Low-poly winter scene

Game Engine Works in Progress and Game Demos
#1

Updated June 1st - see post #15

http://www.traylorpark.com/files/lowpolywinter/winter2.jpg http://www.traylorpark.com/files/lowpolywinter/winter4.jpg http://www.traylorpark.com/files/lowpolywinter/winter3.jpg

May I present to you, an adorable little Nordic’ish winter scene! Done in ultra low-poly! This was a technical excersize for myself, practicing most of what I have learned in addition to solving a few new puzzles.

I do not plan to do much more with this. However, I would love to encourage anybody interested to continue this piece in any direction they desire. I would love to see this made interactive somehow. There is also room left to make more objects for the scene, such as the interior or the house.

The scene is almost BGE friendly. There are some normal issues that need to be figured out. I also wanted the glow from the lights to be billboarded somehow (instead of simply duplicated and rotated).

http://www.traylorpark.com/files/lowpolywinter/wintersolid.jpg

triangles = 1559
texture = 256x256
(however I cheated and made an additional emit map)

http://www.traylorpark.com/files/lowpolywinter/house_scene_tex.png

Click the image below to see full scene rotated. [![http://www.traylorpark.com/files/lowpolywinter/vimeolink.jpg](http://www.traylorpark.com/files/lowpolywinter/vimeolink.jpg)](http://vimeo.com/1816813)

I have also attached the packed .blend file. Feel free to break apart, inspect and use in any of your own works. If you want to use, just give credit - thas all.

I packed the textures as .psd files to maintain the ability to edit the individual layers.

Lastly, I would like to encourage anybody who is just starting out on their magnum opus game to consider the value in focusing their efforts on a smaller scene, and working out from there.

Thanks for taking a look!

Attachments

winter scene_packed.blend (484 KB)

#2

What a totally awesome little scene! Man that is sweet.

#3

Very very very nice! Love the toony style, you should definitley develop this further if you get the chance. About bilboarding the lights, try going into the texture face panel and sctivating ‘Halo’ :wink:

#4

Great work. Thanks for sharing your image and the blend.

#5

Very nice, you could try using less spot lights and one shadow lamp on the top for some shadows.

#6

Thanks for the comments!

tb1alexc - I’ll try that halo button however, interestingly, the entire scene is made up of one single texture and material… but this can be adjusted to accommodate the special glowing effect. I was not planning on doing much else with it, and instead move onto the next project (this could change if someone had a very persuasive argument other wise) however…

Cloud_GL - Actually, I didn’t use a single spot light. The lighting model consists of points lights for the lanterns and subtle rising sun, and a hemi for the overall blue. However, I did bake an AO pass and a shadow pass for the sun. I am noticing now that the effect of my AO bake was diminished during later texture adjustments. Odd, I’ll be fixing this because it was a great effect… good catch!
I am trying to keep in mind the type of lighting for this scene, and a soft wintary scene just as dawn is arriving probably would not have any really harsh shadows. (oh, that sounds really cliche)

#7

Top notch work!

It’s amazing what you can do with so few polygons. This is a great scene, and its unfortunate that you dont have any plans to use this in a game. I wait in great anticipation to see what you do next. Thanks for sharing the blend = )

Hope to see more soon!

#8

sweeeet, but in my opinion the textures look a lil distorted in up close

#9

keep it up dudette

#10

Just lovely!!

#11

Amazing, wonderfull:p

#12

VenomSeven - The primary reason why I don’t want to continue with this in a scene, is because I want to move on to more conceptual ideas that utilize the same low-poly methods.

This project was really just me scratching an itch. I find this scene to be, for some reason, nostalgic. Beyond that though, there really is no inherent substance, and that fact bothers me after a while.

I learned a lot from this project, for example: do NOT UV your entire terrain and attempt to incorporate it into your scene texture. I did my best to cover up the giant pixels ;).

I would love to see more of this kind of work coming from the 3D community and Blender community especially (considering we have the BGE and all). It really requires a good level of technical proficiency, attention to detail and teaches you about the roots of 3D and how to be more concious of your models in a realtime environment. If people are interested, when I am a bit more comfortable, I would be happy to do some video tutorials.

likestosayblah - the texture looks distorted up close because of the extremely tiny resolution. The above texture is shown in its true “physical” size; 256x256 does not give you many pixels to work with :eyebrowlift: and I HATE bilinear filtering on precise pixel work.

Thanks again for the compliments

#13

incredible! a tutorial of how you made it would be greatly appreciated by everyone I think

#14

Great job man. I would like to see your next project also.

peace,
-nick

#15

The little project that could. There is plenty of other stuff I could be working on, but I decided to do more with this little guy. This scene has become my official BGE playground.

I must admit something, the previous (ancient) version was made in low poly style, but setup to only render properly in the internal renderer. Not the BGE.

So I have now made this totally BGE happy (and uncovered some bugs in 2.49 in the process :eyebrowlift: ) Massive thanks to ideasman42 and ben2610 for the support.

Added are some fog elements and the halos properly track the camera, spent hours killing other alpha sorting issues (that originally prevented this from being BGE friendly), and finalized the lighting and over mood.

Use the Arrow Keys and A and Z to navigate the scene.

Attachments

winterscene.jpg816×555 53.5 KB

winter scene PNG packed.blend (580 KB)

#16

heh nice! looks like nintendo DS graphics :slight_smile:

#17

Wow… That is just… Gorgeous! Pixel Art+ Low poly rulez!

Your “Nordic aproach” raise up that “FairyTale” spirit. It’s so great to see this lowpoly work done so nicely today… Looks like WarCraft 3!

Please, tell us more about your tecnical background :stuck_out_tongue: (Your idea about the tutorial is great!)
Because is so hard to understand how to make this things (i mean low poly and nice texture display) really right. Your bug report thread is very interesting! (Even though i didn’t figure out what exactly was going on there, lol… : ))

You should check out the work of this guy (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMX69Priad8).
I think he is a Nordic guy tring to be Japanese.

Bye! And thank you very much for the .blend file!

#18

I love it!!

#19

may i use it in my game?

#20

may i use it in my game?

No, you can’t, all .blends are released under GPL which means that you have to sell your soul to D.R.M. (Devil, Rare, Melons?–emphasis on the Melons :D). :stuck_out_tongue: sorry, I’m having too much fun.

+peter, great work man. Still inspiring. :smiley:

peace,
-nick