Arabian Pottery Shop - DS Specs

m.roanhaus

I'm calling this piece done but would appreciate some input on it. It's an Arabian Pottery Shop that's 902 Tris. After reading some spec sheets they all agreed a game at 30fps could hand 2048 tris onscreen at once so I wanted to keep it under 1000 tris since the characters onscreen would take up the remainder of tris. I figured the player could rotate the screen 45 degrees to the left or to the right so planes weren't an option for the pots. The majority of my textures are 16x16 with the highest single map being 64x64 on an object and 128x128 for the shadow map. I don't know if the DS can handle maps that size though, couldn't find anything on that. If anyone has official specs on the DS please share.




Up-Close Renders (I know you'll never see this on the tiny DS screen but I figured I'd show the little details for people to scrutinize:poly124:.)





Lemme know what you think:)

aesir

fantastic job. You've got this art style down pat.

BrodyB

I think I see a brick texture for your walls, but it's so mute it doesn't show when zoomed out. Maybe bring up the contrast on the walls a bit more? Not much else I can really say, you can do lo-poly environments!

m.roanhaus

Thanks, yeah, I couldn't figure out if I wanted a brick texture on the wall or mud walls so it's kinda in between. I think I'm gonna change it to bricks though, thanks for reminding me BrodyB.:)

commander_keen

I think the lighting is too flat overall. It would be awesome if at least 75% of the light was comming that lamp on the wall. also the lighting decal doesnt seem to be working very well. Im sure the DS supports additive blending, and even if not you could still get a better result by tweaking it. Also I think using vertex lighting and adding special cuts in the geometry might be cheaper then overlaying shadow maps on everything and might give a better result as long as you can do a modulation blending for the vertex colors which would probably be tricky in max.

StJoris

Hey mate, looking good, very zelda-ish. Reminds me of the shoppe in kokiri forest from Ocarina of time. Think you can get some more of the lighting in them base textures. What I did with the tf2 scene was shadowing/lighting one half of say a beam (in the style still, so no blacks) and I'd just map the underside of beams to the dark bit.

andrei313

Vertex color could improve this a little It should also save some texture space.
From what I know the DS can handle 512x512 textures but most of the time you won't need more then 256x256 (and this just for backgrounds and maybe characters) because the screen resolution is smaller then 512
DS also has less colors then Windows does. I like to index my textures to 256 colors... gives a better idea of how it will look on the console. This might mean that you won't get that nice gradient in the light color.

danr

its looking pretty good for a low-poly scene, but i think you're underestimating ds spec

"After reading some spec sheets they all agreed a game at 30fps could hand 2048 tris onscreen at once so I wanted to keep it under 1000 tris since the characters onscreen would take up the remainder of tris"

it's not 2048 tris in total for your scene and characters - it's 2048 RENDERED tris. Everything is backface culled, you're never rendering anything you can't see. If you select all your polys from a camera pos with "ignore backface" switched on, you'll probably be surprised at just how few triangles you're rendering. Probably less than half of your total.

texture wise, i also think you're underestimating what you can get in. You've effectively got about 512k of vram - it's all split up into chunks, not all of it is usable for everything, but it's good as a sort of ballpark figure. Uncompressed, a 64x64 texture at 256 colours would be 4k. Compressed, this would be 1k for the texture and then whatever you need for the palette (compressed textures can use hundreds of colours). Dunno if the ninty compression photoshop plugin is available to the homebrew crowd though

Not entirely sure of the actual maximum texture size as defined by hardware... PSP is 1024x1024, i seem to remember DS might be bigger than that. It all depends on what you can squeeze into VRAM at any given time really. Difficult to second guess without an engine in front of you, but 64x64 is a good ballpark for a working maximum for environment textures. Optimise down from this in halves rather than quarters since you can have rectangular textures, as long as they remain power of 2. So 64x32 is half of a 64x64 and depending on how you map and render it, it can be just as high quality onscreen. It's a useful technique and allows you to be as wacky as you like while getting the absolute most from your textures ... 128x8 is a favourite for trim with a really nice non-repeating pattern on it

set yourself up renders at 256x192 with anti-aliasing and filtering switched off to try and judge what you can pick out onscreen from your cameras. If it's a fixed camera distance, you need to try and get rid of stuff that just flickers and turns into glitchy noise, it can be really grim

okno

I love seeing pieces like this, nice work. You could still use planes for the pots by getting them to face the camera at all times, (like the trees/bob-ombs etc. in Mario 64) but I think the aesthetics of modeling them like you have is more consistent. The biggest thing which stands out to me is the brightness of the wooden structures at the back, it would look better if it had the same kind of hard-core shading the nearby walls have.

Justin Meisse

what others have said, maybe some more contrast

especially more contrast and edge highlights on the wood bits, it all sort of blends together.

The soot marks on the stove kind of blur the shape of the opening

Still, this is very sexy and I like it alot

Pootel

Hmm really nice. Wonder how well you could up the texture resolution while at the same time keep that cool low poly style and look?