/3/ - 3DCG

>>634220
That's a simple question to answer. All you have to do is... >>633468

study low poly models and P R A C T I C E
also let's post cool low poly models!

>>634222

>>634223

>>634221
Real talk though, while I'm one of these "questions thread is that way" anons, the percentage of questions that don't get answered has just been increasing every time the general reappears. We should actually be answering them instead of just shoving them into that corner, if not it just looks like /3/ is a collective of assholes asking people to shout into an empty well. I'm trying my best to do so, but unfortunately my expertise isn't at that point where I can answer everything.

>>634224

>>634226

>>634227

>>634229

>>634230

>>634231

>>634232

>>634222
i am, but i tried recreating this model’s topology and some places confused me. for example, it looks like there are at least a couple of ngons. i thought that’s a bad practice, no? should you only use tris? and all tutorial seem to be advocating to using quads only. so i’m confused a bit. i’d mainly use my models is small video game demos.

also, for the texture question: i know how to create textures. i just want to know how do you think the modeller draw that texture - texture paining/photoshop/actual real life photographs of textures and Willis’s face?

>>634225
Lurk moar, answer what you can. Even if you don't have questions, lurk the questions thread, you might be able to answer something, or you might be able to learn something you didn't even know you needed to know.
/3/ is for sure a collective of assholes. But if you ever want that to change you need to make sure you're not one of them.

>>634235
Well, yeah, I have been. Reread my post and you'll realise I've been doing exactly what your post says, and for a long time at that. I'm just saying other anons have to help out too.

bump

>>634224
I would fap to her nudes.

>>634236
All you can do is continue to keep answering questions. Forever and ever. Maybe someday we'll have a trip fag come back and /3/ can unite the blendlets and the autocucks for the greater good.
Look at the bright side as well, at least the questions thread has cut down the number of questions that go unanswered. People are a lot more helpful when it's expected/accepted to ask a question in a thread vs making a new one and being told to fuck off.

>>634258
Man, I'm saying that we're getting more unanswered questions _in the questions thread itself_. But glad we're ultimately on the same page.

>>634220
You paint it, brainlet. With photos as your sources.

You need to be good at painting. Do regular 2d digital painting. Topology is secondary.

>>634220
Topology is the easy part for low poly
It's the texture you have to worry about

>>634234
I couldn't see any ngons on the model you posted. But yeah you should avoid ngons, especially if the model is going to deform, they're less bad on hard surface models as long as the face is completely flat, but should still be avoided. Quads are what you should use mostly, they're easy to work with and deform nicely. Triangles are also fine, and are pretty much always necessary in low poly models.
There's many ways to work on a texture. For me I'd probably block in some basic shapes with texture paint in Blender, then open the texture in Krita and add more detail. Definitely used real life photos for reference.

Also think of it like this: The actual mesh is just the silhouette of the character or object, all the detail is in the texture.

>>634282
>no ngons
what about under the eyes where the cheecks begins. the edges don’t seem to connect at the same vertex of the perpendicular edge?

thanks for answering btw.

>>634321
Just looks like quads and triangles to me. It might just be the low resolution wire frame and the angle of the head that's making it look kind of like an ngon.

How do you make an armpit in low poly that won't deform horribly when the arm points forward?

>>634358
I don't think it's possible. There's a reason many low poly characters have shoulder pads or some other shoulder coverings.

>>634363
Or arms not connected to the body?

>>634220
You can practice by making an actual low poly game designed to run on real low poly hardware.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkG1xQX0XzM

>>634220
I think we're on the cusp of a massive resurgence of low poly textured models. There are so many indie game devs out there and pixel art / 2d have been done to death. With the rise of Unity and Unreal so many complete idiots can now make 3D games, but the time and effort required to make realistic models is astronomical.

Everyone is looking for a quick, aesthetically pleasing way to do 3D and every solution brings more problems.

Flat Shaded? Blocky, boring, done to death, no detail.

Hand Painted? Requires advanced painting techniques and strong color theory, very time consuming and doesn't play well with advanced lighting tools. Requires well planned models, typically box modeled.

Low Poly Pixel Art? Shadeless, work intensive UV arrangement / straightening, strict shape restrictions to avoid pixel distortion, and no 3d facial animations. Requires the most carefully planned models with as many rectangular shapes as possible.

