Any tips or thoughts on good low poly model creation?

[Waldo]

Cross post from Polycount...

I've been snuffling about the web lately looking for good examples of low poly models and wondering just what makes a good low poly model beyond just that it's low poly? Texture style seems really important for example. Crappy blurred out textures won't do. Should the textures be low color count for example, or not? Heavily emphasized shadow lines?

I thought the example at the link below was pretty nice....

http://www.angelfire.com/wa3/emilyogle/ ... rdesk.html

An exaggeration of features, very clear and distinct artwork. Also the render of it is actually lit very well. I suppose one take away there is that a good low poly model still looks good in a high res engine render.

The Arabic Pottery Shop at http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=55173 also is like that. Sharp textures but a well lit example I think.

I'm curious what thoughts are on this question. What I'm really wanting to make is something more like the Arabic Pottery Shop example (second link). Low poly but actually somewhat realistic looking.

(oops, don't copy and paste truncated URLs. Fixed)

[Waldo]

Hmm... you know just talking about polygons doesn't actually add any and ruin the model. It's like dieting. Just looking at chocolate cake won't make you gain weight!

[e-freak]

your first link is broken. might be the problem noone's responding?

a good lowpoly model or better good and economical usage of polys is (imho) if you achieve the viewer to understand and accept the seen as what it was meant to be. a good lowpoly model uses exactly as many faces/tris/polys as neceserry, no more but not less. it's simmilar to uv-mapping/texturesize and texturstyle.

[Minos]

First you need to know well your target platform. The arabic pottery shop is aimed at the Nintendo DS system, where the polycount and texture memory is a lot more limited than on a PSP or a PC engine. The first example is obviously targeted at a previous gen platform (think Unreal2004), as you can see it uses a much larger texture map.

Here's a nice list of low poly hardware systems specs:

http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=40563

Moreover, what kind of models are you working on? Environments or characters? If you are working on characters take a look at these threads, you'll find plenty of examples of good poly distribution and nice looking tiny textures:

http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=51455

http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=41232

For environments there's this little girl's bedroom I made recently aiming at a DS system. It's not perfect but you can steal some ideas from it (Basically try to cut up as many faces as you can so you can mirror textures and gain double the pixel density, if you can afford the extra polys that is)

http://thiagoklafke.com/ds_env.html

[hessi]

what moste people dont know, is that the DS textures are using color palettes. so there are different combinations to fill the memory. i doubt that the pottery store is really making use of this/simulating the palleting.

anyway: good lowpoly is imo the mix of being efficient in time and a visual result. that's a production centric view.

[Minos]

Oh yes. Knowing pixel art techniques, such as dithering, is a must when working within true DS specs.

[Waldo]

Minotauro thanks for the links. I've seen the last one but not the LPC contest - good thread. I was particularly impressed with low poly TF2 characters in the Low-poly Game Art sticky thread. I think they actually work well because of the underlying design elements for TF2 characters - shape (profile) and use of colors in particular.

My own target is a lower spec system. Think like a RuneScape (or a bit higher) level of game that is specifically aimed at older machines. What I don't want it to have some kind of old Q1 look to it, and it's been great to see a number of LP models in the various links that really are quite good.

Ah another set of low poly models I found a while back is a commercial package at http://frogames.net/shop/index.php?main ... ducts_id=4

[Minos]

If you can afford relatively large texture maps (such as 256x256) learn to bake occlusion maps onto your textures. There are numerous tutorials about this on game-artist.net =)

[Waldo]

If you can afford relatively large texture maps (such as 256x256) learn to bake occlusion maps onto your textures. There are numerous tutorials about this on game-artist.net =)

Ah good tip,thanks.