I’d really like to recreate the graphical style of Myst, OG Fallout, Grim Fandango prerendered stuff, I really love the vibe these 2000s era cheap prerendered graphics have, but I want to recreate this for my game in realtime, any suggestions?
The project I am working on involves more so natural environments and stone/medieval era construction like in the photos attached, the first image especially…
Found a water shader that reminds me of these aesthetics… GitHub - hecomi/UnityWaterSurface: Water Surface Simulation using CutomRenderTexture in Unity 2017.1
Most of 1993 Myst would now be fallback techniques now;
no normal maps, (processing it as simple bump mapping)
single directional, + ambient and simple fog.
Simple UV mapping techniques (remedial UV shells)
sharpened textures from samples found in stock texture packs.
no PBR, just diffuse Phong or Goraud shading
and old school reflection mapping
foliage is ~1990’s techniques (FWIW Myst '93 was in Strata 3D, Riven '97 in Maya) just cones (mesh’s) with textures applied to them.
Getting the feel of pristine raytraced shadows can be handled in realtime with high def shadow mapping though you can bake the raytraced lighting as well.
for bloom in riven you need a post processing to handle it ‘well’ or you can just attach lensflare objects to fake it for Realtime
Thanks!
The models used in late 90’s to early 2000 games, might not have a very high polycount. And they might be using cheap basic shaders too. If you use a combination of low poly models and basic shaders, that might help add to and help you achieve, the 90’s and early 2000’s graphical look.
Myst backdrops were stored as 8-bit indexed colors, so one thing I’d try is to render those backdrops into low color-depth render textures (such as RGB565 or ARGB4444) and/or add a color dithering shader effect on top.
You might also want to render them in a lower resolution (but with maximum antialiasing) and then blow them up with linear interpolation.
And you have to remember that those images are all pre-rendered. I’m currently working on something similar, so this post has been very helpful. But basically I’m researching the same stuff right now to emulate the style using blender and render out my background images, to then use for a (3D looking, but actually) 2D Point&Click game in Unity.
I’m going to render lowpoly 3D scenes only using diffuse and bump (if even bump), with simple baked or one-bounce raytraced lighting in blender cycles, to emulate that Strata Studio Pro look from 1993. All I currently haven’t figured out, is how big the max texture resolution could be in Strata on an old Mac. If someone has an idea, please reply.
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