All in all, each of these techniques have their own difficulties. There also is a notable lack of tutorials and resources on Hand Painted and Low Poly Pixel styles. Do any of you think these styles will take off?

>>634371
I'm a gamedev transitioning from pixelart 2D to lowpoly 3D. I think the hardest thing is just the learning curve of 3D modeling. I feel like 2D is very intuitive, you just draw things and that's how they will look. In 3D you have to actually think about the shapes and view it from all angles. Then there's the UV, texturing, rigging, and animating. It gets intimidating.
Although that said there's a lot of nice benefits of 3D. Only having to make a model and animate it once and having it work in all situations and from all angles is nice. Plus being able to reuse animations on any models that use the same bone structure.
I'm not sure why more indie devs aren't making low poly 3D games, they're not much more difficult than good 2D pixel art.

>>634376
Honestly, probably because there's more "charm" in a good pixel art game. Look at Owlboy for example, that game is drop-dead gorgeous. There's your staple games like the Terraria/Starbound/Stardew Valley trifecta, crazy good indie hits like Enter the Gungeon, your nonsense RPG Maker trash (although you can find some diamonds in the rough), so on. Maybe low poly 3D games will have their renaissance some time in the future (hell, execute it very well and you might as well pioneer that age), but well animated pixel art games still remain king in terms of style.

To put in my own 2 cents on the whole low-poly game thing anyway, I feel that in order for it to really work in the current age you've got to hit that perfect combination of "old tech + new". It's got to incorporate the aesthetic but still showcase modern power, in a sense. To use the pixel art games listed above as an example, most of them aren't "true pixel art", i.e. sprites don't conform to the pixel grid and can move around smoothly, they don't suffer from colour nor size limitations like older games did, etc.
I'm not sure how you'd do something similar in a low-poly 3d game, maybe if you paired unparalleled animation with your assets? Since there's really nothing stopping you from having ridiculously detailed animations any more. But maybe you can be more innovative than me.

>>634382
I think the biggest things that benefit modern lowpoly styles are shaders and lighting. A lot of fancy effects can be made with shaders that were impossible or very hard/expensive on PS1/N64 or similar systems. And many of those games had to be unshaded or used basic vertex shading, but now we can have nice lighting and real time shadows.

>>634382
I think we are still waiting for the next hit low poly 3d game to kickstart the trend. With a more rudimentary art style the designer is forced to amplify the shape language they use to communicate.

Things are chunkier, simplified, obvious because they need to convey meaning with minimum fidelity. The positive, and rather lost element of this style is that everything reads more smoothly in game. The visual communication between the player and the game is streamlined.

Now look at high fidelity modern games with such immense detail that we actually can't focus on the environment at all, it's overwhelming. How many times have you found yourself playing a AAA modern game and realize you're not even seeing the graphics, you're just running to the next glowing object and following your HUD's directions?

>>634390
>How many times have you found yourself playing a AAA modern game and realize you're not even seeing the graphics, you're just running to the next glowing object and following your HUD's directions?
Well, I think this is more about player style than the game itself. Good game design always has slow sections built just for the art team to show off their hard work, if not why spend so much on art if you're just gonna gloss over it?
Open worlds are the best example of this. I had the pleasure of playing the new God of War and I rarely ever just ran from objective marker to marker. It was always a slow walk because goddamn the game is astoundingly gorgeous. Same for titles like Horizon: Zero Dawn, Uncharted 4, etc. It's on the player's volition to enjoy the graphics, and if they don't and prefer to just get it done and over with, then it's ultimately their loss.
Of course, more on-rail games are going to differ, like first person shooters. Those are fast-paced and built to haul you through the action. But you'll notice there's always a very slow part somewhere where you're doing some menial task or in some long introductory cutscene but you're in just this incredulous environment.

>>634224
how does one make a shader like this

>>634558
The outline is actually a duplicate of the model with the faces inverted and pushed out a little bit along their normal, and with back face culling on. Looks like a few of the outline verts were manipulated manually to make bits of the outline thicker or thinner.
The actual model's shader looks like a very basic toon lighting shader with a hard cutoff. The girl rotates while the light stays still.

