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LOW-POLY ART

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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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  • rollin
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    rollin polycounter
    ich glaube sogar Informationen zu haben, dass er mit Sniper aus dem cs.de Modelforum zusammen studiert(hat?!)

    spys all over the place *G*
  • JohnnySix
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    JohnnySix polycounter lvl 16
    Quick go with experimenting baking shadows.

    Texture maps could be smaller I guess, seeing the awesome pixel work earlier in the thread. :poly124:

    Bomberman_low_poly_by_JohnnySix.jpg
  • JohnnySix
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    JohnnySix polycounter lvl 16
    Insomnia - thought I'd have a go at a car. :poly142:

    Smart_Cars_by_JohnnySix.jpg

    Texture:

    Smart_Texture_by_JohnnySix.gif
  • Eclipse
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    Eclipse polycounter lvl 18
    Nice stuff Johnny. I would personally lighten up Bomber man because I think of him as white. I really like your cars as well, but the textures could use some smoothing out. I know you are doing low res and stuff, but you have all the extra texture space, use it to make them shine!
  • renderhjs
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    renderhjs sublime tool
    another tip (in 3dsmax) is to set the Self Illuminating value to 100, or your viewport mode to 'other' > 'flat'.
    The last one is at least how I test my models for low spec engines that dont support lighting and rather depend on shading placement in the texture.
  • Squiggly_P
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    Squiggly_P polycounter lvl 11
    Robot_001_Render.png

    306 tris
    64x64 texture. I would have added shading and all of that, but to be honest I am getting frustrated with my lack of texturing prowess. I dunno what I need to do, but it would seem that I can't manage to make textures that don't look like ass (to me, at least... I dunno...)

    I think, tho, that a lot of my problem with smaller res textures is the fact that I've been trying to make my characters overly round and cute, when it seems that a better method for these very low-res models would be to make them more square / boxy than I've been doing. I'd love to have a conversation with people about theories regarding this sort of stuff. I love pixel art, I love low poly 3D stuff, but I can't for the life of me combine those two things with any level of competence at all. You people make me jealous. :(

    EDIT: I should mention that this design is by the great Jake Parker, who is a frequent contributer to the Flight comics anthologies. He's a bad-ass for letting me do some of his Roboready designs. www.roboready.com
  • Eclipse
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    Eclipse polycounter lvl 18
    Squiggly, I think he looks pretty cool. His texture is minimal, but it kinda works for him. The style is great. I was able to find the picture of him and the only thing I can really see is that the eyes need to be a little bigger, more just a circle. (this is going off the wallpaper) Also his eyebrows could be more to the outside of his eyes, and make him smile, he looks like a happy chap in the image :P.
  • renderhjs
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    renderhjs sublime tool
    @Squiggly_P: maybe dont use that flashy colors or default colors. It looks a little bit as if the texture was done in msPaint.
    Add some harmony in the colors by blending them a little bit more together the red with the black lines is a very agressive contrast. If you pick colors dont always go to the extremes but rather well balanced so that black is never black for example but always a dark color e.g very dark red.
  • Baddcog
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    Baddcog polycounter lvl 9
    Looks pretty good to me, maybe you should try doing an AO pass on him. Easy way to add some shadow without overdoing it.
  • Enix
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    Enix polycounter lvl 18
    I'm doing Clefable from pokemon for the lulz:

    clefable1.jpg

    He's at 504 tris.
  • BrodyB
    crashermm2.jpg
    w405.png

    Did this rather quickly. I'll start the texture tomorrow.
  • Neox
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    Neox godlike master sticky
    Enix wrote: »
    for the lulz:

    lulz
  • Laheen
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    Laheen polycounter lvl 18
    wut2jn1.png

    joined enix for some lulz - its around 500 tris, obtw its glaceon
  • qubism
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    qubism polycounter lvl 18
    hobodactyl wrote: »
    God I love this stuff :D

    Elementrix: If the glow in front of the fire is a separate texture you should definitely animate that with the fire. Looks awesome!

    agreed. will pump up the vividness...
    awesome piece ... really love it
  • Eclipse
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    Eclipse polycounter lvl 18
    Just a WIP I started like an hour ago. The textures are just laid out for tomorrow. Let me know what you think :). 248 tris

    RedKnightWIP.jpg
  • CIgano
  • Eclipse
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    Eclipse polycounter lvl 18
    Nice work Clgano, they look really realistic for the texture size, great stuff!

    Here is an update on my crashers, let me know what you guys think :).

    TheCrashers.jpg
  • J533Hale
    Eclipse wrote: »
    Nice work Clgano, they look really realistic for the texture size, great stuff!

    Here is an update on my crashers, let me know what you guys think :).

