LOW-POLY ART
polycounter lvl 19
This is the sweet spot for your low-poly models. Post 'em if you've got 'em!
Low-poly hasn't really been a requirement in the games industry for a long while now. This thread is for low-poly art style appreciation, so please take note of these rough guidelines:
Here's a handy list of ways to make your art look right in mainstream 3D software: Low-Poly Art Style Guide
Low-poly hasn't really been a requirement in the games industry for a long while now. This thread is for low-poly art style appreciation, so please take note of these rough guidelines:
- Keep models under 1,000 triangles.
- Scenes are fine, if all models are low poly.
Here's a handy list of ways to make your art look right in mainstream 3D software: Low-Poly Art Style Guide
Replies
I should definitely revisit this!
more:
http://dadako.com/forums/mkb_right.png
http://dadako.com/forums/mkb_scale.png
Although I made it a while back some of the key principles to budgeting your triangles still count: (the budget was 1024 tris)
1. Maximise your detail on the tyres, spend as many polygons as you can here. Beg borrow and steal geometry from around the bike to feed these hungry beasts. This is the area that will get the most attention, as they move and the eye is naturally drawn to them as they spin.
2. Remove any detail that doesn't add to the silhouette of the bike or can be done just as well in a texture. You don't need to model that brake cable when a 6 tris plane can do the same job. That tiny bit of metal that connects the shocks or pedals, is it ever seen?
3. Floating geometry is king. Stick pipes into planes, tubes into tubes. Geo doesn't need to be connected, you can save huge amounts of triangles here. The focus is the end shape and not the geo flow.
4. Try to remove as many curves out of your pipes as possible. Only curve when it adds to the silhouette. As you can see above, I could have collapsed that one loop in the middle of the long part on the handlebars and saved a whole bunch of tris without changing the models appearance.
5. Reference regularly, make sure it can be ridden by your player model.
6. Try to avoid "dirty modelling" - the bike is not a table, it will fall over. If the under part of your seat was deleted due to saving 2 triangles, that's going to look weird when seen.
O-oh.... :shifty::shifty::shifty: *ninja-delete-headlight-shine*
In other news, I love seeing these low-poly bikes! I don't know much about bikes, but I do definitely appreciate sexy machinery.
Are you going get rid of that mirror line in the middle of the chassis when you get your model finishded? Because I think you should do that. The middle line is giving nothing to the profile of your bike, so it would save tons of tris there and you could spend them to something more important.
Also I'd prolly do something for these:
And first I thought I saw some unnecessary edges in the engine department, but then I realized the engine is just made of overlapping parts, am I right?
Good work anyways!
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@leilei That torch is looking good
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@wildmax Nice solid start there! I'd triangulate the sides of the petrol tank to make the shape more natural (that one quad there seems to "stretch" out a bit too much).
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@Rapante Haha, squirrel on dope.. And I'm messing up all my nuts 'cause of dat.
Oh wait, what was the analogue again... :poly141:
About the cabin, I may have some kind of texture to show later today.
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@hawken Thanks for the comment! And yea I should raise the fender again. Last update wasn't 'nuff I see.
And what browser do you watch the gif with? One other dude also complained about not seeing the gif properly (on dA). I'm using Firefox 7-something it is working as supposed to. I also tested it on IE8 (eeeeeeeeeew, I had to use IE! I had to watch porn for like 2 hrs just to clean up my head from that kind of carbage >_>) which seemed to work "fine" if you don't count in the slooooooowwww FPS of ~8-10 or something.
Guess I should do another test with Google Chrome.
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@hawken Oh and about your bike: is that your entry for this bikefest? It's looking good... Wait! Is that... Is that...
... AN N-GON ON YOUR BIKE'S GAS TANK!? My god
Also is there somekind of fancy reflection stuff going on with the shiny parts of your bike, or is it just cleverly textured?
ALSO, I agree with the points you made in that post. Especially the 1. and 3. one. My first thoughts were when I started modelling my own bike was "I seriously got to make those wheels look chubby".
Cuz I looove it chubby.
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@Tigerfeet You are just like the ninjas from old movies. They always yell right before they perform the sneak attack
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@Fomori You are OBLIGATED to do so! Now at least.
@9skulls
haven't really thought about that yet. Its a pretty small bike IRL, so ill probably have to go with lankier proportions compared to what everyone else is doing.
it can! but unfortunately not by rendering it. Go to your "animation" dropdown menu and choose "make preview"
you won't be able to render directly to a gif, but you'll be able to render single frames and put them together in your image manipulation app of choice!
Here's the texture WIP for my arcade cabin:
Oh what's the inspiration behind that, you ask? I'm glad you asked! I am trying to combine succesfully this, this and this.
as for me i'm doing some tweaks to lighting and environment in dicta. I think it's starting to look more natural.
Since i've posted in this thread we've also implemented morph targets, so the early planes without ailerons properly warp their wings
Cloud distribution still sucks. That's the next thing I hope to revisit.
Just webkit (safari / chrome) - I think it would be safer to remove any transparency & loss on export) What bikefest? Nah, I modelled that back in 2003... I have the file in MAX format but am now on a mac, no way to open it.
Maybe it's time for a bike challenge.
Textures? nothing over 256x256?
or Strictly 1024 tris for the bike?
9skulls: Gorgeous bike and cabinet! I'm actually building an arcade cabinet for reals so I'm biased, but yours rocks mah socks.
