What to do? DS enviornments

Sage

Hi I have a few questions about modeling. Currently I'm doing some environment props and targeting a developer that makes Nintendo DS games. I have searched through some of the threads that have information on the DS specs. From these threads I decided to keep my props under 256 tris probably around 64 or less, of course it depends on how important they are. Buildings would probably be 128 to 256 tris. The textures I'm keeping 256 or less, 64. For scenes I'm keeping them at 2048 tris. Are these good numbers to follow for texture and poly limits? About how many textures should I use and do these need to be several tiling textures in one page?

I have shown potential employers solid air tight models and versions were I delete all hidden tris. I seem to always get mixed reactions, if they are solid they make the comment that I'm wasting polys or if I delete the hidden polys I get the comment about how the shadow casting needs solid meshes to work properly. Should I just have samples of both?

Thanks.

Alex

Joseph Silverman

http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=87756&an=0&page=0#Post87756

Sage

Suprore I did read that thread and many others, I'm just wondering if there is more to it than that and for any information on how to do this that is not posted there. Thanks though.

Alex

dur23

Vertex colors for lighting, under 2k in triangles(that the ingame camera would see), no textures bigger than 64x64 cause they're a hog. And you can use full color cause most studios i would assume use the nns.tga format (which is another version of the dds format).
I'd say its alright to do entire scenes but show what kind of view you would have on the ds (under 2k).

And vertex light EVERYTHING! hehe. Makes the world go around i say.

Emil Mujanovic

I second vertex lighting! Instant win if done correctly.

-caseyjones

danr

your poly budgets are a bit odd, there's nothing to be gained from "power of two" numbers (32,64,128 etc) when it comes to poly count ... if, for example, you managed to hit your 128 tri budget exactly, but at the detriment of a vital bit of shape, everyone looking at your portfolio is going to say "why the hell did you do that?". And that's not good.

for showing off DS stuff to developers, one idea would be to do some mockup shots using a typical game camera angle, and count the triangles that the camera can see. Everything is backface culled, so your 100 tri building won't necessarily be contributing a full 100 tris to the 2048 tri limit for the screen. Adding that sort of info to your portfolio will show devs that you really understand your target platform

Sage

Sweetness, really good to know this! Thanks a million. The only type of experience I have is doing low poly work for RTS games. So the limits I kind of formulated in my mind after i did some thinking for the 2000 tris screen limits was say 100 for an m1 abrams tank. It was fun to model. Can these models have holes in them or do they need to be water tight or is this a just depends kind of thing? Thanks for the feedback.

Alex

Steve Schulze

I'll have to look into this NNS.TGA business. We tend to reduce everything to 16 colours as much as possible along with loads of vertex lighting. For a portfolio piece you might be better to go with the reduced colour palettes simply to show that you know how to work with them. They can be tricky to work with if you don't know how.

Models definitely don't need to be water tight. Delete anythign you won't ever see and use 1 bit (black and white)alpha planes instead of geometry wherever you possibly can.

danr

nns_tga covers the whole lot, from 4-colour through 16, 256 and onto more-or-less full colour, and a compressed texel format that gives a smaller size than 16-colour but allows you to use more. Also has support for 8 and 32-colour alpha

Sage

Danr how do I make a nns_tga? Is this just some special file format like say gif where you get to specify settings at the time of export? I'm kind of thinking in terms of how photoshop 5.5 and up let you specify things for web when you go into the save for web menu option? Is there a limit to how many vertex lighting layers you can have on your model? Thanks for the feedback.

Alex

Joshua Stubbles

I'm assuming it's part of the Nintendo DS dev tool kit?

I don't know how homebrewers deal with it. There's someone here on the forums that's working on a DS game - has flying aircraft and whatnot. Pretty swanky stuff. Can't remember his name though...

Uly

Shepeiro.

