Some lowpoly stuff

[Squiggly_P]

Made this guy a couple weeks ago.  I was planning on making a series of them, but I've have an interesting idea, and I want to see where it goes.
I'll have more stuff to post soon.  I want to work more on my pixel art, so my next thread will probably be in the other forum, cause I'll be wanting me some hardcore crits.
The pixel art will eventually wrap around this sort of model, though.  I'm trying to get near to the PSone.  I think it used 128² textures for most characters...  I might be wrong tho...

Also, inspired by Jakten's lowpoly Megaman / Hiro:


Just a doodle

[ptoing]

quite nice. Also PS has 16 colour textures for pretty much everything, even the PS2 still has 16 colour textures for most things (just multiple textures per model where you need more colours in most cases.

Just some quick fudging around with gradient maps and masks

[Gil]

ptoing: I think the PS2 can handle more than 16 per texture, but it was notoriously hard for the developers to work with the high bandwidth, low RAM in the PS2, so that might explain them going for very easy, layered textures.

I might be totally off though, you tell me

[ptoing]

Yeh, it can handle 256 colour textures just fine. But it does not have a lot of graphics memory, so it's rather wasteful to use those.
Rather than making a single 256 colour texture it is more economic to make several smaller 16 colour ones and use them for different parts of the model. And this is what most people did.
I think it is also possible to blend between two or more textures, which they used quite often on terrain (for example in sotc I think).

But anyway, enough ot here.

[Gil]

Actually, it's a little more nuanced than that. Final post though, don't want to derail the thread, the discussion might be interesting however.

There is a specific reason the PS2 has low video memory, it isn't supposed to use it. PS2 was designed with a VERY high bandwidth bus. In other words, the programmer is supposed to stream textures through the bus, instead of buffering them in video memory. This is actually very different from any other platform, resulting in programmers trying to shoe horn their usual way of doing into the low video memory, ending up with solutions like layered 16 color textures. This is not always because of bad programmers, it's just very hard to work with the architecture.

More informative read than what I provide:
http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2000/04/ps2vspc.ars

I'll try to stay on topic now

[Squiggly_P]

That's all actually really useful.  I couldn't find much info about the PSone / 2 texture memory.  All I knew is that devs would complain about how little of it there was compared to the xbox or the DC or whatever.  Didn't know about the 16 color limitation for the PSone either, tho it makes perfect sense.

To be honest, I'm not sure the actual geometry there is PSone friendly.  If anyone's aware of a good site that lists the technical specifics / limitations of the hardware, that would be awesome.

[Jakten]

http://psx.rules.org/gpu.txt

This is a good amount of information on how the graphics work on the PS1 I think there could be something useful. Seems like it says it used 64x64, 128x128 and also 256x256 sized textures.
In terms of polycount I think it would be fine as well depending on what he used the rest of the polygons that would be displayed on. Its hard to say though as it's near impossible to find just polycounts on models, all i could find out about is how many polygons a second the PS1 can display.

This guy is looking great though Sqiggly, I saw him on tisource I believe awhile ago and thought it was fantastic. I really like how the texture looks on him. Will be interesting to see him coloured.