Undertale 360: How To

This isn't a complete beginner's guide to make a video – you must be familiar with a 2d graphics editor capable of working with individual pixels, layers and alpha-channels. You'll also need a 3d modeling app, for example Blender – it's free and powerful, it has built-in 360 camera and all other needed functions.

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First let's talk about the source of the textures and sprites.

I use screen shots because a simple source ripping seems to me a very disrespectful thing to do even when I'm planning to redraw the original image.

Having a screenshot you have to downscale it to the original resolution, which is 320 by 240 so the outlines of the sprites will be exactly 1 pixel wide.

In case you're using Adobe PS make sure you're scaling the image with "Nearest Neighbor" algorithm (or similar in other software) to prevent pixels from blending with each other.

Now let’s disassemble a screenshot and have ourselves some textures.

Most of the textures tend to repeat themselves eventually so you'll have to eyeball their pattern in order to get the fragment that will repeat seamlessly.

Sometimes you will not have a clear shot on the texture fragment you need and you'll have to work with what you've got and clean it a bit by hand.

Now let's move on to the sprites. Cut the sprite and paste it into another file.

You'll have to detach movable parts or parts that you will have to place separately in 3d.

Getting rid of the background is a tedious task, so I prefer filling and painting over the background with a vibrant color and then just deleting this whole by selecting the color. This will only work when you're working with pixel art.

Remember that in order to use the alpha channel (semi- or full transparent pixels) you'll have to make sure there's no background layer behind your sprite/ texture. Also use .png format to store pictures as it contains the alpha-channel and works lossless.

Time to put our pixels into 3d world. My approach to pixels in 3d is based on perfect matching of the image sizes. In order to achieve this we'll have to agree that measurement units we're using in our 3d-modeling tool are now representing pixels.

It means that in order to use Frisk sprite we will create a 29 pixels high and 19 pixels wide plane to match, let's say 55*61 pixels of Asgore. All the pixels on the scene should be the same size.

Another big thing is to set up your render engine and texture properties to use no filtration. Any process that blends your pixels would ruin the very concept of pixel-art textures. We need our pixels to be crisp and proud in all it's 8 to 16 bit glory.

If you’re a 3ds Max user you can play with real-world scale property in your texture options – this would speed up some texturing tasks a bit, but not much – I personally prefer setting the size of the texture on the stage of UVW-mapping. And of course planes you've created will fit respective textures automatically.

The fact that you're modeling for 360 means that even if you're using the whole source material from the screen shot you still have at least four major view directions to fill. Play with what you have to make source scene more self-sufficient. Hide edges, reuse models you've already created and try to think what can realistically or logically live outside the original 2d graphics limitations.

 

 

This time the task is simple – you can hide the edges by rounding the scene and the sea that we normally don't see in the game, obviously, can just expand towards the horizon. We can imagine the color of the sky and use some clouds from "Papyrus in the car" scene.

Sometimes you'll have to draw a lot from the scratch and really risk getting too far away from canonical appearance of the location you draw, or character that you normally see as a portrait. Remember Bratty's panties? Was your childhood ruined by this picture?

Remember to always go to your camera view and test your scene.

BTW I'm using 100-110 FOV camera as it allows me to comfortably adopt my 360s to YouTube 360 player.

If you plan to move your camera around the scene, you'll probably encounter a problem with your sprites not facing your camera. You can use axis track algorithm like "Look at constraint" in 3ds Max or Track script in Blender to make the sprites turn at you every time you move.

So let's say your scene is ready to be rendered – in order to make it 360 you'll need a 360 spherical camera. Blender has one and I use it to make real-time 360s, vray render engine has a good 360 camera at least since 2.x generation.

When the video is fully composed and rendered with sounds and music, you'll need to inject a 360 meta data so YouTube will recognize it as a 360 and run it with dedicated media player.

Search YouTube instructions on how to upload a 360 video and you'll have yourself a link to a meta data injector.

That pretty much concludes this article. As easy as it may look, 360 is not a task for a complete beginner, so if you're new to making stuff using creative software – start small, get to know your programs and very soon you'll be ready to make your creative dreams come true.