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
@terri Can't believe you're a beginner, nice work! You've got rigging and animation down too? Amazing!
Very nice work my friend. I especially like the lights on the ships. They really came out well. It looks as though you have been watching some Star Trek and Star Wars. the white ship looks like a Ramulan ship. Aside from that i like what i see. I watched the video and the game is coming along. What are you using to make the ships?
I spent a lot of time browsing http://conceptships.blogspot.com/ for reference haha.
I use modo for modelling and baking mostly (blender otherwise), zbrush to sketch details to bake , along with photoshop obviously. As you can see some are older and were still experimenting with getting the style right - the newer ones have a bunch more style and lights. Sometimes I try to use dDo as well sometimes (the big white ship was an experiment with it).
Thanks for the kind words
All handpainted using bodypaint for all but the seam lines, which are all photoshop since bodypaint doesn´t have the 'constrain to vertical/horizontal' that photoshop does when holding shift. Glad you like em!
This came out nice, though I think the greenish/cyan cast you gave the highlights isn´t quite as nice as the more whitish pink you had going on it in the classroom.
Great site. Would i be remiss if i thought that all those lego planes looked an awful lot like pod racers?
I love the colors on the pack deer
hey thanks a lot man, I started one recently at http://terrivellmann.tumblr.com/
in the textured model it's unnoticable because you may have checked a "two-sided" checkbox. but you can tell if you look at the smooth, x-ray, and wire versions.
yes, I only noticed it on P3d, but had no idea what it was. thanks the explanation, I tried googling it but it was too vague
I'm using blender, I'm going to try to fix it! I'm wonder what I'm doing that causes it
@Moltazia That is a really nice model/texture
I made a space container!
I'm new to this kind of low poly modeling so give me the benefit of the doubt
Cross Post
These look great! Such clean, well presented models. What's the poly count, and any chance you could post your wireframes?
getting lazy with all his decalzZZzz
Here are some houses I made for a game I'm working on. Tower defense called "Defender of light"
You can try the demo here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fos4o.defoflight
finished up the first of a few swords in a custom Torchlight 2 weapon set, called Enteaters. I have no idea how this will hold up in game, probably went too far with detailing/contrast, patiently awaiting for the TL2 editor
Haven't done/finished something like this in years, feels good, i miss it! There are some bits on the texture that are still rough that I'd like to touch up, but want to walk away from it for now.
614 Triangles
512 Texture
meshes
(older shot, have optimized and added some additional shapes since this shot)
the car sits in at 948 triangles with 1 512x512 diffuse texture
I'm afraid I felt in love with her and may want to ask you to post the diffuse map.
Head is built for expression so I can use morphs to change his mood.
Aiming for iOS spec.
Diffuse only.
Currently at 689 triangles.
Wanting to experiment, so going to totally re-do him and creating the texture from a high poly using Max's render to texture.
See which workflow I prefer.
Any tips for improvement?
It's 800 tris, which is far more than it should need, but it's the only way I can get the normals to come out anything other than a horrifying mess.
View it's glorious 213 faces on this page.
Looking much cleaner, nice job.
Here is my arcade game cabinet. 474 tris.
I've started playing around with textures, and I can't seem to get that crisp look I've seen around here. I'm trying to work with a 128x diffuse, and I've tried to maximize my UV space efficiently, but my textures show up very blurry. I've checked for stretching with a checkered pattern, and there isn't any.
Would love some feedback and assistance.
Other than that, try just doing pixel lines, and get those lines not to be blurry (^ like these things) and then go from there?
Another issue I realized was the renderer also had a filter on it which made it blurry. Finished up the textures, but I'd appreciate some C&C because I know there are areas that could use improvements.
Here is my final render (with AO pass).
If you mean the UV space, I just realized this and will go back and optimize it.
For the actual arcade cabinet, I wanted it to be comical proportions to add interest.
I would, however, work on the texture a bit more by adding some interesting detail to it. Maybe some games running on it? Vinyls in the sides of it? Also I'd reconsider the color palette to make it more harmonic, y'know?
I also made an arcade cabin a while back. I decided to make it a little more interesting by adding huge cooling fans on the sides of it. Texture style is a mashup of Pokemon meets Tron meets Duke Nukem. Just to give you a glimpse on how to make stuff a bit more intersting:
FreeFall - nice smooth style (though perhaps using more texture space than necessary?) but you seem to be missing quite a few details here. I can understand leaving out the grille logo because of © issues, but you're also missing the ridges on the hood and roof, and things like blinkerlights, proper doorhandles and windshield wipers.
