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LOW-POLY ART

polycounter lvl 19
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hawken 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:
  • Keep models under 1,000 triangles.
  • Scenes are fine, if all models are low poly.
Some dedicated low-poly modelling tools now exist that make this art style a lot easier to produce; Crocotile3D & Blockbench

Here's a handy list of ways to make your art look right in mainstream 3D software: Low-Poly Art Style Guide

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  • Beazel
    @Giles

    Looks nice man, specially for 2 hours.
    The texturing videos are always an interesting watch.

    Some C&C if you want it,

    The extra loop on his arms isn't helping the silhouette and won't be much help to deformation either. Neither will the leg ones.

    The shield could be cut down to 16 tris (saving you 14 tris) whilst keeping the outside shape. Did a little image below to show some tests. Personally I think 20 is the best as it allows for symmetrical unwrapping.

    Hope it helps man.

    gilesshields.jpg

    Edit: Updated it.
  • vkp_number2
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    vkp_number2 polycounter lvl 8
    My version of Roll from the American Megaman cartoon. I just recently redid the face over. She's for a Homebrew project of mine.

    dy001b.png
    dy001c.png
    dy001ba.png

    sorry for the spam...

    Supercompressed_004z2.gif
    43674337.png
  • gilesruscoe
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    gilesruscoe polycounter lvl 10
    Beazel wrote: »
    @Giles

    Looks nice man, specially for 2 hours.
    The texturing videos are always an interesting watch.

    Some C&C if you want it,

    The extra loop on his arms isn't helping the silhouette and won't be much help to deformation either. Neither will the leg ones.

    The shield could be cut down to 16 tris (saving you 14 tris) whilst keeping the outside shape. Did a little image below to show some tests. Personally I think 20 is the best as it allows for symmetrical unwrapping.

    Hope it helps man.

    gilesshields.jpg

    Edit: Updated it.

    Hey man, thanks.
    That 20 tri's variation is new to me, i'll have to check it out, does it have a reasonably good sideways silhouette also?
    Only really spent around 30mins on the model itself including the unwrap, so i really just slapped this thing together ;) needs an extra loop in the arms and legs for deforms which i've added now along with merging the extra loose verts.
    Another personal crit which im not sure sticks out to other people or not is the flatness of the muscles, especially on his back. I'd like to have fixed that if i gave myself more time ;)
  • Belias
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    Belias polycounter lvl 14
    thanks gilesruscoe, and good work.
    why use 3d coat, isn't blender enough with it's texture painting mode?
  • gilesruscoe
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    gilesruscoe polycounter lvl 10
    Blender has... a brush tool and... a colour select tool i believe which work well, then a couple of dodgy tools which seem to give mixed results (smear and stamp), which is fine for painting in the lines of where things go at the start, but later on when im painting the skin colours etc i need to be able to keep track of my colour pallete, smooth colours together, view guidelines i've drawn. Also 3D coat uses layers which makes things a hella lot easier instead of saving out new Targa's from blender. Also for other models which require more detail 3Dcoat can use the same layer blending modes as photoshop, paint different channels and use brushes which are all super helpful. Blender vs 3Dcoat for texture painting is like comparing MS paint v1 with photoshop, sure, you could paint with it, but its guna be alot quicker and easier if you use the more advanced toolset.
  • krisCrash
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    krisCrash polycounter lvl 9
    vkp_number2: heee, did you slow down the animation to show the boob motion? ;) she is very cute but she looks a bit angry. Maybe do something with her elbows and shoulders, they are collapsing a lot right now. Did you model her in a T pose? The edge for her armpit is definitely too high up, imo. Might be a bit nitpick-ish of me to say!
    Carle, those models are looking ok, the second one is rather alot of tris, im sure alot of the detail in the upper section could be achieved with textures. Also seeming as your using so many cylindrical shapes it would be worth merging the verts together, could add up to saving quite a few tris:
    merge.jpg

