Godot N64 Style Demo

Play demo in browser!

A collection of shaders and materials for Godot engine that aim to recreate the aesthetics and quirks of the N64

Features

• 3-point texture filtering
• Light anti-aliasing
• Linear mip-map filtering
• Horizontal blur across the screen
• Limited color depth
• Hardware dithering to hide color banding
• Shiny chrome-like metallic surfaces
• Billboard sprites
• Fog to limit draw distance

Tips for best results

• Use very low poly models
  • Prefer smooth-shading over flat-shading wherever possible
• Keep textures as low resolution as humanly possible
  • Huge blurry texels are the cornerstone of the N64 look
  • Make sure filtering is disabled - the filtering is handled in the shader
  • Make sure mip-maps are enabled
  • Rely on a mix of vertex colours and texture maps, instead of higher detailed texture maps wherever possible
• Keep your internal resolution low
  • Resolution on N64 is a complicated affair. While the system would output to video at certain specific resolutions, games themselves would have their own separate internal resolutions
  • These internal resolutions could vary wildly between games, but 320x240 seems to be the most common choice
  • That being said, you can easily go widescreen by using a 16:9 resolution with similar height
• Use as basic of a lighting set up as you can get away with
  • Modern lighting techniques are a very easy way to break the illusion of appearing like early 3D!
  • Where possible, prefer to use white ambient light, with vertex colours on geometry to fake lighting

Credits

Floor texture (available under CC-0): https://stealthix.itch.io/rpg-nature-tileset