>>634558
>>634563
This is how we did cel-edges before sophisticated shaders that could detect edges. It's light on the resources but can produce messy results, especially on deforming models.

>>634220

These days you can just "cheat" by sculpting everything then projecting it onto a very low poly cage and just painting over it to make it look more painterly. The results are basically the same if you know what you are doing and have some basic painting skill and it will take about a fraction of the time.

>>634371
>>634376

Probably the best work flow I've seen for this style that cuts out the maximum of annoying busy work is using a 64x64 - 256x256 texture which only contains simple blocks of color gradients and then just UVing your mesh through dragging UV verts around and using projection.

This is what they use for guilty gear xrd and its very intuitive and allows to create the essentials of a painted look with hard and soft transitions without having to do as much work.

Obviously it limits you stylistically somewhat and also leads to slightly more geometry overall, but considering that assets take much less time to make its a decent trade off in my opinion. Really depends how much you value speed.

Pic related: it's a character textured only using a gradients, no painting.

>>634596
>textured only using a gradients
Big deal, I did that with vertex coloring 20-something years ago

>>634594
I see a lot of the newer hand painted models done like this. It's just a lot easier to sculpt all the details and creases and then paint over them via AO bake rather than messing around with the details manually.

You PAINT that bitch in 1000+ pixel resolution then compress it down to 256x256.
I don't know how the FUCK to make shoulders and armpits.
One day I'll figure out how the FUCK shaders work.

>>634814
Jesus that's one noisy render my dude

>>634814
>You PAINT that bitch in 1000+ pixel resolution then compress it down to 256x256

Idiotic practice for lowrez lowpoly, as your textures are going to all be affected by the resizing filter.

>fine at modelling
>Absolute garbage at making textures

>>634814
did you take a screenshot in rendered mode?

>>634814
I like it, reminds me of LoZ majora's mask (I guess that's what you were going for with the color scheme right?)

You don't really need cycles for this blender render should be enough. I think the textures are okay no need to be pixel perfect. If you need a large amount of models like this for a game resizing from a high res to a low res is the way to go, drawing pixel perfect textures and making UVs for them is too time consuming.

I'm more interested din how the textures are made, as far as I know there isn't a single video or tutorial about how a professional would go about texturing something like this.

From what I can tell it's painted at a higher res and then downscaled, definitely not placed pixel by pixel like people are doing in indie games.

>>635411
just like paint it bruh
yes you need to be decent at art

>>635411
I wish I knew. There is just no information on how this stuff was done. There are probably some japanese books buried somewhere on the workflow.

There is this kid that goes by Sully that is really focused on 3d pixel art and he does show his workflow, but it's very limiting. He basically sets each unit in 3D to 1 pixel on the UV grid and he uses Maya I think. Not as easy to do in blender.

Per your example, just setting up the UV's so that all of those little pixels are in the same direction would be insanely time consuming. The level of detail does make me think it was downscaled from higher res art too.

>>635436
you seem to be searching for some magic technique that would improve your workflow, but the truth is those old models had their textures just hand painted on flat UVs.

Now you can actually paint in 3d, but you can still easily find many old photoshop texturing tutorials.

>>634563
>>634590
Complete 3D noob here who is considering learning a thing or two for a personal project, how would one use this technique while still avoiding these wonky-looking intersections near concave angles?

>>635452
Just use blenders freestyle render option. If you are having trouble with it rendering animations slowly, modify your render settings as follows...
>turn off overwrite in render output settings
>turn on use placeholders
>limit the scene to a single thread
When you go to render do it from the console/terminal (background mode)... And run one instance of blender per CPU core.

I was able to go from render 1 frame in 3min to rendering 8 frames in 5min by using that technique (that said, the cycles portion of my animation was very light so this huge difference might not hold true for cycles heavy renders)

That backface culling technique is needlessly cumbersome, and, in your case, it is causing clipping issues.

>>635456
I appreciate the advice but I probably should have mentioned that this would be for real-time rendering in a game (the pic was stolen from a Polycount thread discussing outline rendering techniques).

>>635452
I don't think it's possible. That's one of the downsides of using that 3D outline technique. But honestly 99% of the time the player isn't going to notice that unless they are super close to the object. I mean even in the thumbnail it's hard to tell the outline is wonky there.