    Strictly speaking, this is a bit better. I understand it's something about thin strips taking more rendering time for the pixels they cover, and they of course also affect your shading. So it's better to have more relaxed triangles taking up most the space.
    merge.png

    Loving the robots though :3

    Ah! Also, I should add, I found this very lovely face in another thread, from Quake 3 I believe?
    urs_head.jpg
    I think it's very elegantly done.
    so I tried to use that topology myself. I also slapped a texture on for fun earlier but people thought it was serious so I don't even want to risk that again. I am kind of torn between low poly styles myself when figuring out what I want to make - the cartoony flat faces vs focusing on facial planes :B
    magelp1.png
  • gilesruscoe
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    gilesruscoe polycounter lvl 10
    I like my triangles the way i like my women.... not sure where im going with that, so i'll leave it there.
    Quake definately provides lots of inspiration, even if the target devices are 100 times smaller these days.
    I too am torn between flat and modelled faces for lowpoly stuff, while its fun to have complete freedom to change faces in your texture with a flat face, the added depth and silhouette from facial planes is also great fun to play around with... I guess it just depends on the style of game your working on, which is why its hard to decide which to use when your making characters with no predefined style.
    I can also emphasis what you mean about people taking stuff too seriously, sometimes its fun just to chuck a load of random colours and shapes onto something and see what comes out, and then some guy on polycount will say that its anatomically incorrect.. Thats fine if its something u've spent ages on which actually could be improved apon, but alot of stuff is just done for fun/experiments which people need to start to understand more.
    I wouldn't be too worried about people thinking less of you due to posting something experimental, or getting the wrong end of the stick.

    Essay over, faces like this look fun to do, maybe i'll try one sometime... give it some texture lovin'.
  • Bibendum
    Somebody with more technical knowledge than me can probably provide better insight but I'm pretty sure this is ideal as it is a triangle strip instead of a fan.

    trianglestrip.jpg
  • krisCrash
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    krisCrash polycounter lvl 9
    Ohnononono, this was actually researched.
    Here's the rendering cost data, ok, it's extreme, but bear with me and see the Max Area has a good FPS for increased poly counts: http://www.humus.name/index.php?page=News&ID=228

    There are a great many threads about this by now :B It makes sense in a drawing logic sort of idea too, blocking the major shapes out... and sometimes it makes you realize you can optimize some of those thin triangles away.

    Fan method: a poly with tons of edges meeting = bad shading.
    Strip: with a smoother cylinder, the polygons get very long and thin, I understand this is generally bad business for the rendering.
    Max area: the thin triangles aren't long, and they are fewer in number. Most area covered by nice relaxed triangles.
  • Bibendum
    Ah yeah that was a good read. I was going off of this:
    http://www.ericchadwick.com/examples/provost/byf2.html

    But I guess it's a bit dated.
  • fabio brasilien
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    fabio brasilien polycounter lvl 11
    gilesruscoe: I agree with the point that sometimes we do stuff just for fun.
    But those feedbacks about anatomy and little things about polys arangement are the reason why I love polycount!
    I think in this case you are taking stuff too serious...:\

    I hope everyone still very tough with my work and tell me where I am wrong and what could be improved. Sometimes I get that information and use in my next project...:poly121:

    But I agree that sometimes people get worried in post something here because that. :poly142:
  • krisCrash
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    krisCrash polycounter lvl 9
    That's a good article, but that stuff appears to be about triangle stripping, which is relevant, though I was talking about rendering cost.

    I tested, honestly none of them shade that prettily :P but the long thin strips definitely appear to create more artefacts for me.
    cylindercap.png
  • Bibendum
    krisCrash wrote: »
    That's a good article, but that stuff appears to be about triangle stripping, which is relevant, though I was talking about rendering cost.
    Isn't the entire point of triangle stripping to reduce rendering time?
  • gilesruscoe
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    gilesruscoe polycounter lvl 10
    gilesruscoe: I agree with the point that sometimes we do stuff just for fun.
    But those feedbacks about anatomy and little things about polys arangement are the reason why I love polycount!
    I think in this case you are taking stuff too serious...:\

