One vTuber I follow is Natsu Kashii - she's a vTuber that specializes in playing Retro games. I like how she has a retro anime avatar - her model is really good. Because of her retro aesthetic, I decided to make some short animations of her dancing with her community mascot - little coconut crabs. I wanted them to be the PSX aka Playstation 1 style. That is, low poly, jittery, and with crispy unfiltered textures.
I want to explore this aesthetic some more, but this was my first attempt in Blender.
There's a plugin for Blender that automatically snaps vertexes within a box to grid units, so you can approximate the integer math of the PSX graphics processor. I set my texturing to linear so the low res textures come in nice and sharp.
I modeled the scene, crabs, and Natsu in low poly, hand painted the textures in high quality (2K), but then down sampled them and palettized them in Aseprite to get the chonky pixels.
I used Mixamo to rig the animations & did some fun renders. This "PSX Natsu" is perfect for her retro theme aesthetic.