>>634220
>>>/pol/180582140

>>634224
The things I would do to her

>>635461
Find a graphics engine with outlining built into it. Whatever answer you find for your question will take just as long as simply implementing proper shader based outlining into your game. You'll end up with superior results and an outlining system that only needs to be done once (as apposed to having to be done to each asset you create).

>>635310
Dude no one cares about that if it looks nice anyways, which it will if the texture is done by a competent artist that knows how to paint properly.
Resizing filter ain't shit.

>>635436
It’s all done in Maya. I wish I could find my old cds with software. I’d kill to have Maya 3 or 3.5 to use. Today’s 3d software is so bloated.

I leaarned 3d like Sully’s or OP in college around y2k. Only techniques that were taught then. It’s insanely time consuming. Not difficult though. Early screenshot of a game I’m making.

If you all wanna learn 3d like OP, you’ll need to dig up Quake 1 tutorials if they’re still around.

>>635278
>>635382
I still have no clue how to use this program beyond making these basic models.

>>635310
Isn't it traditional to do it though, isn't that what they did in the past? It is good at covering up mistakes, I'm not a decent artist.

>>635397
Majora's Mask is how my characters looked so that's accurate. That's what I've been doing just to pixelate it, I figured that's what I should do since games compressed their things down and the artists genuinely still painted rather than making it.

>>635411
DB Origins games use both textures and vertex coloring.

>>635565
Don't worry about the idiots who say you cant resize textures it's all fine, in Resident Evil 2/3 they did the same and just resized the textures.

You got some twitter/tumbler for your game you working on?

>>635572
Not yet but probably should even though I hate Twitter and am paranoid about fags stealing my ideas.

>>634220
>>634222
>>634224
>>635499
I unironically wish they'd make a really cool game in this kind of resolution/style. Like really make it AAA in terms of animation, scope, playable content etc. like a modern GTA title, but keep everything in that style. Instead of wanking endlessly around on graphics, invest the time in building the actual world, intricate varied quests with hundreds of items and good writing.

>>635774
So... the old GTA games?
Anyway, I really dislike this complaint that all games these days are just "flashy graphics and nothing else". I'll honestly say that that says more about you than it does the game, that story and graphics to you are mutually exclusive and you don't have the mental capacity to enjoy both at the same time. Sure, it's a valid complaint for formulaic cookie-cutter titles like Assassin's Creed and CoD. But there exists games that really bring fantastic writing accompanied by bleeding edge graphics. Witcher 3 is the shining example of this. You could even argue that the GTA games do this too.
But this is /3/ and not /v/, so I'll stop here.
Good luck getting something like this to sell like an AAA title, though. It'd work in the indie niche markets for sure, but it really won't have the visual shock and awe to compete with the masses, even if the aesthetic was streamlined and perfected.

>>634232
Wow this looks great

>>635777
The problem is not inherently the graphics but the graphics get more detailed but the gameplay get more shittier and generic each game so people assume it's the graphics fault. It got to the point previously distinct games like resident evil and metal gear solid both who used to be very distinct games feel like generic 3rd person shooters with not much difference aside what you shoot at.

>>634232
This way is how I originally learned to build game assets...and any other assets. Long before PBR.

I love CG, but why am I not excited for vieeo game graphics anymore?

Anyone here use Sprytile for Blender? Looks like it could be useful for lowpoly pixelart textured models.

>>636258
I never heard of it, so I gave it a quick look
I watched first random video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH60mg84GIE

and I don't think it is anything special. You can model the same geometry very easily, and with fewer polys. it's kinda a modular build tool for flat planes that use seamless textures.

>>635572
alright I made one, so I can negotiate with some music artists and show them proof of concept
https://twitter.com/PAL57820700

>>635381
this is the reverse of my problem.
if only people hired texture artists cause unwrapping makes me want to fucking die senpai.

>>635411
You basically project some orthogonal views of the model onto the UV editing screen thing multiple times. This lets you 'paint onto' the model with front/side view textures. You make the front/side textures first, then do as above... low quality but fast

>>635452
It's kind of a funny question because the pic comes from a polycount post that explains how Guilty gear did that, namely the outlines use a shader that displaces the outline mesh further on the z axis post-transform, that way you don't have intersections. Doesn't have to be as far as on the screencap but this is the general idea.