    I hope everyone still very tough with my work and tell me where I am wrong and what could be improved. Sometimes I get that information and use in my next project...:poly121:

    But I agree that sometimes people get worried in post something here because that. :poly142:
    Dont get me wrong, i love the feedback, just that sometimes work can be misinterpreted as a serious project. I'm sure somebody looking at a My Little Pony with a gattling gun strapped to its back smoking a cigar is going to care much for the muscle placements in its back ;)

    Getting pretty techy with those triangle strips... was certainly an educating read though and the graphs were interesting. Next time i use a 49,000 sided circle it'll come in handy :D
  • Beazel
    http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=86261

    Worth a read about cylindrical topology (It gets trolled at the end but you can see the general flow of other users). Imo it all depends on what you are doing with the circle/cylinder. If there is going to be 1 Smoothing group then use Giles way. If there is 2 smoothing groups it doesn't really matter. It also depends on the shading/unwrapping/texturing that will be applied, not all models are shaded Kris. A lot of people model for self illumination.

    @Kris

    It's looking good. For some reason it reminds me of Alyx from Half Life 2. You need to apply a smoothing group to it.

    @Giles

    Did a little knock up for you. I used your shield part of the texture. (Screen grabbed from Youtube) I hope you don't mind, I thought it was the best way to show it. You have been credited of course. If you wanted to extrude out a middle vert I think it only adds 2 triangles.

    Yer 30 mins is pretty awesome for him. As for the personal crit I dunno I guess it depends on the environment and the pixel resolution he will be at. If he has 3 edges on the side you could pull em in or remove a side out of his legs and put it in his back/chest.

    I have been looking into some MMOs at how they do their legs and it seems either 4 sided diamonds or a 5 sided pentagon are used. Gonna start doing that I think. And try some 3d painting (videos have given me some motivation).

    Good stuff!

    gilesshields2.jpg
  • vkp_number2
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    vkp_number2 polycounter lvl 8
    krisCrash wrote:
    vkp_number2: heee, did you slow down the animation to show the boob motion? ;)

    No I didn't slow it down. Actually, I tried to speed it up, but I used Good Ol' Gif Construction Kit to make it. I'm a bit out-of-date with technology ^_^ How do people make animated gifs nowadays anyway?
    krisCrash wrote:
    she is very cute but she looks a bit angry.

    Thanks. You should see how angry she looks in the cartoons.roll26.jpg
    krisCrash wrote:
    Maybe do something with her elbows and shoulders, they are collapsing a lot right now. The edge for her armpit is definitely too high up, imo. Might be a bit nitpick-ish of me to say!

    You know what, your right! I'm ashamed to admit it, but I really never noticed... I'll see what I can do about those armpits.
    krisCrash wrote:
    Did you model her in a T pose?
    What's T pose... {googles T pose} Oh so that's T pose!... Sadly no... (I'm a bit out-of-date with technology)
  • gilesruscoe
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    gilesruscoe polycounter lvl 10
    Beazel wrote: »
    (Screen grabbed from Youtube) I hope you don't mind

    I'm furious that your spending your own time to help me!! I kid i kid, thanks alot. I did wonder how you got the texture when i first saw the picture! :D So it would be... 22 tris with the central vert extruded? pretty nifty i must say. Cheers again.

    @VKP, for gif turntables i make a 75 frame spin animation, then export a 74 frame .MOV file. Then i open up photoshop (CS5, not sure if CS4 can do this) and go to File>Import>Video frames to layers. This then makes a frame animation (go to windows>animation to see this animation panel in PS) you can control the timing of each frame, i set it to 0 secs to play at the same speed as the .MOV, then finally Files>Save for Web/Devices and save as a gif :) sounds like a lot, but it only takes 1min to do.
  • vkp_number2
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    vkp_number2 polycounter lvl 8
    Thanks for the gif info Gilesruscoe. I'll try to make a turntable next time.
    krisCrash wrote: »
    she looks a bit angry... The edge for her armpit is definitely too high up...

