ikanij i malo reči. Sidi da razumej, čego hoče skazati tutoj človek.
AMAZING! This is what’s going to get me to learn Blender!