Thank you. This is the feeling N64 graphics gives me as well.

@@Legend64Project You make the modeling look so easy! Did you start with a flat plane? I'm a noob, I don't understand. I've always wanted to make an N64-style game, and I'm so happy I found your videos.

@@mybrainhurts3727 i think everyone use cube and subdivison modifire

It was highly technical back then, a thing you could hardly get into without some degree in digital media on the basis of the UI and softwares made and meant for 3D design being almost unusable without someone who knew f it teaching you. Nowadays things like Blender can be crashcoursed trough trial and error with a few weeks or months of time and enough willpower. Zbrush is unironically super easy because the majority of functions are "Padding" as I'd like to call t, like a BBL on a skinny girl it's just addition for the looks and nothing else.

okay so yeah. I can't remember what system it was for, and maybe only the early 90s or 80s for actual CG movies, but early on they couldn't do bones or rigs; they had to manually type in the positions of all the vertices for each frame. it was super technical and math-heavy. they could not even tween/interpolate, as in create the first frame and the last, and have it auto move between them; they had to do all this math stuff for EVERY FRAME. for Jurassic Park 1, all the animators working with Phil Tippet were used to doing stop motion for dinosaurs and were not computer animators, so they built toy-sized metal dinosaur puppets with sensors, so they could hand-animate the cg monsters in real life, and the data went into the computer (I still want this method to come back - of having real-world puppets to animate cg things, and apps like Tvori VR show promise here.) and by the time of the N64, I think many animators were using interpolation and forward kinematics - to move an arm you gotta move from the shoulder down. move the shoulder, then the elbow, then the wrist. cringe. then around the time of Timesplitters 2, they had figured out INVERSE kinematic - you grab the hand and pull it, and it automatically pulls the forearm, upper arm, and even the torso depending on the way you'd set it up. Inverse kinematics, with keyframing, is still pretty standard. but the true god tier animation I want is going back to having real-world puppets with trackers, so you hand-animate and it does all the on-screen stuff based on that. in lieu of all that, I'm saving up for a Rokoko Smartsuit V2 to do motion capture. motion-captured animations may or may not look ideal depending on the vibe you're going for (In the Sims 2 they famously tried mocap but found it "not cartoony enough" and ended up hand-animating it all.) But moca[ with a suit would be so fast that I'll deal with the 'added realism' even if it's not exactly the vibe I want. PS. (2023 04 25 )Adam Savage recently did a video showing how they are doing the new fraggle rock animation, and they are using hand puppeterring of digital characters with these weird mouth gloves they put their hands in, and it animates on-screen.

Portal 64 my dude look him up

trying to create AAA game today as a small team or solo would be just as difficult I assume, for other reason ofcourse, people tend to forget that N64/PS1 games back in their time were AAA quality, as technology progresses Iam sure that in a few decades solo developers would manage to make what is now considered AAA game on their own within a year or two, actually bizzare to think where gaming is headed in the far future, wont be no need for studios or large teams, just 1 guy and some AI in "moms basement", ironically this is how "gaming" started in the first place, so you could say that industry would go through a full circle.

@@tezwoacz yeah totally. there's a few weird angles to this. 1) back then just the tools themselves were slower and less robust, so making ANYTHING was more difficult and time-consuming. 2) now that the tools are easier to use, big studios push graphics further and further, often at the expense of creating an immersive simulation, spending so much money that they don't want to risk it and play it safe with the design. now that this tech allows stuff to be made both fast and cheaply by single individuals, we are getting, and will continue to get more, fresh styles of gameplay, and now with the ai stuff, we can have fresh gameplay IN larger open-world AAA quality environments. I'm actually trying to make a game richer than Skyrim at my mom's house, and AI tools are helping a lot. just the other day I got ControlNet in StableDiffusion working, meaning I can create front, side and back textures of characters with the press of a button, all in one image. I concepted about 150 for my game, each with a unique look and back story. now I'm looking into the best way to do mocap (looking at the Rokoko Smartsuit V2.)

