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
That's what I was thinking too. It's a great model and tex, but they do blend together.
As for a cartoony style, have a look at some of Kenneth Fejer's (aka Tennis) work:
Your latest WIP is going in the right direction, but I still feel your textures are trying to be too realistic. Also, please pixel the road, the AA on the striping is very bothersome.
Rapante, you could tighten up the texture a bunch by straightening out texture islands. Less stairstepping = more awesome.
TonyClifton, you'll want to play around with your colors a bit, give the shadows some color, and make the cannon a bunch lighter because right now there's no volume discernible. If you're just using fullbright textures and no shading you could do away with the chamfers, btw.
Delko, maybe you want to cut down on the dithering. Based on what I'm seeing here you'll get a lot of speckly noise while animated. Also try to adjust the amount of detail in your texture to the size an object uses on screen. Take a look at the rims for instance, which looks like someone used the MSpaint spraycan on it. Along the same lines, you might wanna thicken the highlights on the trunk.
bridge
sorry for misunderstanding your dilemma!
Started something.
Are there nay good tutorials on creating a UVmap/texture like the house example you provided?
I created a similar looking model but I am having a hard time figuring out how to uvmap so it can reuse certain parts of the texture without increasing the poly count. (like that tiny 32x32 texture with that house).
The way I was doing it before had lots of wasted texture space
Thats a 1/4 of your space there.
Invert 2 sets of buildings and have the v's of the roofs overlap.
to a degree you need more tris to tile more.
Notice that the house that snade posted uses the same window all around. But on the sides and back it's mirrored, that that makes one more tri for the back, and 2 for the sides (over just texturing plain) . that's another 1/4 of your tex usage.
But your house specs are so low as is i don't think a few more tris would hurt.
You could use the top half of your buidling front for the top half of the back, the bottom half of the back could use the left side of the one building side you have left (after tiling and getting rid of one)
A quick ps job. Basically cut the space in half with only a resize of the snowflake.
Here is a wip of a new house.. Ignore the house thing on the right, that will be a garage or something eventually.
Whats issues have you run into with your textures? I may be able to help.
Allow me to fix that for you: Don't render.
Seriously though, why would you even bother with this hassle, if the goal of all this is to do something that is useless? The render won't offer you anything but aa, and you can get that a few different ways. One is get a bigger screengrab and resize it, another is to force aa in your nvidia (or ati *shudder*) control panel. Another is to say 'fuck aa, I'm making pixel art'.
That looks fantastic! Initially though, I was just shocked at the similarity to what I was doing at work a while back, heh. We were working on a mobile racing game (I posted some of the characters in here), and I went for almost the exact colours! I suppose we're both inspired by the same games from our youth, when green grass and blue skies were common
Vprime: I'd say it all looks too dirty. That can be partially solved by introducing some colour to your shadows (can make the difference between nuclear fallout and cozy winter), but even then I'd take advantage of the strength of small textures and exaggerate everything more. It will push things in a more cartoony direction, but I believe that just works better with such lowres graphics.
I would also do away with the tiny bevels and other detail in your mesh and spend those tris on cutting up your mesh. This way you could have a small texture with a few windows and a few doors, and have each house be different without having to uniquely texture each one.
what do you mean just use screen grabs?
without rendering I really don't think I have a way to create an image sequence.
Window > Playblast
Each house is 55 tris, with garage it is 80 tris versus the 20 from the old houses before.
128x128 texture (I left rooma t the top of the map for things like trees, christmas lights etc.).. I honestly don't know how some of you work at these kind of resolutions!?
Here is a picture from the viewport (not in game yet with any lightmaps)
I think I am going to remove the little dip in the roof as you can't really see it and it will save a bit of polys with a bunch of houses on screen.
It looks a bit like you're using floating geometry for the windows and doors? This could give z-fighting issues , so be careful.
You said you were looking in to shaders, do you think it would be possible to color the houses by using a mask? This would give you four times the variety at the cost of an alpha-channel. Actually, it would give you infinitely more. You could mask 4 different window/door layouts, and then you could randomly generate a color for each house.
Actually, I might give this a whirl, see what I can come up with.
Won't be using any shaders, though that is a good idea will look into it and see if we have time to do something like that.
Here's what I got after 30 minutes of doodling. You could very easily make variations by dragging the entire unwrap down, like I did with the least house.
Often, when you're making a bunch of buildings, it's better to start with the texture and then build geometry with that in mind.
Also, I recommend you look at working on a grid, this simplifies things a lot. For example, these are 3x2 and 2x3, which means I can easily swap and rotate roofs for even more variation.
So glad you kept up with this, It's all awesome and I am loving that bridge!
Love everything here, especially those lowpoly bikes.
ultra-small sprite - might need CTRL+middlemouse zoom.
@snader Completely missed your comment, sorry about that. I suppose I could drop the wheels resolution down to 32x32, would read better from a distance but would lose a lot of detail in the wheels. I'll have to experiment with that. Im having trouble with the textures turning into noise at a distance, regardless of the use of dithering or not. Im wondering if some subtle anisotropic filtering wouldn't minimize that.
-edit-
Pretty much done, im going to add in some scenery like houses and maybe a barn since its all just tree tree tree tree rock tree tree, oh and a bridge, at the moment.
Explosion :
Helmet Animated :
Delko: looks great, any chance we can have a look at the textures ?
Rapante: very cool!
@JohnnySix, that explosions great, I never got the hang of animating dynamic stuff like that.
Any tips on getting this down to <500?
Also, I haven't made his cat tail yet; is there a best practice for that?
Tennis, that style looks amazing!
edit. Only the textures are done by me. I couldn't change anything about the mesh as they'd been rigged and animated already.
EDIT
Unless my god it IS!?
okay think im done for now, might animate him later.
really had a longing to do some proper pixelart lately, so today I doodled up this guy here
Nicely done here Tennis ! Your robot could match well with some fighting game (ie: Street Fighter 3rd Strike :poly115:)
about 430 polys .
Really cool! Nice work!