    How Dat?

    dy001dd.png

    -WOW! Those Scream 4 characters look almost too real to be low poly! (O_O)
  • Racer445
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    Racer445 polycounter lvl 12
    just clarifying something regarding the humus cylinder topology graphs: he's dealing with extremely dense subdivided meshes going all the way up to cylinders with 49152 verts! in game art we would only ever use the first part of the graph (48 verts) and even that's quite high, but you can still see there is barely any difference; with 8 or 12 sides i can imagine there would be no difference at all.

    modern gpus (even mobile) can crunch so much geo that most of this doesn't matter to us... for mobile work just pick whatever shades the best!
  • tucho
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    tucho polycounter lvl 17
    Hi there, here you can see some pictures of the characters I made for Scream 4 iOS game, all of them have less than 500 tris and I almost don't use mirros because texture size are big enough for this polycount.

    You can see more pictures and wires on my website

    I hope you like it, as always crits and comments are welcome

    art_student.gifcheerleader.gif

    cop.giffemaleart.gif

    film_buff.gifgoth_girl.gif

    jock.gifstoner.gif

    nerd.gifnerd_girl.gif

    preppy.gifslut.gif

    killer.gif
  • Snader
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    Snader polycounter lvl 15
    Here's my 2 cents on the cylinder debate:

    If you have no idea what to use, fanning is usually the best/safe option.

    If it needs to be shaded, use some variation of fanning.
    If it lends itself well to repeating textures, for instance car rims, use fanning.
    If it's a dome shape, use fanning.
    If it needs to be flexible or someone else has to use it, use fanning because this is far easier to modify afterwards.


    In most circumstances this'll be rare, but for mobile devices it might occur enough to make a mental note: if you're bound by hard polygon/vertice budgets (for instance on the DS) AND it will be flatshaded/fullbright textures and needs no or little texture repeating, use a strip.

    If it's a cylinder with an odd shaped end like this, use stripping, ofcourse.

    The humus article pertains to high polygon counts. Therefore it doesn't ever (or hardly ever) apply to videogames.
    The first bar on the graph is 181 pixels for Max area, 180 and 176 for stripping. That's a negligible difference of about half a percent between fanning and max area, and a still-not-shocking 2~3 percent for stripping. That first bar is about a 48 sided circle - which is alot, as you can see in this image. Games don't use many 48-or-more sided circles, especially mobile games.

    If you have no idea what to use, fanning is usually the best/safe option.
  • paradise.engineering
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    paradise.engineering polycounter lvl 11
    tucho those are incredible and all of them have less than 500 tris !! wow! kudos for that!
  • tucho
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    tucho polycounter lvl 17
    thanks for your comment paradise.engineering, I'm glad you like it :D, when I said less than 500 tris I mean each one, I hope that nobody has misunderstanding it, 500 tris for 13 characters would be really crazy :P

    Here you can see a video of models ingame

    [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Dh_8B2lNFA[/ame]
  • Razorb
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    Razorb polycounter lvl 15
    hah tucho that game is fuckin wierd :D! YOU AINT SLICIN RIGHT! nice work on the models btw! :) very clean
  • gilesruscoe
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    gilesruscoe polycounter lvl 10
    Tucho those are great mate, gotta say the police man and the hippie dude are my favs :p
    Another random quickie from me, i've been oddly productive these last few days;
    Eyeball-monster-TT.gif
    *waits for somebody to say it remotely looks like a cock*
  • vkp_number2
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    vkp_number2 polycounter lvl 8
    Not so much a cock, but rather a sperm with legs.
  • Avanthera
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    Avanthera polycounter lvl 10
  • achmedthesnake
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    achmedthesnake polycounter lvl 17
    tucho - great work mate! 500 tris is great - but what's the texture res? 256? 512?
  • D4V1DC
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    D4V1DC polycounter lvl 18
    Awesome Tucho! On his site It looks like 512X².
  • sketch81
    Great work Tucho, the characters look amazing. :)
  • tucho
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    tucho polycounter lvl 17
    Thanks a lot for your comments guys!, I'm glad you like it :)