>>635499
>If you all wanna learn 3d like OP, you’ll need to dig up Quake 1 tutorials if they’re still around.

For the love of...All I can find is map tutorials. Man I'm begging you, if you have links to those Quake tutorials then please post them.

>>635452
>>637709
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQLgn9-xqQc
https://www.psoft.co.jp/en/product/pencil/3dsmax/

>>638200
Pencil is a post-rendering technique and thus irrelevant to a low poly thread, unlike polygon hulls.

>>634224
I think I fell in love with her

>>638188
Almost all this shit has been deleted by some shitbag company that has its hand in everything (IGN). on webarchive you can search for planetquake.com look around the 96-99 dates and see how much is there. A lot is archived fortunately. There is so much shit. Wish there was a cdrom.com archive from around 98-99.

After poking around for an hour or so I’d forgotten just how awesome that internet community was back when. It was like a borg collective working together to push tech then.

>>638188

It's just freaking handpainted texture maps. I don't understand what exactly you are yearning for in this tutorials. This is not some process you can "cheat" and learn through some tutorial. Learn on how to digital paint (buy a wacom tablet) or forget about it.

>>634222
Sauce?

>>638533
https://seafoamboy.tumblr.com/

>>634222
>>634224
>>638604
so this is what she looks like in cycles

judging by >>638607 and expressions, her face is much higher poly than the rest of her body

>>634220
>that
>low poly
Oof amigo that's at least 120,00 polygons

>>638614
*120,000 sry

>>634222
>>634224

Hate this faux-poly shit. Absolutely Disgusting

>>634222
>>634224
>GIRLBOY
What did he mean by this?

>>638614
polycount's on the pic, dumbass, it's 700

>>638674
You're in for a surprise :)

Any free good low poly base mesh to get things started?

>>638783
>low poly base mech

>>638786
wtf m̶e̶c̶h̶ mesh
too much giant robots for me

>>638786
>>638787
Now I want some low poly base mechs.

>>638806
How about a cube?

>>638495

That's interesting. Thanks.

>>638501

I'm looking for a guide on everything regarding the making of Quake's models, not just the texturing. I played it a while ago and I was surprised by them. Even though it's ancient, the enemies were single meshes instead of clipping meshes. And despite the low poly count there were no obvious issues with the deformation. Either that or I was too distracted trying to stay alive.

>>634365
wtf this is sick

>>635381
>decent at both
>decent * decent = bad
>end product looks like absolute garbage
W H E W
H
E
W

Does anyone happen to hate the models from the first Dead or Alive game or pictures of their wireframes?

>>639684
Forget the shitty console ports of DOA 1. See if you can emulate the arcade version (model 2), maybe you can force wireframes via the emulator.

>>639684

Fuck me, I meant have.

>>639697

Which emulator?

>>639700
Model 2 Emulator, formerly known as Nebula Model 2. I don't know what debug options it has, but you can force wireframe display externally through your display drivers.

>>638806

Here's a basic WFC Prime. I tried making a Megatron to go with him but his shape is odd and his legs are a right mess.

>>639705

2technical4me

>>634220
Extrude, Merge, Knife. What most noobs tend to fuck up are their proportions and gesture.

So you need to know the fundamentals. You also just need Mileage. Work under the same resource limits game devs had back in the day and keep working the same model even if you fuck up, don't undo or create a new file. Literally go in there and find the vertex that's off or try to correct an improper loop. This is easy to do since the poly count is so low.

Texture is weird it looks scaled down on the model using Nearest Neighbor as a scaling algorithm, which gives it a pixelated look. Disable mipmapping so it remains pixelated at any camera distance.

Working on an airplane shooter in this style. I'm stuck on getting the "late 90s Sega arcade" feeling like in >>635499

>>640441
>even if you fuck up, don't undo or create a new file. Literally go in there and find the vertex that's off or try to correct an improper loop
This one is important. The easiest way to learn is to fuck up and try to fix it. I used to be afraid of messing up a model and would just remake it completely if I messed up. This only lead to me making the same mistakes over and over and not learning from them.

