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🦇 Hexavier 🎃
@xavierck.com

Fun fact: They did this exact same thing in 3D with the characters in Vagrant Story All you have to do is duplicate the model, offset it by a few onscreen pixels, and set it to fullbright/tinted. The lit character model hides the polygons of the secondary mesh, giving a nice rim light

Supper Mario Broth@mariobrothblog.bsky.social

Some areas in Paper Mario feature a rim lighting effect that is achieved in a manner that is extremely simple for the surprisingly effective results it produces, being simply shifting around a shadow copy of the sprite.

611 reposts2K likes

wunk
@wunk.bsky.social

love this trick it works great on pixely art in particular, always wanted to call it "embossing" or something

BaronBucket
@baronbucket.bsky.social

Wolfenstein 3D also had a similar trick for environmental shadows. Walls had two textures, a shadowed and a normal version, and they were placed on the walls in a way to simulate lighting

Tattorack
@tattorack.bsky.social

If they really dupe the model for that effect, then I don't like it. All those extra polygons. Better to have the silhouette of the model get rendered to a 2D mask, then offset the mask.

Tattorack
@tattorack.bsky.social

Maybe. But it turns out a lot of programming techniques from consoles of that generation were inefficient. Today there are a few projects that are using modern methods on native hardware that show how truly powerful those consoles were. There's a Mario 64 mod project that comes to mind.

🦇 Hexavier 🎃
@xavierck.com

Absolutely, a lot of cel shading makes use of inverted hulls It's been a pretty common technique since the early PS1 days, and even newer games like the Guilty Gear series use it because it's still much easier to implement and art direct than post process outlines

Cameron Craig 🎲🎨
@cameroncraig.bsky.social

There aren't a ton of games from this era that I'm crazy eager to make time to play for the first time but Vagrant Story is at the top of that list. Everything I see and hear about the technical execution of that game alongside its art style makes me wanna play it so bad!

MaxMarave
@maxmarave.bsky.social

i will never stop to feel that. It's in me. The music, the sounds behind with weird voices, the mobs,... Now i don't have other choice than launching it before the summer !