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
@d2king10: I like that a LOT but what the heck is going on with his hand texture! ewww!
JohnnySix - Really digging the texture man. I like the soft look as well. Are you going for gold along the railing? Can't wait to see more!
I'm not sure if you want this, but I thought maybe you'll find it usefull.
Right now your texture looks monochrome and kinda flat. Here is small overpaint I did, perhaps you'll like it more.
Basically, I've added some slight yellow to the top surfaces and some blue to the front/side/bottom surfaces. This is not some rule you need to apply to everything you do. In fact, depending on situation you may vary these colors to achieve different results, although going overboard with this may end up with some really strong 'predefined' lighting conditions in your scene.
Also, dakrkened a little bit in the corners of the stairs, because these places will collect more dust and dirt than more often used parts. This work regardless of style you working with, be it hand painted or photo-real.
And finally, you might want to check Blizzard's WoW art. Despite it being very cartoony and handpainted, their textures contain a lot of small details which helps with surface definition.
Calling this one done, I think:
linkov - I misinterpreted your paintover and multiplied the yellow and blue - now looking back at the last couple of hours thinking I should've read before I started at things lol.
I think half the issue is my monitor that changes drastically based on angle, and that Max displays things WAY brighter than they are in PS, so it's hard to judge sometimes if the darks are dark enough, and likewise if the highlights are too blown out. As in the image below - the texture looks REALLY dark, but in max, it comes out looking fine.
Is there an easier way of getting tiling stuff like bricks etc lining up, other than grabbing the wire+grid from the viewport, cookie-cutting out the shape then pasting in line with the UVWS? I realise my second mistake while lining up with the brick wall piece, while it tiled to the wall, it didn't tile to itself when placed in position for the next set of 3 stairs. Is it possible to 'bake' textures from one mesh onto another? Say if you placed a plane with a tiling texture all the way along, then picked the meshes along-side to pass the detail onto?
Snader - where's your Ferry?
And Spacey - it's insane how much detail is packed into those tiny faces, did you work on those textures at source size? No downscaling?
LoTekk - nice rifle too, interesting that it's a specialised Hitler assassinating rifle
Check your Render-Environment section in MAX, for Ambient Color value. Its affects the overall lighting in your scene. And get better monitor with wider angles))
Separate your textures. Create one 256*128 (or 256*256 whatever you see fits better) for the steps+railings, one 256*256 with tiling bricks. Use bricks texture for sides of the staircase and you can reuse it in other places too. Its efficient and you won't be getting problems like this.
Erhm.. here?
@johnnysix:
Kinda big critique here, wish I caught you earlier, woulda saved you some time. Anyway, you're approaching this wrong from a couple of angles...
Firstly:Models.
You're way overusing polies. You don't need to have every tile on a polygon, and you don't need all that many cuts parallel to the risers. Your model is also a bit bland. In my example I've reduced polies to an average of about 83 triangles(for two rows of stones. You seem to be using, yours seem to be about 120 for 2 rows, right?
So I'm using a lot less polies, while adding detail. Though Torchlight uses even less polies for the stairs. You also seem to be using complete models for the floor, instead of planes, and you seem to be using more sides on the handrail-pillars (you need only 4)
And I think you should go and delete a lot of faces, like the endparts of the handrail and all undersides. You'll have open ends on the handrail, but you would cover these up with a newel (looks nicer than what you currently have).
Second, you're not being really modular. Your floor modules are 1x1meter, the walls are 2 meter, and the stars sides are 1,5 meter. The 1,5 meter offers no real advantage over 1 meter, and IMO the floor modules could be made 2x2 meter. Adhering to a grid makes things easier.
Third, you could use your texture space more efficiently. On a strip of 3-4 stones wide, I would offset the tiles, giving more room to play with texturing. This is the reason I kept the middle lines perfectly straight. Though I just realize that the damaged stones should get more texture space instead of the clean ones. (clean ones would be less noticeable tilingwise because theres less detail, and I'm using the damaged texture on more modules)
Hope this is any use to you!