>>640922
This is looking nice.

guys on an older thread of low poly i saw this low poly car, the glass of the car had a toon effect in a way you could see a shadow even though the whole glass was just blue. idk how to explain it ill make a drawing but ive never seen it again.

>>640963

>>640968
The way it's done is by inverting the glass normals and using back face culling. So the light blue color is actually behind the silhouette, then the silhouette itself is just all the same blue color. And the highlights on the windows are a transparent texture.

>>640969
>>640969
Cute, I really like it. These glare stripes on the windows need to wander/flex/deform as the surface rotates, just like the reflections/glare stripes you see in older Anime.

>>640922
Really looks like something a Model 2 board could push, with the drawn highlights/shadows in the diffuse and all. Good job anon, keep us posted.

>>640968
>>640969
fucking hell thanks man!

>>640972
been thinking how to do this since your comment. maybe there's a way using anisotropic fuckery to create a partial sphere or sphere section that only renders within a window clipping plane, is clipped by other spheres to define it's shape, with changing portion visibility using normals.

>>640973 thanks, here's the player plane model. posting some other stuff.

>>641036 test showing the water texture which I'm still working on. trying to achieve a perfect raspberry blue jello look.

>>641038
Snazzy, though I think it'd look nicer if you properly animated it rather than relying on that wobble effect.

>>641037
you made this? how do you git gud at texturing small models? looks super nice

>>640969
so i tried this and it works in the viewport but it doesnt in the render. what am i doing wrong?

>>641035
That's actually close to what I did, but for offline rendering and realized with some additional compositing trickery.

>>641057
learn and practice with pixel art is the biggest thing. that + being good with mentally understanding orthographic projections in order to break down the faces of a model into flat textures. having boxy models also help, and it's way better to think with quads instead of triangles or polygons.

>>641039
I've been trying to mess with Unity and figure out how to get three distinct layers that all wobble slightly out of phase to get a depth effect, but I cannot in2code.

Here's an art test of what the islands will look like, but they'll be seen more from above, obviously.

I thought I knew suffering and then I tried making enough tropical vegetation to fill out an entire island and jungle scene.

>>641148
Can't see a thing.

>>641138
i only use quads since i model for animation, do you have any guides to recommend?

>>641311
Best advice is to look at the games and styles you are wanting to emulate. If you can, it's really helpful to find models on sites like the models resource and see how they did things. Delko, the guy who's making drift stage, used to post here and his tumblr (floopydisk) is a pretty good collection of stuff to look at for ideas and techniques.

>>641369
*floopydisc, not disk

>>634233
htromak <3

A big question I always wanted to know was how did people years ago manage to paint across UV seams? I saw lots of tutorials and methods of painting their textures in photoshop but nothing touched on how they got certain details to cross, or did they just switch between photoshop and their 3d program and refresh constantly and check? What was done before viewport canvas paint on model?

>>642970
Don't know for sure, but I would assume if you need it you would do projection painting to paint over seams, for example. There is no reason they wouldn't have had it.
And you can certainly have the model with auto-reload on save on a second monitor and also just make guidelines across seams first.

>>642970
>or did they just switch between photoshop and their 3d program and refresh constantly and check
this.
you basically have photoshop open and also 3d program, texture is inside 3d program, everytime you click Ctrl+S in photoshop it saves and updates in 3d program instantly
I have not done that, because I'm fairly new to 3d, but I guess it was that way..

>>642983
>>642976
This basically.

>>642970
Bodypaint 3D

>>642994
I still have a very old version of this boxed somewhere. This early versions even had plugins for 3D Studio MAX, Lightwave and Maya.

>>642983
>>642976

Thanks. Also i found this video which is a youtube reupload of an old painting method. IIRC the original video was from like 2004~5ish

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QKXpaRiTYs

>>642994
the koreans are all about bodypaint 3d

https://www.artstation.com/bli

I've been making retro-3d characters for 3 months now.
Also have to take pictures in grainy Render mode because there's some transparent .png textures.

>>642983
Fucking seams.

>>643095
This pleases the oldfag

>>643095
Blog? Looks aestethic and i want more,

>>643121
Trying to get as close to an authentic feeling mix of Dreamcast, N64 and Dreamcast as I can because that's the shit I grew up with. I'm physically disgusted from seeing that now they're starting to combine pixelshit and calarts on my twitter feed.