    :) Awesome! I wondered if anyone was going to do a 3D homage to the game. I know I want to!

    Are you going to model/texture some of their different weapons?
  • Spug
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    Spug polycounter lvl 12
    Having a lot of fun with bobo's model!

    f_Untitled1m_a29ae97.jpg
  • BrodyB
    Eclipse wrote: »
    Here is an update on my crashers, let me know what you guys think

    Damn you, Eclipse! Damn you and your reliably available free time! Still need to texture mine >_>
  • flaagan
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    flaagan polycounter lvl 18
    Eclipse wrote: »
    Nice work Clgano, they look really realistic for the texture size, great stuff!

    Here is an update on my crashers, let me know what you guys think :).

    TheCrashers.jpg


    Didnt each of the crashers have a different style of eyes? Diggin it otherwise! :thumbup:
  • Stronin
    Hello all, new here, but i figured I'd throw in my low poly piece A workbench of some kind..

    Final_3.jpg

    It is after all just some boxes! :)
  • Michael Knubben
    Cool Spug, you're really bringing more depth into your stuff. It's still pretty monochrome right now, but I'm sure you're not finished. Looking forward to seeing this one finished.
  • IceWolve
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    IceWolve polycounter lvl 18
    CIgano wrote: »
    dumbasswithabellvg3.jpg

    i did ze textures
    I think it would look nicer/more real if it was textured as a plate that was that same shape instead of a circular one, they do have weight plates that aren't circular.
  • steady
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    steady polycounter lvl 18
    made a sniper rifle for the megatf coop mod for quake 1 ( kickin it oldschool!!!)
    snag0006gt3.jpg
    604 tris, 256x256 yeah it might be a bit too high for quake 1 but we'll see
  • renderhjs
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    renderhjs sublime tool
    nice rifle, texture look like 8bit with the color-noise in the grey but I like it.
  • CIgano
    IceWolve wrote: »
    I think it would look nicer/more real if it was textured as a plate that was that same shape instead of a circular one, they do have weight plates that aren't circular.

    its based off my irl ones, i tried to make it as close as possible(hence the noisy texture, wich some people have wtf'd at since standard disks are polished/plated), only thing missing is the text, not enough pixels for it :(

    /e

    steady, you could problably add some stronger lighting on the whole thing, but especially on the metal parts, it looks nice but atm its too monotone and doesnt really 'pop out', wich you want to considering it'll be in your face all the time ;D

    put some stronger highlights(blue-ish highlights always look nicer, and normally metal would reflect the sky's colour, but that could depend on your mod's atmosphere), and add some more white to the iluminated parts of the wood, to make it look a bit more varnished-like
  • Pencilninja
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    Pencilninja polycounter lvl 10
    Took a while, but I've been meaning to post my updated Misery from cave story with the added suggestions from Spacey, who inspired the design!

    1220589895_MUSjdWK2TY.jpg
  • ChrisG
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    ChrisG polycounter lvl 14
    gunscreen.jpg


    lowpoly halo stuff, Im getting to grips with c++ and ds homebrewing, maybe one day make the halo ds which almost came out!

    I have added the reloading thingy after these shots were taken

    *edit* sorry about huge image size!
  • sir-knight
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    sir-knight polycounter lvl 10
    hmm... I think you're going to have to sacrifice more tris than that for a DS.. what's the max it can do, like 1200 tris on a screen?

    mods let me know if what I'm doing here is faux pas, I can't resist moving my fingers to type. :D

    gunscreen.jpg

    not saying I know what I'm doing here, but I think there are some avenues you can pursue to make this mesh more optimized.

    See what happens when you remove the lines I've highlighted in red to end up with the green geometry. You do lose some topography but you still retain an overall silhouette of the the original.

    From my point of view, a DS screen is fairly low res, so you won't see some of those subtle changes in the geometry anyways, so there's no point in having some of them. Also some of the beveling can be cheated with the texture and shading. If you told me a few months ago that I'd be doing a car in 80 triangles or LESS, I'd have said you were nuts.

    But here I am, with a car at 80 triangles and LODs going down to 22, and on a cellphone screen, you can't see the difference.
  • ChrisG
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    ChrisG polycounter lvl 14
    sir-knight:
    thanks for the paint over, will come in handy. I thought that 100 polys mabe abit too much 80 is much better, I am going to cut down the handle and things, much appreciated:)

    next up warthog or
    Covenant plasma rifle hmmm choices...
    chris
  • Ghostscape
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    Ghostscape polycounter lvl 13
    sir-knight wrote: »
    hmm... I think you're going to have to sacrifice more tris than that for a DS.. what's the max it can do, like 1200 tris on a screen?

    mods let me know if what I'm doing here is faux pas, I can't resist moving my fingers to type. :D

    gunscreen.jpg

    not saying I know what I'm doing here, but I think there are some avenues you can pursue to make this mesh more optimized.

