There are a lot of things that can make a model "dirty" or amateurish. Assuming making game-ready models here.
- Shaped in an overly blocky (amateur extruder) or overly blobby (amateur sculpter) way
- Too many polys
- Not enough polys where needed (e.g. joints)
- Not sticking to quads and good topology (unnecessary tris, ngons, etc)
- Overlapping polys that are z-fighting
- Normals not facing correct direction
- Holes in the model (non-manifold), especially if you want to later 3D print or use perfect collisions
- No UV mapping
- UV seams in bad places
- UV poorly done causing texture distortion
- Poor or inconsistent quality textures
- Materials not baked and exported
- Materials missing maps usually found on a given material e.g. specular/gloss, normal, metal/roughness, ambient occlusion, cavity, height, emit, wear, etc.
Malifer, if there's a real-world equivalent it does help to at least get the approximate scale right. But not all modelers worry about that for stand-alone props, cause resizing isn't too difficult for the end devs.
In my games I do try to use the 1 unit = 1 meter scale in Blender for all my 3D models.
capbros: Yeah this is closer to Game Boy resolution. I've been seeing a lot of fun PICO-8 art on my feed, and that system is 128x128.
I didn't give it a ton of thought beyond that. I did some mockups with 16px tiles and it felt good enough. The bigger challenge for me has come from sticking with single-screen rooms (scrolling on vanilla HTML5 isn't pretty on every device at the moment). This resolution and screen size mean designing 8x8 tile rooms. That's really only big enough for one thing in each room, like one item pickup or one platforming challenge.
It's turning out fun though. To fit everything in an 8x8 screen, the rover's basic jumps are pretty small. It can clear a 2 block high jump, or 4 blocks with double jump. The rover can just barely (almost frame perfect) clear a gap that is 6 across, which is a full screen wide at 8 tiles. The sweet spot for fun jumps turns out to be 4 across, 2 up and 5 across, 1 up. With double jump there are lots more interesting skill jumps possible.
I wanted to keep the entire game small enough so that I could start and finish it just for kicks. With just jumping and exploring as game mechanics, there's only so long the game ought to be anyway.
Limitations are fun! They lead to creativity and finished games.
Malifer, no my game won't have a separate driver and all that. I'm keeping this game super simple. But I'll release all the art and code later, so someone could add that stuff in to their own game.
Thanks surt! These are a lot of details for me to pour over.
I'm surprised at how much different the contrast is with that black background.
I especially like the vine alterations and the alt green tiles. Those simplified cave tiles look interesting, I'll play around with that. I noticed you completely changed those ugly quad orange bricks I had. I still haven't found a plain brick tile that I really like for this.
Thanks Boom Shaka, that's great feedback. The springbot sounds fun, I'll see if I can find an enemy jump arc that is fun to drive under.
I had the same thoughts about animating the bots' eyes. I also thought about animating the "eyes" on those green plants, I think it would make it feel creepy and alien. I might leave that to the polishing phase if the game comes together well.
This one pays more attention to the main light direction, and makes sure each panel's brightness and edge visibility is relative to that.
I lightened the internal sepration lines on the panels. Those fine lines wouldn't be so dark from this far away. Dark lines should be saved for clear separations of depth. Notice I kept the dark line separating the head and the body, and between the shoulders and arms. Those are important to reading the main shapes, in the same way that the black cartoon outline separates shapes from the background.
I would say on the body frames the edge shading is causing issues. You have a single pixel stripe on top/left that is brighter, and on the right/bottom it's darker. Because every panel has this one pixel border, it makes each panel look flat and facing the viewer. Kind of like old style GUI buttons, it just has the appearance of sticking out slightly instead of giving the robot form.
There are a lot of things that can make a model "dirty" or amateurish. Assuming making game-ready models here.