Edit: this bike thing is pretty tempting, I've been dying to do some more LP work!
Well, there's already the "manifesto" of it...
thanks Maph! Yep, I did the texture the old way
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@hawken It's a great idea, but I am afraid that as soon as you make this "official" ppl will fleet the same second
But if you are going to set down some rules, I think 1000-1100 tris for the combined biker + motorbike is about the correct limit. That and texture size of MAX 256² for each model.
:poly145:
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HAHAHAHAHA I love what you did thar :poly142:
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@Rapante Yeah but the gradient trick was brilliant. It added so much depth to the texture without making it look too hi-res or anything.
I would be so down with this!
[THREAD HIJACK]
Yip, for reals. And it's a MAME cabinet based on the MK2 design. It's actually my mate's cabinet, but we've talking about this since our childhood basically. I also started building custom joysticks for the PS3 as well whenever I can find the time.
We can only work on the cabinet sporadically, but the side panels are all cut out, next up are the back, front and top panels and the control panel.
Blog wise, that mate of mine started a blog about it yes, but it's in Dutch. I'll look into creating an english one when we're done.
But here are two pictures anyway!
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7460156/MameSidePanels01.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7460156/MameSidePanels02.jpg
(edited by hawken - I won't delete this but links for pictures please)
As far as plans go, you can find a whole slew of plans online for arcade cabinets. http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/Cabinet_Plans Just take any one to base yours off or re-create it as is.
The hardest choice to make is what kind of monitor you're going to use imho. Depending on the cabinet specs, you'll need at least a 21" and preferably a 25". But the latter only comes in the arcade monitor variant, and those don't come cheap.
We opted for a television with a VGA to SCART (EU standard) cable I still need to make at some point to translate the VGA to RGB signal combined with using some software driver hacks to get the refresh rates good.
If you ever get started on one, it ain't cheap. Unless you already have the proper powertools available already (table and circular saw, sander, jigsaw, heavy duty drill, router, etc...), which we did not.
If you want some more infos, shoot me a pm.
[/THREAD HIJACK]
Rapante: Are you telling me you did not dither those gradient yourself? Shame on you!
Fuck, I'm gonna try to get some action of this contest as well! Do FX and all that stuff count for the tri budget?
ok here she is, little blue riding hood
tris: 1023 combined
will unwrap and texture her later because I literally have to catch a train in an hour or so, my bro's wedding is tomorrow
Tell the truth. t's a future model of a Kawasaki Ninja. And they'll sell Ninjas bundled with motorbikes!
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorrad
Hmm, don't really agree with this. To be fair Rider should be optional, and separate budget. It's a much more modular approach surely?
1024 is a nice round number we usually use.
Let's have the rules clearly outlined then and get the challenge started. What's it gonna be?
I've already started in mind to keep bike+rider below 1100 tris.
but would like to know asap if I can go higher.
But then again, I never started it out as a competition or anything that formal, so yeah, whatevs. Start a bike competition if you like
Edit: I do think we should keep the texture size at 128x each because there's been so many of us that have already made textures that size
You can check out the rest here http://www.indiedb.com/games/turbo-run/images/turntable7#imagebox
Rapante I really dig that texture style, the addition of the gradients really make the texture look crisp and clean.
curse you lucky people in the EU getting RGB on TVs! here we need to hunt for industrial monitors with BNC connectors for RGBHV, and most of the cheaper ones (sony pvm) are only 15khz, so the good tri-sync displays like the nec xm29 sell for a premium. thankfully i found an older tri-sync mitsubishi for $40 in decent condition, though i'm pretty sure the yoke is out of alignment causing some wacked geo and bad edge convergence.
i'm a crazy hardware purist nutjob but you should just be able to wire up a simple cable and use a tool like soft-15khz, right?
anyway, enough derailing.
Challenge will officially start when the Tron challenge voting ends (oct 31st)
ugggggh I love Tyson Murphy's tutorial...Concept on left, mine on right
Model and texture have taken about 3 hours combined so far, will hopefully have it done tomorrow
338 tris, self-lit
[SF]Three9 Your texture painting skillz are crazy!
Rapante Amazing bike there! I have probably been playing too much Deus Ex, but it looks like a way prettier version of the one in Pritchett's office
Can't wait to see the finished rider!
[SF]Three9 Why is this edge loop there?
I don't think it serves a purpose :P
8skulls Nice arcade cabinet! I love your work
EDIT
Well I might just aswell do something useful with this post.
I saw another comp at lowpolyworkshop and thought it might be a nice reason for me to do some more low poly modelling.
So the comp was about making a building under 3000 tris or so, and I thought I'd make a club house for my biker. Basically it is like an old pirate ship or something which was later transformed into a house. Top part of the building "the old deck" of the ship acts as relaxing chillout place. The roof will be growing grass 'n' trees 'n' stuff, so it's like own personal forest on your roof.
But yeah:
Currently my building is sitting at 1066 tris with 128² texture, which obviously is WIP:
There's some usable space left for additional stuff I need to be adding later on.
Any ideas of what I should add to the top part of the ship which currently looks very empty (the part where the steering wheel should be)?
hoping to keep him under 500 when finished.
I think I have a serious disorder...
Seriously though, much love.
> see it here <
And to make sure this post isn't a total waste, I'll just post something I'm working on right now.