#pixel texture

Pixel Capybara

Quick model playing with more low poly pixelly style - first time using Pribambase (Blender/Aesprite plug in) and really digging it so far, will do some more stuff like this in future

Hello! So quite a few people have been wondering how I do my pixely models recently. I've wanted to explain this for a little while now but have never gotten around to it. I'm only going to explain how to render your models to get the effect, not how to model or texture them. Maybe I'll do something for those some time, but not anytime soon as I'm still trying to figure those out haha. I'll try to make it as clear as possible from what I know and easy to understand.

OK! SO! At least half of the magic of making these models is adjusting the render settings. And by half, I don't mean how much work it takes, but just the amount of pixelization that it does to the model. When you render your models under the normal settings, assuming you are using the Default Scanline renderer, your models and scenes have antialiasing, shadows, etc that to try and simulate objects in nature and make them look realistic. It obviously doesn't do it well on its own, but it tries. AND the lighting that is provided by default is not great at all. So to get the results we need, we need to turn off some render settings and make it look less "realistic".

So here is one of my Earthbound enemy models. I've rendered it with the right textures but with the default render settings.

As you can see, theres shadows that are cast very flatly on each line of polygons on the body. Additionally, the textures are blurred like crazy. But lets focus on the shadows. To get rid of these is really easy. All you have to do is add a Skylight. That can be found here:

You can put it anywhere in your scene and it will basically add flat lighting to everything and will eliminate all shadows. Then the model looks like this!

There we go. Now we have no crappy looking shadows. The next thing we need to address is the blurring textures. For some reason, 3DS Max will blur textures with high close proximity contrast, like pixels shifting colors drastically next to eachother. To stop this from happening, you need to turn off something called Filter Maps. This can be found in the Render Settings in Render Setup here (The icon for Render Setup looks like a teapot with a window underneath it):

And then we get these results.

WOW! Already much better! Well there we are! We did it! Well, almost. If you look closely at the edges of the model, the edges that touch the background, you can see that they are still really smooth. To get rid of that, we need to turn off AntiAliasing, also found in the Render Settings. Then we get this!

So there you have it. Its pretty simple to do this, but not very easy to figure out on your own haha. Theres a couple other settings you can use as well to possibly lower your render size, and those can be found in the Options under File: