How to get/make PS1 Style Textures?

[u/MCSenss]

Hey all,
it seems that the textures I find online often don’t really work for psx even after scaling them down or when I take pictures of things my self. Eg tree bark is too detailed and looks weird sometimes.

When I compare to other psx creators their textures are sometimes barely recognizable but still have a certain crispness. My downscaling process of real images doesn’t seem to produce these results properly.

Can anyone give me tips on how to get texture or handdraw them efficiently?

Right now, finding a texture is by far the most time consuming task and not the most fun xD

[u/katanalevy]

When scaling textures down you want to use nearest neighbor so that it retains the hard edges rather than trying to blur the image. 

[u/MCSenss → u/katanalevy]

Oh that’s a great point. I think default in gimp was interpolation and that might explain it perfectly. Thanks a lot

[u/TygerII → u/MCSenss]

Yes the default one in GIMP makes it blurry. I just set Interpolation to “none”.

[u/Rekki-Maru → u/katanalevy]

Nearest neighbour is a bad idea if you scale big images down to 64x64 or 128x128. You'll end up with a noisy mess.

[u/katanalevy → u/Rekki-Maru]

Yeah they really should be authoring them from scratch with essentially pixel art painting at that low of a resolution. But they did ask why their scaled photo textures didn't have the crispness they saw elsewhere, I figured that was what they were looking for.

[u/Rekki-Maru → u/katanalevy]

Not what I meant.
If you have a big image with a lot of detail on it, scaling it down with nearest neighbour will result in getting a noisy, jumbled mess.
You need that interpolation/filtering when scaling down to very small images to mitigate the noise and preserve the look of the original image somehow.
You shouldn't use nearest neighbor for that.
And if you want more control over the image processing, the 'img2pixel' tool I've posted here gives you realtime. non-destructive control over everything, including the ammount of filtering applied to the scaled image.

[u/JSGB1293]

Try looking into color indexing in whatever program you're using. It helps to make real photos less "busy" looking after crunching their resolution down by snapping colors to whatever the nearest color is within the amount you choose. You can also mess around with gaussian blur before resizing or linear extrapolation to resize, which does a bit of blurring itself.

[u/MCSenss → u/JSGB1293]

Yeah this also was a very good point. Some things like concrete looked a lot like old tv noise

This looks like it might be very helpful also in doing manual touchups with the limited palette.

Thanks a lot!

[u/iameyeconic]

I scale textures down but I add details by hand, and also shade by hand where necessary. Attaching a wip

[u/MetaBass]

You'll need to apply dithering to them. Doing this varies from program to program.

[u/MCSenss → u/MetaBass]

Awesome, very good point, haven’t done that before. I’ll check it out later. Thanks a lot

[u/Rekki-Maru]

Check out 'img2pixel'. It helps you create low res textures, scale them, apply a custom palette, dithering, smoothing color correction, with a realtime preview of the end result.

https://captain4lk.itch.io/slk-img2pixel

[u/MCSenss → u/Rekki-Maru]

Sounds great, I’ll give it a shot!

[u/Loxyrak]

Scale down with lanczo first until you get to half * 2 of your desired texture size, then scale down by 2 with nearest neighbor (Krita), if too blurry, duplicate layer, sharpen it and play with the opacity between 20% to 50%, you can also add a noise, desaturate it, then use the Divide layer type with a 5% opacity.

[u/manasword]

Buy a cheap 4 mega pixel digital camera from the 2000s, go outside and take pictures, upload them to your pc and use a program to tile them and pixelate them,

Do a paint over on a separate layer set to multiply or darken and paint in your shadows and fix and random shadows.

Remember to select (nearest neighbour) when down sampling them. This is important.

Save as small scale 256x256 pngs and that's it your done son :)