The problem is, I’ve never used blender to model anything before, and I’ve never been able to fully deliver on the PSX style; I am basically going in blind with a goal and some (extremely) basic prior knowledge of blender. Time to get learning!

STEP 1: Reference Photos

I knew I had to start somewhere, so I started by first getting a grasp of the space that I will be re-creating. I re-downloaded the game, then started taking some screenshots of the area. I needed 3 views of the room:

a front view:

a side view:

and ceiling view because it doesn’t really show much in the screenshots:

Now that I have my reference images, let’s start up blender.

STEP 2: Modelling

So as mentioned previously, I don’t really know how to model things. When making games in the past, I used Trenchbroom to make the levels; it’s a great tool, but I wanted to be able to create those pillars with more detail. I didn’t think TB was going to cut it this time. So now it’s time for me to get familiar with Blender.

First thing was to remove the existing scene objects, I did that by tapping the “a” key on my keyboard to select all items, and then tapped the “x” key to bring up a menu that allowed me to delete all selected items

Once I had a blank slate, I had to figure out how the hell I was going to actually model this thing. Thankfully, others have done this for me, and I was able to follow a video from a few years back from someone named “TheSicklyWizard”, that essentially showed me everything I needed to know by looking at one of my favourite games of all time: Silent Hill.

How to make PS1-Esque graphics with Blender 2.9 (Trimsheets and Enviroment Modeling)

Now that I knew that I could use grids and sculpting to create environments, I figured I had everything I needed to get started. First thing I did was set up the correct scaling for the grid in blender by setting the units in the scene settings to “None”.

After that, I set the scaling in the viewport settings to 0.1, and subdivisions to 1.

Now that I had that out of the way, I hit shift+A to add a mesh to the screen, specifically a grid. Once I added the grid to the scene, a context menu popped up on the bottom left, and I used these settings:

I plugged in those settings and hit “enter” on my keyboard.

Once I finished that up, I trimmed the size of the grid down to what I wanted for the hallway by deleting some faces on the grid. Once that was done, I extruded the walls and copied the floor to the ceiling. Now I had a basic room to work with!

I didn’t want to get too fancy for the columns, so I just created a 5 “cube” high column, used the inset faces tool to create some moulding on the edges, and then I used the mirror modifier to create the other half of the column.

After that, I duplicated that column 4 times to match our side reference image.

Once I had that done, I had pretty much all the geometry I needed for the hallway. The door will be made later once I rip the door texture from the game.

STEP 3: Textures

So as much as I wanted to go out and take real-world photos for my textures, it was -30° where I lived when I started this project, so I definitely needed to grab my textures from elsewhere. I still wanted to process them as much as possible on my end so I could learn how to do it though, so my process ended up like this: Grab image from textures.com (I have a monthly subscription, but there are free options elsewhere on the internet), import them into GIMP, and then scale / color / posterize them as I see fit.

From reading around and referencing TheSicklyWizard’s video, I could determine that texture size was generally anywhere between 32x32 to 128x128 for environment textures, but texture size could max out at 256x256 for things that require a lot of detail, such as a character’s face on a character mesh. I decided to go with 64x64 for my texture sizes, on a 256x256 texture atlas.

So I was looking for a wallpaper texture, a wood texture, a fancy hardwood texture, a carpet texture, and I needed to rip the door from the game still (we’ll get to that at the end). I landed on these textures from textures.com:

Now that I had all these, I just had to import them one by one into GIMP, and color them to how I needed. Then I scaled them to 64x64, and set the posterize level to 32 to reduce the amount of colors in the images. Finally, I pasted all those textures onto a 256x256 texture atlas.

Once I was done with all that, I tried to get a clear picture of one of the doors in the game so that I could rip the image from the game instead of trying to cobble together a door from textures.com. I took the clearest photo I could, and used Sand Ripper to grab a flat version of the door.

Now that I had a door, same thing; color, scale, and posterize. The door texture was going to be 128x64, so it kept a similar scale to the rest of the textures. The final texture atlas looked like this:

Final thing was adding a slightly darker wood texture so that I could have some contrast between the moulding and the rest of the pillars.

STEP 4: UV Editing the Model

UV editing for this ended up being a lot easier than I thought it would. I just went into the UV editing tab in blender, selected the faces I wanted to texture, hit the “UV RESET” option under the UV tab, and then scaled the UV to fit my texture atlas.

I just repeated that process for the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and the pillars. I also made up a quick door model that uses our texture we just made.

STEP 5: Godot Time

I threw the level into the engine and added some candle sticks, but it didn’t quite have the look I needed yet. Tried to add some blood decals I made, but that ended up looking REAL bad.

So I ended up doing the same texturing process I did earlier on some blood textures I found on textures.com, and I added some volumetric fog. I also bumped up the resolution a bit(ended up using 640x480 for that sweet sweet 4:3 aspect ratio). That really helped.

After that, I just needed some dead bodies littered around. So I followed a “Stark Crafts” video on making low poly 3d models to make an Alan Wake lowpoly model, and I think it turned out pretty good!

Definitely didn’t take me like, 6 full restarts to get it looking the way I wanted, but whatever.

Once I had finished that, I just threw the model into mixamo’s auto-rigger to rig the mesh, and then I put it into the engine and posed him looking dead a bunch of times. After that, I added a dither shader to the scene in Godot, and I was done!

I am very happy with the final results. I think it was a fantastic way to learn blender, and I couldn’t have done it without those who had paved the way beforehand. Looking forward to taking all these new skills into the next game project I am working on.

If you’d like to ask questions or keep an eye on the stuff I am working on, feel free to reach out/follow me on BlueSky. It’s where I do most of my posting nowadays.

Thanks for reading!