Silly Question to Old School 3d Guys
I've been playing a bunch of PS1 games lately and I've noticed that the characters are usually a bunch of objects instead of one piece. Example:
Notice how Cloud's (guy with big sword and hair) arms and legs seem to be split up into 2 pieces instead of one? Why exactly is that?
Notice how Cloud's (guy with big sword and hair) arms and legs seem to be split up into 2 pieces instead of one? Why exactly is that?
Replies
The mesh doesnt have to be a "closed" mesh. Think of this technique a bit like old action figures, with seperate meshes for the different limbs. I wasn't making games back then but I also expect it might be to do with they way rigging was done back then.
It was common for characters to be made this way. Here's Ecstacica 2. They were made of ZSpheres, long before ZBrush was even thought of. ;P
http://games-history.ru/?division=game&id=533
I still have mucho respect for the guys who can model in a truly old school fashion, BoBo/B1ll et al.
I think even Quake 3 had no skeletial animation, it was all baked out mesh animation at 15 fps or so. That's why lower/upper body and head were separate objects so that they could move independently.
Half-life was one of the first FPS games to use bones and weighting in real time.
Hey, I remember being excited about the "tags" in q3's animation system, so... yeah.
I'm happy. Some of us young bucks like to hear about how things were in the good old days. A time before 2k targas and colored lights :P
yea...as a rule of thumb, never ever go back and play games you thought were awesome as a kid, or even 10 years ago. games dont really age well. It will be funny 10 years from now looking back at BF3 and crysis and thinking how awesome they looked. hard to imagine but probably a reality.
Only the 1995ish early low textured polygon games don't age well (especially with affine texturing it looks really bad on the PSX side, combined with low framerates of the 4 major 5th gen consoles). Anything before in 2D or PS2+ era seem to age a lot better.
SubCulture still looks alright on my PC (even if it does go 16-bit). The lighting is OK, the draw distance is acceptable for a submarine-based vehicular open world RPG sandbox. Sure some of the stuff is just a sprite, but hey, it holds itself together well enough I'd reckon it'd look good enough that if it was released as an App then it wouldn't lose too many marks on graphics at all!
I don't know why I play them again really. I have a shit load of new games I havent finished (darksiders, AVP, etc). Maybe I'm trying to recapture my youth or maybe the games were just better back then.
this.
btw it played out nicely in gta 3, cause it made it easier for the peeps to fall apart when affected by explosions.) The only 3d gta game that had this:)
In terms of graphics, I think Tekken 3 still looks good to me. And you can't really complain about Parapa the Rapper
Recently I found a portfolio of an artist who worked on it: http://www.jakerowell.com/blog/2010/01/20/final-fantasy-ix-portfolio-art/
FFIX art in high res. I never thought I would see that
Unseen64 also has a few shots that show how their made their environments. The fact that they painted over renders doesn't really surprise me; I remember how back in the day all my friend though it was all hand painted :poly142: