🧵 how do you emulate the style of doom 3, quake 4, and other id tech 4 engine games in blender?
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Apr 2025 05:32:13 UTC No. 1010887
games like doom 3, quake 4, and other id tech 4 engine games share a style im really interested in but confused on how its made. its a mix of metalics with rounded edges and a grimy sheen over it. in the engine, it looks really good but when the models are shown out of it, they look very dry and awkward. just look at images of the doom 3 cyberdemon and you can see a huge difference between the model in game vs it being rendered out of it. is there any way to emulate this style in blender?
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Apr 2025 06:04:15 UTC No. 1010889
>>1010887
>it's another thread by a zoomer who just downloaded blender and hasn't even bothered to make a donut asking how to make nostalgic game graphics
Just nuke this dead board already hiromoot
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Apr 2025 09:50:05 UTC No. 1010893
>>1010887
>im really interested in but confused on how its made.
Part of it is art style and part of it is new technologies, many of which are now commonplace or improved upon. Read up on the development of those games to better understand what was novel at the time.
Also harsh shadows. I know Doom 3 gets memed a lot but Doom 3, F.E.A.R., and some others had particularly dark shadows for the time.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Apr 2025 10:10:12 UTC No. 1010894
>>1010893
thank you. im new but wanted to start with animations similar to that time. i remember bump mapping and per pixel stencil shading were also involved
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Apr 2025 16:16:39 UTC No. 1010902
photographic textures
normal maps
specularity
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Apr 2025 20:37:57 UTC No. 1010916
>>1010887
This trend of style over substance ps1 ps2 ps3 style makes me want to blow my brains out. Most surface level braindead imitation, sitting on decades old laurels that were made with true passion limited only by technology
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Apr 2025 21:13:40 UTC No. 1010917
>>1010916
I did a lowpoly game without trying to imitate psx or whatever else. Just came up with certain style I liked by experimenting and applying what I knew. Now I'm playing around with more ideas, but better and with more depth and interest. I think one of approaches I want to try most for the next game is high poly with abstract chunky shapes and NPR smooth shading and minimal palette. Bonus point is: this style highlights that one of appeals of lowpoly is chunky shapes rather than lofi-ness of it. I mean those kinda "exagerrated" cartoonish or abstract shapes are something that gives an impression of lowpoly even though they're smooth and curved. I've actually seen people mistakingly calling similar styles lowpoly even though polycounts are high.
Anonymous at Sat, 12 Apr 2025 22:46:36 UTC No. 1010922
>>1010918
No, Doom 3 uses true normal maps and is one of the earliest games to do so. Its distinctive plasticky look comes from the way it approximates specular
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Apr 2025 02:34:40 UTC No. 1010930
>>1010922
>
i see, thank you. how does is approximate specular that gives its look? all the examples on youtube for normal maps show the shadowing and the model as far too detailed.
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Apr 2025 03:59:48 UTC No. 1010932
>>1010930
'Doom III' together with 'Half Life II' is a early examples of direct x 9 'shader model 3' graphics, it has a fully scriptable 'pixel shader' (often reffered to as 'fragment program' in documentaion).
If you could go back to then from today you could do very modern 'PBR' looking graphics using 'sm3' as everything you need is there already, you'd only had to known what to write.
Today it'd be common knowledge and easily done but back then this was new and many people jumping into shading had to learn the basics from documentation for offline rendering
as this stuff hadn't been exposed for the masses to play around with like this and there was a learning curve before masses of people could start contribute to do it smarter.
But ultimatly The normalmap was expanded/unpacked in the fragment program with the same 'normalize((normalTexure.rgb+1)*0.5
You do specular via some formula based on 'NdotH' like we've done since Blinn/Phong in the 1970's, the blinn specular formula is availible everywhere, don't remember it off the top of my head.
you just don't do it in the fancy nice way that gives it a proper 'long tail' falloff like current used models such as GGX, you just stop at a more naive (and computationally inexpensive) stage.
If you want softer falloff from lighting calculations against a normal map wihtout using ambient light probes etc just let the light wrap around further towards the back of the model to fit your taste.
Valve used a method called 'half lambert' that was/is very popular it's just 'NdotL*0.5 + 0.5' and make the model look like it is in a space that is bouncing light onto it from nearby surfaces.
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Apr 2025 04:26:56 UTC No. 1010935
Anonymous at Sun, 13 Apr 2025 07:24:28 UTC No. 1010936
>>1010887
Rounded edges.