    See what happens when you remove the lines I've highlighted in red to end up with the green geometry. You do lose some topography but you still retain an overall silhouette of the the original.

    From my point of view, a DS screen is fairly low res, so you won't see some of those subtle changes in the geometry anyways, so there's no point in having some of them. Also some of the beveling can be cheated with the texture and shading. If you told me a few months ago that I'd be doing a car in 80 triangles or LESS, I'd have said you were nuts.

    But here I am, with a car at 80 triangles and LODs going down to 22, and on a cellphone screen, you can't see the difference.

    Paintovers and critiques are ALWAYS appreciated at polycount.

    I believe the DS does 2k tris per screen. It might be 2k quads (IIRC it has weird quad-loving hardware) but I don't develop for DS so I'm just passing about heresay and halftruths.
  • Rox
    What's that particular model intended to be used as? If it's the first-person model, it can be much more optimized in areas the player will barely even see. And if it's for third-person use, it's much too detailed. I was pondering a DS FPS a while ago, while my computer was broken, and I made some concept sketches on paper and drew them up so I could manually count how many triangles they would be.

    I made three weapons, one pistol, one SMG and one assault rifle (very similar in shape to the Halo one), and their polycounts are, respectively, 32, 60 and 36. Then I made lower detail versions of the first two, which ended up being 22 and 40 tris.

    The DS is not a powerful machine, and even if you can make things look good and detailed, framerate will suffer something fiercely. Low detail is something the player can grow used to, but a poor framerate never stops feeling like it's hurting the game.

    I BET you can manage to bring that AR down to under 100 tris and still have it look recognizable. Push yourself! Try to cut down on parts that don't really need to be there. For my lowest detail models, I removed the handles because the player's hand would cover them anyway. You could easily remove the flashlight and replace it with a texture. Consider that, even if the player's standing in front of someone else with that AR, staring right at it, the whole rifle won't be bigger than 100x100 pixels. While working on the model, try zooming out so the rifle covers the same area on your screen as it would on a DS. Then it gets much easier to start chopping off triangles without worrying about it looking bad. Because you can't even see the difference, yourself.

    [edit]
    Why talk about them when it's easier to make them? Here's the sketches I made, 3Dified. With good textures, I think they'd pass on a DS. You really have to consider how much detail you want on your characters and environment, too. Of course, the 1st person gun could have quite a lot more detail, because that one really affects the feel of the game quite a lot. But for all other uses, I think I'd try to go with these.
    dsgunsjm0.png
  • Eclipse
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    Eclipse polycounter lvl 18
    Steady: That looks really cool, I agree you should try and push the lighting on it a bit more.

    PencilNinja: That looks awesome, great work. Really nice update to the original, great work!

    chrizz1: I have never played Halo, so I don't know the reference, but it looks pretty solid. If you are going for DS specs it might be a little high, especially around the grip where the user will never really see. The DS can show a max of 2048 triangles on screen at once, so keep that in mind when dividing stuff up :).

    J533: Thanks a lot! I did some weapons indeed! I might do more if I have the time and what not. I want to add some blood to them as well :P and maybe do some more of the funny/cooler weapons instead of the basic ones.

    BrodyB: Thanks? I liked yours man, but I just had it in my heart to do these guys because I fell in love with the game, sorry, I didn't mean to kinda steal your spotlight.

    Flaagan: I n their big portraits, yes. But it was just a quick palette change to see how they looked. I might go in and change them up and what not later, but yeah, i kept them the same for now. I think they are like that in the game, but I didn't check I just have too much fun playing it! :P.

    Anyway here is the updates on them. I based the first render off of this old screenshot on the website (http://www.castlecrashers.com/images/thumbnailed/cc_screencap24.jpg) . I want to photoshop in the magic, but I don't know if I will have the time, if I do, I will post it up here. The others are to show off the weapons and poses. Again the crashers are 248, the mace is 176, the sword is 29, and the axe is 66. For the outlines I just duplicated the mesh and used push. I hope you like them, C&C are welcome!

    all_crashers.jpg
    red_crasher.pngorange_crasher.gifred_anim.gif
  • ChrisG
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    ChrisG polycounter lvl 14
    gunscreen2.jpg
    to go along with what rox has said, i have cut it down to 89 poly, i could still take more detail if anyone reckons so?