Love the style. I will be creating a guard model for an iPhone game soon as well.. I just hope it turns out half as cool as yours :thumbup:
Yeah, did anyone else put two and two together?
lol, I thought the same thing.
I wonder how much this will change after E3 :P
Wow, that's one hell of a crit. You're right on all fronts, my downfall was not planning, and I tried cutting corners to play around with a layout.
I did try it out in UT2004, and the modularity sorta worked, but unlike torchlight's rendering, the engine just uses horrible vertex lighting, which totally destroys the illusion of seamless tiles.
I started again from scratch - I still don't know what scale torchlight stuff should be , so I went with a 256^3 box and went with stairs that fill a 64x256x16 box, 4 to a tile. I'm hoping to convince someone with max 9 to export a couple of the meshes to .obj so I can at least get things relative scale.
I've just baked simple AO and lighting to define the shapes, then I'll get to brushing in the detail again.
EDIT - added some quick highlights/outlines - think I need to make the chips bigger still. I also need to make some rubble steps and other stuff.
The 3 things on the right use the same model (flat plane, lol) and are using the same texture, just offset by a quarter of the texture width. It's a bit more work, but it'll give you a lot more variety without needing to load up extra textures. You could still use the simple version as laid out in the texture (1234, and possibly 4321), but it adds more possible variations.
I don't think it matters much which unit system/scale you use, as long as you stay consistent. For modules, it's important to remember that you can easily work with 2x2 unit modules, but it's a lot trickier to work with 0.5x0.5 modules. Personally, I'd go for 64³ as the main unit, ignoring the height here.
What you can see in my modules is that the first riser is a lot higher then the second. I did this so I could play around a bit with uneven floors.
The newer modules do look a lot better though, with actual detail instead of just wobbly edges.
If normal mapping suddenly appears on iPhone, DS, PSP and web I'll change the rules.
I noticed this playing around in torched breifly, all the floor tiles randomise automatically between various variations on the texture so it doesn't look too linear.
I guess my only question is, when trying to blend the different tiles together, I can't go TOO wild with chips/broken stuff towards the edges, especially when modelling them, in order that I don't have to add a ton of polys to cover all possibilities where the edges meet?
For example, on the second set of stairs, the upper faces came back a lot further, allowing the crumbled steps to still meet the face of the lower step. If I was to model the severly broken up tiles, I'm guessing those either side would have to have faces moddeled at the sides to ensure you don't get any holess?
This also leads me to my second question - with non-mirrored, unique UVs, I was baking in subtle AO, I'm guessing this isn't really going to work with mix'n'match tiles, as all the edges (especially on the broken steps) aren't going to line up.
Is it best them not to bake accurate AO, and instead just throw in fuzzy shadow towards the edges?
From looking at the torchlight textures, it appears they don't really use AO .
Like so on the tiling, where the green is I guess I'd have to add a side edge, but the lighting may look off in some places, if it's too dark :
Nice job
Look at the armor on Snake's shoulders, it's clearly Normal Mapped.
Believe it or not, this screenshot is taken directly from a 3DS demo by Hideo Kojima, with the actual 3DS final resolution 400*240 (although the real one is 800*240 with pixel aspect of 1:2, but due to 3D glasses-free rendering, every eye can see only an half of the horizontal pixels).
More screenshots at e3.nintendo.com/3ds!
Nice graphics, indeed. Bye bye PSP!
I'm wondering how much triangles can pull this new 3DS, and what's the amount of Ram and Vram...
I wasn't talking about realtime randomization though. Just about how to get more models and variety from one texture. You're right in thinking that with random placement you'll have to forego actual AO.
If you want to truly randomly generate the layout of the map, you'd probably be best off making every tile, or every 2 tiles, actual geometry. But that would cost a lot of polygons.
is sculpting a high poly and baking normal detail into a diffuse okay? I've been thinking about this recently.
It seems like there are many games that don't properly use normals anyways, in mass effect 1 and 2 there are many normal mapped environments that have no moving light source, and in that case wouldnt it just be better for the engine to bake in the normal detail (based on placed static lights) much like what is done with shadow maps... Or is this already being done and i'm just misinformed?