Joshua Stubbles

Bingo

danr

sage - unless you're exporting to a game specifically using the ninty formats, you don't need it. Normal TGAs with the same sort of colour depths (4, 16, 256, and 2/8/32 colour alpha) are fine for showing off. For portfolios though, if you can make something look really good using as few colours as possible, that's always going to be a plus

dur23

Danr knows what he says listen to him.

NNStga's are nintendo format based on the same compression methods as the .dds format. One of the options is 4x4 compression. Basically the best compression i've ever seen in my life. Any studio producing for the DS that isn't using it should be smacked upside the head. One of the better comparisons we did was with 512 textures. One was saved out as a 16 color 8 bit, and one was saved with 4x4. The 4x4 used 6 less kb and had over 300 colors. Just to give you an idea.


As for modeling, the suggestion we have is to always always always go as low as you can. For example some of our particle effects are done on single triangles as opposed to quads. The characters i just completed recently were 300-350 triangles and using 1 32x64 texture (full color). The limit of the number of characters we could have on screen was 3. Totalling (at the high end) 1050 triangles, excluding back face culling, but we never used that as an excuse to add more triangles. So for our environments we shot for having no more than 1000 triangles on the screen at once (exploring-ish game). Another set back from the DS is the number of pallettes that can be loaded. We left 12 for the menus, which i believe (not to sure) left us with 52 pallettes to work with. And in our case that ment only 52 textures can be loaded TOTAL (not to say some studio hasn't found a way to compress all their pallettes in a real nice fashion).

Also remember that there is ZERO filtering on the DS, so a lot of sumdged colors look way worse on the ds (like when you zoom out to 66.7% in photoshop). Takes playin.

Anyways, i think those are some pretty good guidelines to go by.

Good Luck. Post what you got and ill be sure to pipe up and critique you.

Sage

Thanks a lot really helpful. I started to texture my m1 with 1 64 x 64 texture and damn it's tough. I'm going for a realistic style with at 16 colors and it has 159 tris. I was thinking in terms of rts games and thought how many units could the screen handle. Turns out not many at all. I was wondering about the pallete limitation as in how many they could have, thanks for posting these limitations helps get this project going. Are buildings getting textured with seamless textures or more like a character or vehicle skin currently in the DS? Is it possible for textures to share palletes or is 52 textures the limit? Texturing with 16 colors is kind kicking my ass at the moment but I like the challenge. I decided for ease of clarity to start my base at 256 x256 since the wire template at 64 x 64 and 128 x 128 are to hard to read for finding where things go. Thanks again.

Alex

dur23

You should ask yourself how big these objects will be on the screen? How close will you get? etc. And then put it in screen shots the size of the DS screen to see how shes holding up.

Buildings usually all share similar textures; ie. bricks, siding, etc. And then their colors are tweaked by vertex colors. Sharing palettes is tied to the nns, i don't know if anyone is doing this yet. So for now ill say no.

Hope that helps.

Sage

Thanks for the feedback, very helpful. I restarted my texturing. I posted a thread that will show my progress, hopefully it will look great when I'm done. Here is the link:

http://boards.polycount.net/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=197803&an=0&page=0#Post197803

Thanks for all the help, it's made a real difference.

Alex

Steve Schulze

We use pallette sharing, but not NNS (at least not at the artist end of the pipeline. Maybe they're getting converted during export or something). The best way to set this up is to get all the textures you want to share the colours on (and you can often get away with loads) and stick them on the same texture. Reduce to 256 colours and save the pallette. Now you can go through and load the saved pallette onto all of your textures.

This'd probably be a good technique to show off for your reel.

Scott Ruggels

A way to deal with the 16 color problem is to use a 16 color grey scale and use vertex colors to "tint" elements of the model
(but yeah, there is not filtering, so painting a bit blurry in places would work.)

You can also use the vertex colors to add in shadows.
What was the format for getting transparencies in th DS again? where can I find the specs?

Scott

dur23

Scott: NNStga. It something straight out of nintendo i believe.