9Skulls - is that AA in your spinnygif from rendering or is that a clever texture trick? My initial thought was you used something like this to mimic AA at skewed render angles:
But it looks like the AA 'animates' as in it's rendered per frame, and the AA pixel colors are also different colors.
Fashoomp - your texture could be much more efficient and interesting indeed. (the model could be optimized a bit too, but I should have mentioned that sooner, I guess) Mostly I think you need to be more aware of the limitations that such a small texture give you. You can't really do a lot of smooth curves or angled lines because you'll get stairstepping, and it's probably better to do shading in 'straight' gradients than with a fall-of circle.
Look at how your detail lines around the coin area look compared to the shading on the base. Because the lines are the same color, it looks like a design choice, whereas the base shadow just looks like lowres. Stylization is a powerful tool, the tree trunks in this image use only 4x16 pixels per tree, but still look mostly sharp and crispy.
And yes, your UV map is a bit unbalanced. The buttons don't need more than about 16x16 pixels combined. The logo and screen could do with a few more pixels, but the rear of the cabinet doesn't need as many. You could also try to use a technique I'm hereby dubbing 'pixeldoubling' where you make some detailed parts at exactly twice the resolution of the rest of the model. This way you won't notice any texel-size skips. (You can see that in the tree image too, look at the faces: they're 4x the resolution of the trunk) But it's a bit tricky to keep everything in mind when modeling and UV-ing.
Mcunha98 - you really aught to look into mirroring textures, you're wasting a lot of texture space by having the sides on the texture twice.
Fomori - you can probably make the feet as a single block. The space between the toes is minimal, and would be rendered as just a single pixel on an iPhone. (assuming that your character is 25% of the screen height, or 120 pixels tall)
9skulls - Really like your arcade machine! It has exactly that cartoony look I was going for. I'm looking mine over again and I think the silhouette could use some improvement on the side. I'm going to start from scratch again on this one with all my new-found knowledge of low-res.
Good places to have lines in the case of a arcade cabinet are the bottom of the cabinet so you can add a nice floor-mold, the top edges of the 'button platform' and so on. What you want to have is that when a pixel ends, the polygon ends, so you don't have triangularly cut pixels slowly sloping away into the ground.
Here are two of my test-textures:
The first one has a large checkerboard to quickly check texel sizes of different parts so you can divvy up the texture evenly, a gradient which makes it a bit easier to figure out which UV island is which part, and some noise so you can pixel-perfectly align your 'lines' in case you want to have detail crossing several texture islands (for example, the t-shirt collar)
The second one has 3 'layers' of checkerboards, so you can easily compare texel sizes of vastly different scale objects. If you're looking at buildings look at the giant green/white, if you're looking at characters look at the blue/white, and if you're looking at a pistol, look at the 1-pixel grids.
{note to self: create a cohesive and workflow-friendly set someday}
At the same time, though, you want to have as little stretching as possible, so you can't just go and map the entire side to a rectangle because one side is significantly taller than the other. One thing you could do, is treat the thing as a sort of 'roll of paper'
If you look at the red lines of the sidepanels, you can see they go all around the machine at the same thickness, and the machine is just as wide at the front as at the back. If you'd take a roll of wallpaper you could roll it out nicely along those red lines. What this means is that if you treat the top of the cabinet, the lighted 'supercade', the screen and so on as sides of a cylinder you will get perfectly rectangular rectangles, and you can thus texture those red lines all around using a single pixel strip. Then you would have stark detail on the edges, which makes it look fairly interesting already. You could then completely forego any detail on the sides and make it a single color OR you could planarly map the sides - giving you perfectly straight pixels for a nice decal.
Similarly, you could planarly map the grey button panels and treat the black/red sides as a half-cylinder.
I have one test/challenge/request for you: make your next arcade machine using 250 or less triangles. I'm positive you can do it.
I started from scratch on a new model, trying to take everything new I've learned into account. This new one weighs in at 180 tris, far lower than my old one. I've improved the silhouette so it's appealing from the front and the side (I think). Taking a small break from it for now, and I'll tackle unwrapping at some point tonight.
Lens flares are awesome!
@Snader: Yah, it's merely a renderer thing. No fancy AA-techniques used. (check it here for more cleaner, realtime render: http://p3d.in/KYLBD/shadeless (don't mind the texture spills))
@Fashoomp: that's quite an improvement in the silhouette! Also take a note on what Snader says about the texture! Layout UVs as rectangular as possible when working on extra low poly.
I was having some fun at work today. Made a low poly pixel art version of a train featured in a game currently in development called Tumbleweed Express:
Here is the 128X128 texture:
For some reason the animation became a bit slower when creating the GIF in Photoshop. If you would like to check out the game in progress here is the link to our development blog:
http://dirigiballers.blogspot.com/