UDK does this easily. You can get normals from static lights without question.
Polycount 3DS mini PLZ!
Still it's much more impressive technically than the psp.
The video's shown already doesn't seem to be 30fps, and considering something like mariokart which definately will be 60fps.
And besides, it's not alternating screens at 120fps, it's rendering one single screen that is 800x240 at 60fps,.
It has to have two images per "frame". If it is at what we know as standard 60, that would be 120 images.
You're confusing me quite a bit, sorry.
Aye. Are we not going to see PSP2 this E3? I thought we were...:(
this is probably a conversation best kept in tech talk but I was under the impression all nintendo games have to run at 60 fps?
It use to be the 500 tri thread and people would well at you for doing anything normal mapped or anything too much over 500 tris.
But now mobile games are starting to use normal maps, and as long as its not current gen stuff, I think a lot of that stuff is starting to fit here.
He has a point with it though, the 3ds has some rendering capabilities near that of the xbox, (in terms of shader capabilities and such) so that if we would try to target that we would be doing stuff in here that might just aswell end up in the WAYWO thread.
The namechange to mobile gaming was a bit of a bad choice (imo) due to the fact that mobile gaming has advanced so fast now that we're not limited to doing diffuse-textured superoptimized models anymore.
Keep the limit, keep filling this thread with awesome low-end content aimed at having an optimized diffuse texture and a low usage of polygons.
When everybody starts arguing about what system can do this or that, or what this or that web plugin is capable of (which happens all the time...) there's more spam than art here. The specific limits are a good thing for the art of ultra low spec 3D. Go to tech talk or make a post in the WAYWO thread if you want to talk hardware or use normal maps and go beyond the original limits of this thread. What's stopping you? Why spam this special place with arguments when you can make your own thread and be in peace?
Edit: To add an opinion. I don't really see why the first post was changed in the first place, other than to appease babymen who aren't cut out for the challenge that is.
A little something I jammed out to try some super low stuff! Fun! I hate the face...
So these things have no place in this thread and should be posted in 'what are you working on?' thread? I know there's a lot of really great stuff near the 1000 tri mark, just don't want to have to go through 100 pages of stuff, but they often get "yelled" at for breaking the rules. I get it if you are a new/hobbyist artists and kinda post something in the wrong section, but if you are aiming for high end mobile gaming, where are you suppose to post?
My point is, the 'what are you working on?' thread is all about stuff for current console specs.
and I get there's something special about low rez art where every pixel maters, and most props don't get even close to 500 tris, but there's some really high rez low poly stuff here that looks nice, and that doesn't quite fit the spirit of the minimum specs.
Yep! That is what this thread is (was) about!
I am not trying to discredit such pieces like the ones you point out, they are amazing! What I am trying to say is that this thread started as something pretty simple with simple rules to challenge people, but through incessant complaints from people who didn't want to follow them (or worse, didn't even read the rules) we now have a big vague mess that a LOT of people bitch about instead of bucking up and challenging themselves.
I was only saying the WAYWO thread as an example, as anyone who posts on this forum can start an art thread using whatever "spec" they want and they WILL get views and crits.
THIS thread is something special with special rules. How hard is it really to stick to them?
ps: anyone care to post some pics this time? (this is my fav place to lurk on the whole freaking internet!)
i mean if someone did a set of really nice tiny low res RTS units with nice normalmaps id probably rather see them here than in WAYWO, cause here we usually go into details about the optimisations made, rather than just posting pics and people responding "cool"
Basically, even if something uses shaders and stuff I wouldn't want to miss out on seeing it dissected here if it used some of the same tricks traditional low res art uses, because its the discussion and seeing how people optimise and make the art as efficient as possible which is what makes this thread awesome, I know i dont come here to just see cool low res models (though that is a secondary benefit)
I was asking questions about what he meant by his statement about the 3DS specs. Seeing as this is the low poly thread, it fits well here. No need for moving the conversation to tech talk because it can be answered within a couple posts, and the thread is moving.