AuthorTopic: Chunkbot  (Read 21365 times)

Offline .TakaM

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Re: Chunkbot

Reply #10 on: August 15, 2006, 09:03:58 am
very cool, no crits. would look really awesome animated  :-*

edit-
actually, the lack of feet kinda bugs me
« Last Edit: August 15, 2006, 09:42:51 am by .TakaM »
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Offline Helm

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Re: Chunkbot

Reply #11 on: August 15, 2006, 09:14:48 am
Yeah, lowpoly is pretty cool when it doesn't pretend to be anything else. The moment anyone slaps on a 128x128 texture over a triangle, it looks bad. Early 3d looked bad 99% of the time. It has only started recently to look on in games.

So it's not your fault.

Offline ndchristie

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Re: Chunkbot

Reply #12 on: August 15, 2006, 12:47:34 pm
Yeah, lowpoly is pretty cool when it doesn't pretend to be anything else. The moment anyone slaps on a 128x128 texture over a triangle, it looks bad. Early 3d looked bad 99% of the time. It has only started recently to look on in games.

So it's not your fault.

I personally think that low-poly machines and mechs and spaceships etc tend to look fine, except in Descent, one of the worst cases of cheap 3d ive ever seen in a game that was that fun to play, and low-polys even have a certain charm about them, though that could be pure nostalgia from playing homeworld, xenogears, armored core, etc.  Low-poly organic objects tend to look like blizzard took a shit and called it an ork (warcraft III _really_ surprised me with its character quality, I expected much more from them.....)

Can the DS do lighting? That might (or might not) add a lot to this piece.

Also, this may be a lot to ask, in fact, I’m almost certain it is, but could you just explain how to get a project from wings, unwrap it, and apply the texture in blender?  Or point me to a website that would explain how?  it seems like the basics of UV mapping and applying textures are very hard to find, though I admit I haven’t ever searched incredibly hard, most places just seem to say "now unwrap the object," or "simply apply the texture you made," and I’m like, if I knew how to do that already, I wouldn’t be reading a tutorial on how to do that?  lol. (and yeah, I'm a permanent noob to 3d)
nevermind i found some good how-tos.  wasnt as hard as i thought, just had to be more specific with my google
« Last Edit: August 15, 2006, 12:54:55 pm by Adarias »
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Offline AdamAtomic

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Re: Chunkbot

Reply #13 on: August 15, 2006, 02:20:08 pm
Everybody - thanks a lot for the encouragement, there are a couple other pieces that have to go into this mockup I will try to get to them soon!

Helm - very understandable!  Though for me some of my favorite artwork is from games like Vagrant Story and Metal Gear Solid, which were all 3d but were really picky about things like texel density, etc, and were able to achieve some really beautiful visuals (in my opinion).  I think like Adarias said for a lot of people the appeal is nostalgic, though for me ther eis also a sense of compromise and technical achievement that is really enticing (I am a programmer/artist hybrid so I am probably TOO obsessed with this sort of thing).

Alex - Organic stuff is kind of hit and miss.  When you have diagonal edges its a lot harder to get thing to line up nicely (which is one reason why robots look so dang good), and misaligned pixels on stuff this low poly starts to look REALLY bad...but it certainly CAN be done well.  It just usually isn't!  Again, see something like Vagrant Story for some amazing organic models and textures (dragons, knights etc - ye gods their dragons were good).

Adarias - The DS can do *some* lighting, though I was planning on using it mainly only for special effects - like if there's a big explosion, turn on lighting during the explosion etc.  Or maybe during a night map if there are strong light sources.  And yes, Descent was hideous :D

Offline Helm

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Re: Chunkbot

Reply #14 on: August 15, 2006, 02:25:58 pm
See this pretty much paints the picture: I recently replayed MGS and it's an absolute horror in the models and textures of them. They tried their best, and it looks extremely bad for me. So it's pretty clear we're not seeing the same things there.

If I took your robot mesh and simply laid all the colors and detail-work in colored vectors, it would look, in my opinion, much better. This pixels-in-models effect looks to me, like a tessellation photoshop filter of some sort. The fact that you highlight every edge of every box doesn't help either. It's like ultralightsource.

Pixel-art level detail for me is only strong when the pixel is the Atom of the Universe (composition). If it's resized, twisted around and unaligned, it's no longer the smaller part, the foundational material from which the rest is built. Triangles are stronger aesthetically when they stick to themselves as the Atom, which was my point about just coloring the vectors on this piece.

