N64 style vertex shading/lighting for low poly models?

Question

I can't find info on how to achieve this. I'd like to make n64 style graphics and imitating the way models and environments are "lit" is the part I'm very lost on. I've heard it's a kind of vertex shading but I'm not sure how to do this, in blender specifically and accurately to how it looks on n64.

One example of what I mean is seen very well in pokemon stadium:

And a more dramatic(and nice looking) example is bongo bongo from Ocarina of Time:

This is not how the actual model looks obviously, as there is lighting effects added for the game. How can this style of shading and lighting be imitated in blender?

Edit: In addition to manually painting vertexes for certain lighting effects, I also found some sources that say that the N64 used gouraud shading, but I can't for the life of me find any information on how to render something in blender with such shading. Any help?

Answer 1

I'll give this a shot since no else has answered yet.

The N64 had a semi-programmable color combiner, but the most likely mode is probably "modulate" where the texture color is multiplied by the shade color to produce the output color.

The shade color can be either be static vertex colors, or it can be calculated dynamically from the lighting.

Vertex Colors

For the vertex colors, you can hand-paint the shading into the vertex colors, or have Blender bake to vertex colors. Use a node setup like this:

This should be pretty accurate to the N64.

Lights

In this mode, the shade color is a Gouraud Phong-type shading computed from the normal and the lights. The N64 had one ambient light and up to eight directional (diffuse) lights. You can emulate the ambient light in Blender by setting the Background color for the World. For the directional lights, use Suns.

For the nodes, I don't know if you can do Gouraud shading (shading computed per-vertex, then interpolated) with Blender. But you can do it per-pixel with something like this

The diffuse node computes lighting. The node labeled "Clamp" keeps the shade color in the 0-1 range.

Also set Shadow mode in the material settings to None.

However, this is less accurate to the N64 than using vertex colors since it isn't Gouraud shaded.