[Discussion Thread] Low-spec 3D pixel world, collab?

[Grimsane]

idea for an activity for anyone wanting to show off their skills or get in some practice, and or hopefully having some fun, for the love of crates, heh well it will not exclusively be crates it'll be any type of cube any materiel as long as it is a perfect cube, you could render an ice cube a stone block a crate, cardboard, antique, grungy, steam powered, fantasy, sci fi, modern~ anything you want, it should be good practice for any skill level, here is a quick and simple example I whipped up


my approach was to create the 32x32 one first then both scale it down to 16x16 and upscale to 64x64, so it is practice for refining something higher res with more detail and at the same time making something readable at a lower res

then after they are done, use them as a basis for creating a split height 2 tall texture and making a top variation and sides and you'll notice some of the effects you can achieve the upper half of the double height textures is the upper square is the TOP face and the lower is the sides

I've provided a ZIP, it contains the texture examples, blank templates and an OBJ for anyone who wants to check out and show off the 3D cubes themselves, all cube variants and already UV unwrapped, also a cool thing is that I've scaled the cubes relative to each other in the sense that the pixel size/ratio is exactly the same, so the cubes can looks consistent in comparison to each other, if anyone can't do the 3D part, just pixel the textures and just submit them on their own and I'll be glad to do it when I have time, the way I set it up is incredibly easy to swap texture files, the textures are automatically loaded from the ones in the same folder as the OBJ for anyone who wanted to try loading their textures but wasn't sure, and I'd be glad to collate any finished pieces into this post.

as many sets as you want, but each set should be like this one relatively tied together, thinking of imposing a colour limit, maybe I should have colour limits per scale, 8 colour max for 16x16 16 colour max for 32x32 and 32 colours for 64x64, or actually I think I'd prefer 4 colour 16x 8 colours 32x and 16 colours 64x, or even 8,12,16

thoughts?

the ZIP with the templates and relevant files can be grab here

I'll organize and put more effort into this if there is any enthusiasm, come on guys I challenge you all to try it

[Grimsane]

Idea change, not just cubes, but walls floors and anything planar 

and we can try making a big collaborative 3D map, even if I do the map making and people just contribute raw pixel tiles 

examples of what kinda thing I mean, behold:

^earlier before adding shadowing


^captured in game engine with a rotation snapping camera, manually faked shadows

kinda low spec, kinda pixel game art, hopefully all fun?

might be worth making several different themes and making a small 3D level of each, hell who know's if it takes off and has enough contributions might even make a game out of it all

that level is exclusively 16 and 32 tiles, any thoughts or interest?

[PixelPiledriver]

I might do a few.
I see you have a 1 side and 2 sided texture template.
Can you post a standardized texture template you'd like to use for 6 sides?

[Grimsane]

cool, thanks for getting the ball rolling and I hope you do

I was avoiding 6 sided, mainly because efficiency, effectiveness and the time investment.
It's not entirely rewarding to create a cube with 6 unique sides (in this context), the bottoms most likely won't be visible, and I personally wouldn't recommend more than 4 face variations, but I can unwrap some cubes with 4 or 6 face variations if it's requested. but feel free to do 6 if that's what you really wanna do

at the moment I am transferring everything to tile maps like this



with a 1 pixel buffer on them to avoid seams, and am just aligning UV faces to that, so anyone can just submit the faces in preferably the existing templates or like this for 4-6:





the method I am using for the 3D level is quite an effective one and with instancing it's quite easy to manage too, feel free to do long items too, like 2 Wide crates chests tall and wide cupboards etc, basically anything you can tile for a 2D game would work also something else I am working on is ornamentation and wall hangings etc with 1bit alpha transparency like this


these are restricted to a 16x16 grid but can be any multiple width or height as long as it's within that grid.

I'm pondering and about to experiment with the originally intended 64x walls and thus ceiling height, I am keeping the objects relative to a strict grid and pixel sizes, so everything is the exact scale detail wise.

also I have been creating duplicates of textures with a 50% black overlayed as shadows, without them it looks especially flat

[Dusty]

I found that working with my Minecraft texture pack, that as much as I love pixel art it's very hard to get it to translate to 3D textures while looking appealing. It starts to look overly crisp since when it's rotated it doesn't get the AA attention that it would get if it were made of actual iso pixel tiles. I remedied this by applying a cheap little blur by duplicating the tile and offsetting it in each direction by a pixel, and changing the opacity of the duplicates to about 10% of so opacity. It made the tiles much more appealing when applied in 3D space, but of course you lose the pixel appeal so YMMV. Handhelds like the DS lack any sort of AAing so the best comparison to what you're doing would probably be looking at those games, specifically the Zelda games that use a fixed perspective as well. While they did well with their restrictions, I did find the lack of AA in those games fairly bothersome to the eyes as well.

[Grimsane]

I like that crisp look, maybe it's because I was keen on early 3D on PC, and at the moment its strictly from those angles in the gif, mostly it's not too bad, and the good thing about this kind of 3D over the same level of detail in 2D is that it's relatively resolution dependant, and with decent tile design it reads really well from all of them, one way to kill jaggies would be turning on some form of texture interpolation (linear bilinear cubic filtering etc)

and that'll look something like this


still readable yes, but a fair way away from pixel art

btw I made a minecraft texture pack once, mine was restricted colour count think 24-32 max per tile and it looked fine with just pixel style AA etc but I guess it's all down to how crisp the person in question likes it, and if it was in a game I guess the option would be allowed in the options to appease both parties, but it'll need well thought out tiling to look great interpolated, you'll notice there are visible seams on the floor where the colour's don't quite match from tile to tile which is not an issue at all without filtering

the map will probably be rendered out in dimetric isometric view and possibly thumb-nailed/shrunk down considerably and the higher res images hyperlinked underneath, in the OP or if a new showcase thread is created.