    gilesruscoe: nice sperm monster btw ;)
    but what's the texture res? 256? 512?
    On his site It looks like 512X².
    Yep, textures are 512x512, a huge size for this polycount, for this reason I almost don't use any mirrors on them. I don't know if finally ingame they reduce it to 256, but anyway camera never is too close from the characters so almost wouldn't be any difference.
  • achmedthesnake
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    achmedthesnake polycounter lvl 17
    finally had time to poke this one about:
    prawn01.jpg
    its 530 tris (equip incl) - and a 512x tex but still looks effective with a 256x -
    depends on how display it, but for the moment I'll keep it the higher res...
  • Gorman
    It seems weird to me that you give so much more texture space to the pants than to the vest/shirt. Why is that?
  • RAWTalent
    That's brilliant, the only thing I can think of is that if the neck part of the texture was shrunk a tad and perhaps the trousers, you'd be able to fir the ID and calculator parts onto the 1 512x map. Having said that truly inspiring work indeed!
  • achmedthesnake
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    achmedthesnake polycounter lvl 17
    cheers, RAWtalent
    Gorman - it's because your just weird :P kidding - not actually sure, I think my decision at the time was - since I'm mirroring the legs and not the torso - I'd give the legs a bit more real estate...
    When i look at the wireframe (in pshop) it's actually not too much out of ratio..eh
  • Delko
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    Delko polycounter lvl 16
    2qu2kc9.jpg
    scenery for a track
  • laperen
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    laperen polycounter lvl 11
    ikki from air gear
    680 tris
    128 by 128 texture
    ikki_lower_resolution_by_laperen-d3l9ys3.png
  • Hito
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    Hito interpolator
    SDK courtesy of Duncan Fraser

    [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCMwsy8bRGc[/ame]

    *fixed it.
  • hawken
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    hawken polycounter lvl 19
    finally had time to poke this one about:
    prawn01.jpg
    its 530 tris (equip incl) - and a 512x tex but still looks effective with a 256x -
    depends on how display it, but for the moment I'll keep it the higher res...

    how many years have you been working this now?

    in the immortal words of Mortal Combat
  • achmedthesnake
  • gilesruscoe
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    gilesruscoe polycounter lvl 10
    Nice one delko, glass in the windows looks great.
  • Snader
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    Snader polycounter lvl 15
    Wow Hito, those look amazing for below 1000 triangles! (I think you've accidentally posted in the wrong thread)

    Tucho - the models are rock solid, too bad the gameplay doesn't seem quite as good.

    Achmed - the feet look a bit squished/ducky/flat and could do with a bit of extra height.
  • vkp_number2
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    vkp_number2 polycounter lvl 8
    Snader wrote: »
    Achmed - the feet look a bit squished/ "daffy duck" flat...

    His shoes?! I'm mean COME-ON! The model looks AMAZING! What next? His ID cards too flat? ^_^
  • laperen
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    laperen polycounter lvl 11
    agito from air gear
    specs:
    618 tris
    128 by 128 pixels
    fang_agito_by_laperen-d3lfq9n.jpg
  • premium
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    premium polycounter lvl 13
    Nice. I always love those crazy anime characters. :)
  • NthSimulacrum
    guy2.png
    294 triangles, 256 x 256 image texture...

    Nice stuff laperen, could we see some wires?
  • laperen
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    laperen polycounter lvl 11
    hope this is sufficient

    a short version away from the current one, was just cleaning some polys that couldnt be seen anyway
    fangagitoprogress5.jpg

    nextup, kazu, from air gear as well
  • Oleg
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    Oleg polycounter lvl 14
    So much good work here !

    Made a worm thing , XjpQd.jpg
  • Rapante
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    Rapante polygon
    today's low poly practice

    xm-pt6.png
  • felipefrango
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    felipefrango polycounter lvl 9
    Nice plane! I doubt you'd need that big a texture though, specially on a symmetrical model like this.
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