    I have taken it down to 85, i realised i had some unneeded geometry on the back
  • renderhjs
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    renderhjs sublime tool
    been improving my engine mainly speed improvements- and to test the new capabilities of the editor and the improvements of the engine I decided to create another test scene- a camera mapped scene from london.
    The scene shown in Flash would be 987 tris. but since I render faces as polygons including 4 or more sides flat surfaces its reduced to 499 faces. The demo has a noise cam but you can change the perspective yourself as well.

    engine demo:
    screenshot_dmo2.jpg

    http://www.renderhjs.net/_temp/MSO/dm02/londonDemo.swf


    editor (actionscript written app)
    here is shot of my scene editor where I can place different exported objects (on the right in the browser you can see the city, additional cars and the light poly)
    london_editor_shot.jpg

    3ds construction
    some shots from 3dsmax:
    london_construct_3ds.jpg
    the uv´s from camera projected objects look funny
  • hobodactyl
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    hobodactyl polycounter lvl 18
    Eclipse: Really nice, you've pulled them off well!

    renderhjs: Dude, I love what you're doing! I tried out some of the stuff on your site, it's all awesome!
  • Tumerboy
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    Tumerboy polycounter lvl 17
    HA HA! Render I saw those shots of london last week sometime, and my first reaction was "RTS?"
  • rollin
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    rollin polycounter
    eclipse + renderhjs

    nice 1
  • Indecom
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    Indecom polycounter lvl 16
    Did this yesterday for a game i plan to make on the DS. I dont exactly what the DS can handle polycount wise per character, but i know that it can render 4000 polies per screen. This guy is 565 polygons without a hair mesh, but thats the only thing he's missing, and he will likely be the most detailed of the meshes for the game, except for bosses maybe.

    DSRender1.png

    His name is Darren Smith, and its funny because i originally planned to make it for the gba without realizing his initials were DS, lol.

    Might optimize the mesh some more, if you guys think that 565 is too high.
  • sir-knight
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    sir-knight polycounter lvl 10
    definitely on the highside , without hair, remember you need polys for props and environment and other things on the screen at the same time. The lower you can get without sacrificing too much, the better. It will probably mean simplify the face and hands even more.
  • Indecom
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    Indecom polycounter lvl 16
    Hmm, well i'll go ahead and simplify the hands and see what i can do with the face without sacrificing too much detail.

    What poly count would you suggest for the most detailed characters without knowing any information on what props their might be or the polycount of the scene it would be in?

    EDIT:
    Here he is at merely 504 polygons, reccomend anymore reduction? I read that the models in guitar hero on tour are around 2200 a piece, thats crazy for a ds! But i bet the backgrounds were super super low detail, and like only 2 characters show up on screen at a time.

    DSRender2.png

    Just realized that last shot was triangulated, dont know why it was, i didnt triangulate it, oh well its fixed now.
  • renderhjs
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    renderhjs sublime tool
    polygons or triangles?, because that's a big difference ( i assume you meant tris)
  • Chunkey
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    Chunkey polycounter lvl 19
    sonicpy7.jpg

    470 tris, Vahl's wanting me to retopo it and do a sculpt in mudbox and create normals for him :P

    will probably do a DS spec version though just to keep my hand in and then do the normal mapped version that would look about right for the newer generation of handhelds that will probably be hitting the shelves in a few years' time :)
  • leilei
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    leilei polycounter lvl 14
    heh reminds me of the sonic q2 model
  • Chunkey
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    Chunkey polycounter lvl 19
    hehe got a screenshot of it? I'm quite curious now...
  • Indecom
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    Indecom polycounter lvl 16
    @renderhjs:
    i meant polygons, as i've read that the ds can handle quads as well as tris. Will it make that much difference on the ds, i mean, if a mesh has 400 polygons, but 700 tris if it were triangulated, would it be better to just use the 400 poly mesh with quads instead?
  • renderhjs
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    renderhjs sublime tool
    not sure dont know yet that much about the ds- but that quad thingy is interesting .I assume then it doesn´t matter - its just nice for comparison because most engines today only process triangles in the end.
  • Kawe
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    Kawe polycounter lvl 8
    turr03tex1.jpg

    225~ tris
    256x256 diff

    Not sure what to do with this one. Not looking satisfactory but not sure what kind of details I should put on it. This is for a RTS type game so it shouldn't be too cluttered... maybe 256x256 is an overkill for this.
  • RickA
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    RickA polycounter lvl 18
    Indecom wrote: »
    @renderhjs:
    i meant polygons, as i've read that the ds can handle quads as well as tris. Will it make that much difference on the ds, i mean, if a mesh has 400 polygons, but 700 tris if it were triangulated, would it be better to just use the 400 poly mesh with quads instead?

    This is mostly correct. The DS can handle 2048 primitives, and has space for 6144 vertices (which maps to exactly 2048 tris). You can use quads, but then you'll run out of vertex ram before you run out of polygon ram, so you'd be able to show 6144 / 4 = 1536 quads.
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