Realtime Rendering of 3d Meshes as Pixelart

[Howard Day]

Well, I'm glad you see improvement...It's a bit hard to see from my perspective. So...in answer to your question...Both? I was just going to release the method/shader/scripts to everyone who might want to use them (after a ton of clean up and streamlining...I know what's going on, but it'd be useless gibberish to anyone else)... and I want to make a game with it. Well, a couple, actually. The first one would be a combination of Z, 7th Legion, and Cannon Fodder. Where it's an RTS based on zone control, use of a small, randomized-from-a-player-chosen-deck or power-cards (Two defensive cards, one offensive), and squad-based control, instead of enforced single-unit controls. I dunno. It's a game design that's been rattling around my head for a while, no idea if it would be any fun or worthwhile to anyone but me... but I can see it in my skull, and I need to get it out.
..also some Time of Day updates/ other angles...

[RAV]

I like it on every dimension, from tech to art to even your game idea. Altogether really selling me on this.
There are so many cool things happening with pixel art in recent years, and I think you got a strong positioning in all of this.
And I wonder if even 2d games could somehow benefit from this. It could reign in the colors from a lot of the effects these days.
Well, the genre is getting interesting for sure. Trying to make some greater sense and integration of that all will be a fascinating challenge.

[surt]

My biggest issue with these is the colour mixing and dithering look to be lacking control (patches of red and grey in the rock, dithering between non-sequential greens in the grass) so they still look very much like colour reductions.
Have you considered doing something in the style of Indigo's HD index painting?
Render greyscale plus material map then hand tweak per-material gradients/dithering.

[RAV]

It's true that these screens look less clean than the shot he posted just before. But it got me thinking a bit. There's been talk lately about bringing back a bit more "dirty grit" to pixel art. I kinda wonder, if making it as clean as possible should even be the goal, or if reveling in a slightly uncontrolled grit of techniques is an aesthetically interesting deviation for his project, pleasing in its own way. Maybe in the end it comes down again to how readable the critical action in a game would be. For example, I find it slightly difficult to focus on the ship in these latest shots. Still, getting some level of grit just right could be a strength of its own, further setting it apart visually.

[Howard Day]

And these are issues I'm *aware* of, and can already at least partially fix. the issues with the noise are in part due to the texture on these objects, and the palette issues are due mostly to the fact that I'm still tuning the color useage. An index painting method would completely fix those issues, with the caveat that it's... not production friendly. At all. That's not a guess on my part - that's exactly how I did this sort of thing to begin with.

[eishiya]

Would using pre-optimized textures help with the noise? For example, avoiding colours that are difficult to reproduce cleanly with the final palette in the original textures, and using lighting colours that correspond to the hue shifting in the final palette. I'd imagine that would help the shaders avoid clashing dithering colours and ambiguous edges.

[Howard Day]

Absolutely correct! That's, in fact, the plan.
Update: Cleaned up and simplified greatly the textures on the rocks. Vastly improving the readability., still working on jiving the TOD color settings with the palette - it's also improved, but the sheer fact that I'm trying to do a perfectly smooth, TOD animation with light angle and hue changes makes it vastly more complex to manage. If it were easy, everyone would do it.

[Howard Day]

TOD/Explosion/Palette Animation Tests:

[Howard Day]

Zoom / straight on angle tests...

[CyberDain]

no source code ?
looks like you correcting mesh edges based on eye angle in shader