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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

Replies

  • Baddcog
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    Baddcog polycounter lvl 9
    Very slick! The rider might be too similar to the bike, as it's hard to define where one ends and the other begins, unless that is what you are going for?

    That's what I was thinking too. It's a great model and tex, but they do blend together.
  • [SF]Three9
    sooooooooo Tigerfeet did you even look at my post?
  • Tigerfeet
    [SF]Three9 wrote: »
    sooooooooo Tigerfeet did you even look at my post?
    Yes I did. Thank you for taking the time to do the paint over, but I'm not really concerned with stretching (needing to make the inside tire UVs a trapezoid). My issue was with the bleed. Because the texture is so small (128 x 128) I need the pixels to line up exactly. I was hoping I'd be able to snap my UVs to the pixels but it looks like that's not the case. If you look at the first picture I posted you'll see that in order to get the up and down lined up properly I actually had to push the UVs off the texture, bleed area or no. The most frustrating thing is it looks perfectly lined up in the UV editor and in the viewport but the render button tells a 1/2 pixel different story.
  • Snader
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    Snader polycounter lvl 15
    Vprime, I think you should spend more polies on giving the houses more interesting silhouettes, and less on the trees and lights. You'll also want to vary the house shapes a bit I think.

    Suburban-Street-c.jpg

    As for a cartoony style, have a look at some of Kenneth Fejer's (aka Tennis) work:
    lowpoly_house.giflowpoly_house_anim.gif

    Your latest WIP is going in the right direction, but I still feel your textures are trying to be too realistic. Also, please pixel the road, the AA on the striping is very bothersome.


    Rapante, you could tighten up the texture a bunch by straightening out texture islands. Less stairstepping = more awesome.

    TonyClifton, you'll want to play around with your colors a bit, give the shadows some color, and make the cannon a bunch lighter because right now there's no volume discernible. If you're just using fullbright textures and no shading you could do away with the chamfers, btw.


    Delko, maybe you want to cut down on the dithering. Based on what I'm seeing here you'll get a lot of speckly noise while animated. Also try to adjust the amount of detail in your texture to the size an object uses on screen. Take a look at the rims for instance, which looks like someone used the MSpaint spraycan on it. Along the same lines, you might wanna thicken the highlights on the trunk.
  • Delko
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    Delko polycounter lvl 15
  • TonyClifton
    Snader, thanks for your reply! I am still figuring out which textures/shader can be used for Android (with Unity). But let me ask you, what do you mean by "you could do away with the chamfers"?
  • [SF]Three9
    well hmm...don't think I have an answer for that then tiger, sorry buddy :(...I'm not used to doing extremely low poly textures or uvs

    sorry for misunderstanding your dilemma!
  • Snader
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    Snader polycounter lvl 15
    Snader, thanks for your reply! I am still figuring out which textures/shader can be used for Android (with Unity). But let me ask you, what do you mean by "you could do away with the chamfers"?

    cannonsaving.png
  • premium
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    premium polycounter lvl 13
    IMG5685-1319753829.jpg
    Started something.
  • TonyClifton
    Got it! Thanks, Snader!
  • VPrime
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    VPrime polycounter lvl 9
    Sander thanks for the feedback.
    Are there nay good tutorials on creating a UVmap/texture like the house example you provided?
    I created a similar looking model but I am having a hard time figuring out how to uvmap so it can reuse certain parts of the texture without increasing the poly count. (like that tiny 32x32 texture with that house).

    The way I was doing it before had lots of wasted texture space

    6.png
  • Baddcog
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    Baddcog polycounter lvl 9
    VPrime, the obvious wasted space is having both sides of that house on the sheet since they are the same. And you could use the same snow for roof and ground.
    Thats a 1/4 of your space there.

    Invert 2 sets of buildings and have the v's of the roofs overlap.

    to a degree you need more tris to tile more.

    Notice that the house that snade posted uses the same window all around. But on the sides and back it's mirrored, that that makes one more tri for the back, and 2 for the sides (over just texturing plain) . that's another 1/4 of your tex usage.

    But your house specs are so low as is i don't think a few more tris would hurt.

    You could use the top half of your buidling front for the top half of the back, the bottom half of the back could use the left side of the one building side you have left (after tiling and getting rid of one)

    A quick ps job. Basically cut the space in half with only a resize of the snowflake.
  • VPrime
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    VPrime polycounter lvl 9
    Thanks Baddcog, I think I somewhat get it now :). Will try that with the new model.
    Here is a wip of a new house.. Ignore the house thing on the right, that will be a garage or something eventually.
    newhouse.png
  • Delko
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    Delko polycounter lvl 15
    johnas wrote: »
    So much inspiring stuff here, I wish I'd have more time to do 3d :shifty:

    Especially got excited of those schweet bikes but I'm more into old muscle cars so I started to do really low polied muscle beast. I'd like to make pixel styled texture but haven't got pleasing result sofar. Tips are appreciated, in the meanwhile here's the mesh. No fancy turntables, so I just copied the car, tricount is 546 with the wheels included.

    mustang67-001.jpg

    Whats issues have you run into with your textures? I may be able to help.
  • Michael Knubben
    Zoid wrote: »
    don't use anything under 16x16 for render

    Allow me to fix that for you: Don't render.