Well that’s good to hear XD and thank you!

yes, totally. this is as good as the best stuff on the N64. but also. I deal with worrying too much, too, but i'm making a gigantic game with lots of characters, and I simply don't have the time to make them all amazing on their own, so what helps me is saying "it's not about the instrument, it's about the symphony." or "it's not about this brush stroke, it's about the painting". as in, even if you were to make 10 average-quality characters, when you put them all in a game together with "average" music and locations, people will be blown away. because they aren't seeing or scrutinizing the individual parts, they are experiencing the whole thing as a coherent whole emotional unit, and that automatically blows people away. being imperfect on the details, but pushing in the direction of your vision, people will be wowed by that.

@@westingtyler1 That's pretty good advice actually. I tend to get bogged down trying to make details perfect, so I'll try remember this

@@moldman5694 another part of this I think about is what I call the Han Solo principle - when filming the original star wars, the Luke actor was like "hey we just got out of the wet trash compactor, so our hair should be wet in this scene, not dry, guys!" then harrison ford who plays han solo and was 10 years older looked at him and said "kid, it's a space adventure movie; if people are paying attention to our hair, we're all in big trouble." any time I have a slightly jank leaf texture on a tree, in my jungle dinosaur game scene, I tell myself "if people are paying attention to that leaf texture, I'm in big trouble." then it helps me chill and move on, keeping my eye on the big picture.

Thank you Mike :)

Yup

Bros said N64 character really looking cute lmao

@@notkerr kirby is cute

@@notkerr okay but hear me out

if a sculpture of Athena made in Ancient Greece can be cute (it can) then so can a faceted sculpture of Athena (an N64 character). as long as the core "shapes of cuteness" are understood and captured by the artist, of course it can.

Ah I didn’t think about that! I need to buy one before the infamous Nintendo shortages begin!!

@@Legend64Project says no one ever.

yes, I agree. using the weight paint mode to get the deformations right, might also make it easier later to do the animations in the game engine since your coding doesn't have to synchronize the rig animation with the blend shape blending.

I love the eyes just being a texture flat to the face, and blinking.

I do, but sadly I’m limited with what I’m able to do in Unreal Engine at the moment and haven’t been able to test out my ideas. Hopefully this will change once I upgrade from my old laptop to a cutting edge pc!

herhhhh

Cheers I appreciate it :)

Thanks for stopping by :D

Interesting! I will have to look into that! Can you point me to any videos demonstrating?

Cheers, I appreciate :)

Thank you. I wish I had the technical know-how to do that. Sadly I am more of an art guy than a programmer :/

You are welcome, thank YOU for the support. I think Blender is worth it in the long run but it was a pain to “relearn” a few things. Felt like being a beginner again at times! I decided to make the switch because my licenses ran out and I couldn’t justify the expense when there was a free alternative.

@@Legend64Project That's what I'm not looking forward to most, Learning new stuff can be draining but I agree I think it will be better in the long run.

I’m trying not to take too long with it!

Awesome! Just a heads up, someone already mentioned I didn’t use it the right way in the video. Apparently there are additional options for the rig that I missed. I’m looking forward to trying it out some more!

Thanks a lot Cam. That’s lovely to hear. I’ve had a few people ask if they could work on a few tracks for the game.

Haha it’s the best

Whoa really? I seriously thought it was just creating a skeleton super quick, didn’t realize there was more to it!! That’s awesome if it can be even faster to set all this up in the future. Thank you for letting me know.

@@Legend64Project YEAH no prob man, it gives you a pretty advanced rig with basically one more button press, haha. It's pretty customizable too! Your models weight painting should still be more or less compatible with the resulting rig, i think you'll just have to put "DEF-" ? in front of all the vertex group names to match the new bones. It's got some quirks when it comes to being exported for game engines, that said, but there's actually a good amount of addons and such dedicated to fixing the headache that the blender to ue4 pipeline can be, and some even specifically for rigify rigs to ue4. Best of luck with future blender shenanigans, i'll be peepin the next update

@@rittzler dang I’ll have to try it out for real.