>>643183
https://twitter.com/AutLim
Posted it before here with those skeleton pirates but I changed it because having about 10 digit numbers in your username is retarded.
I'm still just fucking with characters I only make concept locations because I can't figure out how to make efficient jungle foliage.

Since there is no dedicated low poly thread right now, this is probably the most related thread to my question:

When should I use textures with transparency over denser mesh?
If I'm making a low poly character, I could have her earings just be a flat plane with a circle drawn on it (2 triangles + texture with transparency), or I could model the earings which would be more polies, but no transparency textures.

I've seen video games that use flat planes with drawn textures with transparency drawn on them instead of modeling low poly weapons. Is it to make it more modular, by using only different textures? How many tries is too many for a prop to justify using flat textures with transparency?

>>643187
>I can't figure out how to make efficient jungle foliage.
I think minecraft jungle looks neat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnYflPpQYDo

Just draw jungle plant sprites, and place them everywhere

>>643269
Always choose more polies. I don't care if you're trying to be traditional. Alphas and backface drawing will always bog down your system when compared to extra geometry. Today's systems are designed to handle millions of vertices, but draw calls are the devil.

You will learn, young padawan. I'd go the rareware route:

Hexagonal cylinder
inset
delete
bridge

>>643271
The problem is I have a beach area and a jungle area, in beach photos, at a not so far distance, the vegetation just turns into an unidentifiable mass of green. Surprisingly I couldn't find what individual plants makes those things up. Like, just normal tropical non-palm trees or what? I am gonna cut the world up into scenes so if it's far back enough I will just color a plane green and throw up some painted backdrops behind real trees.

>>643273
Is it really always more polies over alpha textures? Like if I were to make a metal fence, my first thought was to just paint all the bars on a flat plane instead of modeling.

>You will learn, young padawan.
Yes, I want to learn. Is there some good course for all the low poly knowledge?

What about more bones in armature vs blend shapes?

>>643273
Do alphas really cause that much trouble? Even on 256x256 textures? That'd be a huge oversight that I've done thinking that it's more efficient than more polygons.

>>643279
>>643289
There's really two cases with alpha. If it's alpha testing (ie a pixel is either opaque or invisible, which means as far as the z-buffer goes it's just like a pixel from a non-alpha polygon) there won't be any noticeable perf problem. If it's alpha blending (ie a pixel can be partially transparent, in which case the z-buffer can't be used and the polygons need to be sorted and drawn in-order), then there will be a sizeable performance hit.

But for low poly you don't care about that shit, you'll never hit the polygon counts for which it becomes a problem. So yeah, alpha your fence, no worries.

>>641058
are you using blender? backface culling doesn't function in blender when rendering for some reason, iirc you can do it in nodes though

>>643596
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/72165/is-backface-culling-possible-in-render-mode

>>643596
It's honestly better to just duplicate the leaves and flip the normals on the duplicates.

>>641058
You need a node material. Link "front/back" from geometry input to alpha in output.

>>640969
How do you get those sexy un-aliased lines in blender. I know you can disable AA but how can you get a large, crisp render while maintaining "large pixels".

>>643749
just lower the rendering resolution

>>643749
for the textures you need to go to the settings and disable mipmaps, which will also disable texture filtering.

>>634220
I find it sad that I've learned more frem this wireframe than I've ever learned from the loveable assholes of /3/.

no one's gonna teach you topography
I started off by staring at a guy's lowpoly models without even seeing the wireframes and just guessing

>>644235
>topography
hey guys what's a good software for making maps??

>>644236
Hammer world editor

>>644238
this desu
regards hammer pro

>>634220
Post more lowpoly and any cool people to follow and any guides you recommend

Also why doesn't this board have an archive?

>>645962
>>>/3/archive/ ?
Ours is much smaller than other boards because we're too slow to deserve the bandwidth. We have threads approaching their first year and they're still active.

>>643784
>I find it sad that I've learned more frem this wireframe than I've ever learned from the loveable assholes of /3/.

I know what you mean, but honestly, everywhere feels pretty useless when it comes to low poly stuff. You're either digging through 15 year old archives or everything is trash.