    Seriously though, why would you even bother with this hassle, if the goal of all this is to do something that is useless? The render won't offer you anything but aa, and you can get that a few different ways. One is get a bigger screengrab and resize it, another is to force aa in your nvidia (or ati *shudder*) control panel. Another is to say 'fuck aa, I'm making pixel art'.
  • Michael Knubben
    Delko wrote: »
    bridgein.png
    bridge

    That looks fantastic! Initially though, I was just shocked at the similarity to what I was doing at work a while back, heh. We were working on a mobile racing game (I posted some of the characters in here), and I went for almost the exact colours! I suppose we're both inspired by the same games from our youth, when green grass and blue skies were common :)

    Vprime: I'd say it all looks too dirty. That can be partially solved by introducing some colour to your shadows (can make the difference between nuclear fallout and cozy winter), but even then I'd take advantage of the strength of small textures and exaggerate everything more. It will push things in a more cartoony direction, but I believe that just works better with such lowres graphics.
    I would also do away with the tiny bevels and other detail in your mesh and spend those tris on cutting up your mesh. This way you could have a small texture with a few windows and a few doors, and have each house be different without having to uniquely texture each one.
  • Delko
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    Delko polycounter lvl 15
    I was just shocked at the similarity to what I was doing at work a while back, heh. We were working on a mobile racing game (I posted some of the characters in here
    Could you link to those posts? Id love to see what you had made.
  • Zoid
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    Zoid polycounter lvl 14
    MightyPea wrote: »
    Allow me to fix that for you: Don't render.
    ?
    what do you mean just use screen grabs?
    without rendering I really don't think I have a way to create an image sequence.
  • PolyHertz
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    PolyHertz polycount lvl 666
    Zoid wrote: »
    without rendering I really don't think I have a way to create an image sequence.

    Window > Playblast
  • Zoid
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    Zoid polycounter lvl 14
    PolyHertz wrote: »
    Window > Playblast
    doesn't seem to allow alpha channels for sprite sheets :(
  • green
    Nice work everyone. This thread is always a lust for the eyes.
  • VPrime
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    VPrime polycounter lvl 9
    So here are the new houses I made with textures (texture is still wip).. I think this UV map is better, but I compromised on the snow, made it a solid white.
    Each house is 55 tris, with garage it is 80 tris versus the 20 from the old houses before.

    128x128 texture (I left rooma t the top of the map for things like trees, christmas lights etc.).. I honestly don't know how some of you work at these kind of resolutions!?
    texture.png
    Here is a picture from the viewport (not in game yet with any lightmaps)
    7.png

    I think I am going to remove the little dip in the roof as you can't really see it and it will save a bit of polys with a bunch of houses on screen.
  • Snader
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    Snader polycounter lvl 15
    Yeah this is looking pretty good. I agree on the dip in the spine of the roof, but the ones on the lower edge do add a nice curve.

    It looks a bit like you're using floating geometry for the windows and doors? This could give z-fighting issues , so be careful.

    You said you were looking in to shaders, do you think it would be possible to color the houses by using a mask? This would give you four times the variety at the cost of an alpha-channel. Actually, it would give you infinitely more. You could mask 4 different window/door layouts, and then you could randomly generate a color for each house.

    Actually, I might give this a whirl, see what I can come up with.
  • VPrime
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    VPrime polycounter lvl 9
    The windows and doors are just textured on the house, only floating geometry is the chimney.

    Won't be using any shaders, though that is a good idea will look into it and see if we have time to do something like that.
  • Snader
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    Snader polycounter lvl 15
    I'm thinking you could benefit a bunch by floating some more. These 3 houses are made from a house block, a roof block, and 2 have an extra block for the door.

    houses_42_44_34.png
    Here's what I got after 30 minutes of doodling. You could very easily make variations by dragging the entire unwrap down, like I did with the least house.

    Often, when you're making a bunch of buildings, it's better to start with the texture and then build geometry with that in mind.

    Also, I recommend you look at working on a grid, this simplifies things a lot. For example, these are 3x2 and 2x3, which means I can easily swap and rotate roofs for even more variation.
  • Tigerfeet
    VPrime: I'm enjoying watching your progress, each new picture you post is an improvement :D keep going!
  • D4V1DC
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    D4V1DC polycounter lvl 18
    Delko:
    So glad you kept up with this, It's all awesome and I am loving that bridge!