- Shaped in an overly blocky (amateur extruder) or overly blobby (amateur sculpter) way
- Too many polys
- Not enough polys where needed (e.g. joints)
- Not sticking to quads and good topology (unnecessary tris, ngons, etc)
- Overlapping polys that are z-fighting
- Normals not facing correct direction
- Holes in the model (non-manifold), especially if you want to later 3D print or use perfect collisions
- No UV mapping
- UV seams in bad places
- UV poorly done causing texture distortion
- Poor or inconsistent quality textures
- Materials not baked and exported
- Materials missing maps usually found on a given material e.g. specular/gloss, normal, metal/roughness, ambient occlusion, cavity, height, emit, wear, etc.
- Missing armature
- Poor armature (bad deformations when bending)
- Missing animations
- Poor animations (not enough anticipation, acceleration, follow-through, squash and stretch, etc)
- Scale, Rotate, Translate isn't applied (should be at original values 1,0,0) for all objects
Malifer, if there's a real-world equivalent it does help to at least get the approximate scale right. But not all modelers worry about that for stand-alone props, cause resizing isn't too difficult for the end devs.
In my games I do try to use the 1 unit = 1 meter scale in Blender for all my 3D models.
capbros: Yeah this is closer to Game Boy resolution. I've been seeing a lot of fun PICO-8 art on my feed, and that system is 128x128.
I didn't give it a ton of thought beyond that. I did some mockups with 16px tiles and it felt good enough. The bigger challenge for me has come from sticking with single-screen rooms (scrolling on vanilla HTML5 isn't pretty on every device at the moment). This resolution and screen size mean designing 8x8 tile rooms. That's really only big enough for one thing in each room, like one item pickup or one platforming challenge.
It's turning out fun though. To fit everything in an 8x8 screen, the rover's basic jumps are pretty small. It can clear a 2 block high jump, or 4 blocks with double jump. The rover can just barely (almost frame perfect) clear a gap that is 6 across, which is a full screen wide at 8 tiles. The sweet spot for fun jumps turns out to be 4 across, 2 up and 5 across, 1 up. With double jump there are lots more interesting skill jumps possible.
I wanted to keep the entire game small enough so that I could start and finish it just for kicks. With just jumping and exploring as game mechanics, there's only so long the game ought to be anyway.
Limitations are fun! They lead to creativity and finished games.
Malifer, no my game won't have a separate driver and all that. I'm keeping this game super simple. But I'll release all the art and code later, so someone could add that stuff in to their own game.
Thanks surt! These are a lot of details for me to pour over.
I'm surprised at how much different the contrast is with that black background.
I especially like the vine alterations and the alt green tiles. Those simplified cave tiles look interesting, I'll play around with that. I noticed you completely changed those ugly quad orange bricks I had. I still haven't found a plain brick tile that I really like for this.
Thanks Boom Shaka, that's great feedback. The springbot sounds fun, I'll see if I can find an enemy jump arc that is fun to drive under.
I had the same thoughts about animating the bots' eyes. I also thought about animating the "eyes" on those green plants, I think it would make it feel creepy and alien. I might leave that to the polishing phase if the game comes together well.
Here, some suggestions.
This one pays more attention to the main light direction, and makes sure each panel's brightness and edge visibility is relative to that.
I lightened the internal sepration lines on the panels. Those fine lines wouldn't be so dark from this far away. Dark lines should be saved for clear separations of depth. Notice I kept the dark line separating the head and the body, and between the shoulders and arms. Those are important to reading the main shapes, in the same way that the black cartoon outline separates shapes from the background.
I would say on the body frames the edge shading is causing issues. You have a single pixel stripe on top/left that is brighter, and on the right/bottom it's darker. Because every panel has this one pixel border, it makes each panel look flat and facing the viewer. Kind of like old style GUI buttons, it just has the appearance of sticking out slightly instead of giving the robot form.
I've moved a few of them to here: http://clintbellanger.net/articles/
This is an out-dated tutorial, but the basics still apply:
http://flarerpg.org/tutorials/cave_tiles/
In essence:
- Start with a square grid, fully UV unwrap it to have a seamless texture
- Move the tile edges into a fixed cross-sectional shape, that each tile will snap to
- Subdivide and then displace the inner vertices randomly (using Noise, Fractal, etc)
- Apply seamless texture
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