I wish I had the 3d knowhow to take that mesh and do that edit so I could better explain my position, but sadly I completely lack it.

Offline robotriot

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Re: Chunkbot

Reply #15 on: August 15, 2006, 02:40:50 pm
Heh, I think that's pretty awesome. It's funny, because after seeing the mech in Starstruck, I decided to create one myself with a pixeled texture, still unfinished. It's not as cool as yours though ^^

I didn't like lowpoly textured stuff either until a few months ago, but somehow I discovered that it has it's own charm.
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Offline Helm

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Re: Chunkbot

Reply #16 on: August 15, 2006, 02:48:59 pm


This works so great because it doesn't try to edge enhance every edge. Fake flat shading in places, use light on edges sparingly, It'd be best if you had engine lighting, but even in lack of, it's better to have a good balance of detail in relation of shapes, than you do currently. It needs to read well, and fast, in motion. Right now I don't think the chunkbot does.

Offline ndchristie

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Re: Chunkbot

Reply #17 on: August 15, 2006, 03:10:17 pm
its hard to say without knowitnhg the range of motion that the bot will use, but i would suggest taking the brightest shine off of every bottom corner.
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Offline AdamAtomic

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Re: Chunkbot

Reply #18 on: August 15, 2006, 04:08:59 pm
Helm thanks a bunch for the extra thoughts and feedback.  I will definitely keep it in mind - the "shines" as such are in their mainly as a way to help the shapes stand out, a role that is traditionally played by lighting.  I think possibly simpler textures and some dynamic flat (as in not filtered or averaged) lighting COULD be a decent substitute, and I will definitely experiment with that as I continue the 3d-pixel quest.  The problem with lighting objects that are this simple is you lose a LOT of control over what you get - if I paint my lighting on I can ensure that the mech looks the way I want it (be that bad or good) from pretty much any angle.  I guess it's a control thing (as is the whole discipline of pixel art?).  However, the end quality of the design is more important than self-indulgence!

One technical/aesthetic gripe I do have about using "real" lighting in games is that except for the highest powered systems there are a lot of compromises that have to be made with the colors you use.  As pixel artists we love to mix blues and yellows with our shadows and highlights to get more realistic or at least more believable lighting on our shapes and forms.  Generally speaking this is a limitation on computers that is hard to control/exploit.  You can tint highlight colors or display colors pretty easily, but it is very hard to get something like blue shadows working in-game.  On something like the DS I imagine it is similar to very basic OpenGL in that you really only have a couple of lighting options (without writing some kind of amazing assembly anyways); ambient, diffuse, and specular.  The only one that can affect shadow color is the ambient piece, but if you bump up your ambient to a blue then it has a direct affect on how dark your shadows can be.  Basically, as a pixel artist the kind of affect i'd want is a real ramp of colors that are used for shaded areas, but if you want dark shadows you have to set black, and if you set blue then your dynamic range is severely limited.  Diffuse and Specular lighting on a system like the DS are generally limited to either flat faces or averaged values; averaging the normals on something like this would be absolutely hideous, and the specular lighting has a tendency to wash out colors as it is just an added tone across all colors on the palette (you can't have dynamic specular on something like the DS that knows to use a certain ramp on the yellows and different one on the reds).

Something that I'd like to try is writing my own blending function that just does a lookup on a ramp instead of a straight addition (like if value of shadow is between 20 and 40 then look in spot 3 on the "red" ramp).  This is kind of how cell shaders work, but they generally don't do it on a per-texel basis.

My point is (and probably this was self-evident but whatever!) that I think people are better at coloring and lighting things (especially on hardware like the DS) than a computer chip is.  Thus the chunky, hand-lit approach.  Unfortunately some of my forms weren't popping like I wanted so I added the shines in (sometimes in somewhat unlikely locations) to help those shapes read better.  My other concern is that generally, in-game, these bots will be max maybe 150 pixels tall, and frequently maybe 60 pixels tall.  I need to make sure that all the shapes and forms still pop and read at those resolutions.

Anyways I hope that helps in some way, not saying the bot is perfect but more that he is the result of a lot of compromises that I am still debating myself!

Offline Helm

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Re: Chunkbot

Reply #19 on: August 15, 2006, 04:14:38 pm
the extra shine won't make it read better when small, it'll just noisyfy it. If the character's silluette reads against backgrounds the mind will fill in the blanks. Contrary to what many people believe, SIMPLER design, as long as it has the color choice to help it, reads faster and better than detail work which you might be throwing away if there's a lot of scaling to go on these.