    Love everything here, especially those lowpoly bikes. :)
  • JohnnySix
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    JohnnySix polycounter lvl 16
    Can't wait to see your game in action Delko, really love the style.


    ultra-small sprite - might need CTRL+middlemouse zoom.

    spaceman_sprite_01_by_johnnysix-d4e9fhp.png
  • Delko
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    Delko polycounter lvl 15
    Thanks for all the support guys, it makes the hours of grinding in MSpaint and max worth it.
    @snader Completely missed your comment, sorry about that. I suppose I could drop the wheels resolution down to 32x32, would read better from a distance but would lose a lot of detail in the wheels. I'll have to experiment with that. Im having trouble with the textures turning into noise at a distance, regardless of the use of dithering or not. Im wondering if some subtle anisotropic filtering wouldn't minimize that.
    -edit-
    mountains3.png
    Pretty much done, im going to add in some scenery like houses and maybe a barn since its all just tree tree tree tree rock tree tree, oh and a bridge, at the moment.
  • felipefrango
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    felipefrango polycounter lvl 9
    Johnny, that's so cute. :v
  • MadCarrot
    a little 32x32 sprite idle animation from me

    pixel_sarge__idle_32x32_by_madgharr-d4dxt15.gif
  • 9skulls
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    9skulls polycounter lvl 13
    MadCarrot wrote: »
    pixel_sarge__idle_32x32_by_madgharr-d4dxt15.gif
    "Man, this belt just won't adjust!"
  • Baddcog
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    Baddcog polycounter lvl 9
    MadCarrot, if you tighten up those graphics anymore they might implode!
  • VPrime
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    VPrime polycounter lvl 9
    I think I'm done the base houses. Next up the decorations.
    doneithink.png
  • JohnnySix
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    JohnnySix polycounter lvl 16
    Here's a few more animated, I figured out how to make animated gifs in photoshop, saved a lot of work repositioning a sprite strip just to make it move in flash. *facepalm*

    Explosion :

    explosion_01_by_johnnysix-d4eip8l.gif

    Helmet Animated :

    helmet_on_animation_by_johnnysix-d4eicco.gif
  • Tennis
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    Tennis polycounter lvl 16
    managed to get a little bit of work done on this guy today, so heres a quick update :)

    robot2.png

    Delko: looks great, any chance we can have a look at the textures ?

    Rapante: very cool!
  • Delko
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    Delko polycounter lvl 15
    Sure, here a few of the more interesting ones.
    forestroadmiddle.png
    forestwall.png
    greymountains.png
    pinetree.png
    @JohnnySix, that explosions great, I never got the hang of animating dynamic stuff like that.
  • Chis
    Hey guys! I'm a newbie to modelling, but I was inspired to make my first (almost) low poly model by the awesomeness of this thread.

    Ls1xe.jpg

    Any tips on getting this down to <500?
    Also, I haven't made his cat tail yet; is there a best practice for that?

    Tennis, that style looks amazing!
  • Michael Knubben
    Delko wrote: »
    Could you link to those posts? Id love to see what you had made.
    Here's a slightly more recent one: laplandstudio_allturtles2.jpg
    edit. Only the textures are done by me. I couldn't change anything about the mesh as they'd been rigged and animated already.
  • hobodactyl
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    hobodactyl polycounter lvl 18
    @Tennis: Looking forward to seeing this finished, it looks great already!
  • 9skulls
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    9skulls polycounter lvl 13
    @Tennis THAT IS SO KICKASS BRO! Awesome! Texture makes it look like a transformer version of this :D

    EDIT
    Unless – my god – it IS!?
  • B8MaN
    It's a little boring I know, but it is at least a finished model which is something of a novelty for me. It's a pumpkin for the LPW Halloween contest:

    lppumpkin.png
  • 9skulls
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    9skulls polycounter lvl 13
    @B8MaN That texture is super clean, great work!
  • Tennis
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    Tennis polycounter lvl 16
    thanks all

    okay think im done for now, might animate him later.

    lowpoly_robot.png
  • 9skulls
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    9skulls polycounter lvl 13
    @Tennis Soo.. Is it a transforming boat or what..? :D PLEASE TELL ME THAT IT IS!
  • Rapante
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    Rapante polygon
    Delko & Tennis, great stuff guys!

    really had a longing to do some proper pixelart lately, so today I doodled up this guy here :) I bet you know who he is :) 4 frame animation

    onepiece.gif
  • Leyto
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    Leyto polycounter lvl 7
    Tennis wrote: »
    thanks all

    okay think im done for now, might animate him later.

    lowpoly_robot.png

    Nicely done here Tennis ! Your robot could match well with some fighting game (ie: Street Fighter 3rd Strike :poly115:)
  • hiphopairbrush
    hi this is my first post in this forum :poly121:3041665091_2_3_dP11c3TA.png
    about 430 polys .
  • Graphicalgeek
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    Graphicalgeek polycounter lvl 10
    Tennis wrote: »
    thanks all

    okay think im done for now, might animate him later.

    lowpoly_robot.png

    Really cool! Nice work!
  • Graphicalgeek
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    Graphicalgeek polycounter lvl 10
    A stylized Uzi as a test.

    Uzi.jpg
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