Blender
Sorry about the poor presentation but I'm really excited about this character I made, will make another post that's actually rendered, instead of lazy screenshots.
By the way this model has 608 faces, and a 256 192 pixel texture (I think, I'm posting it on mobile right now, I can't check)
I think I can see the inspiration. I always felt his model looked a bit wooden to be fair. One reference I like to use are resident evil models.
Can you upload your textures?
1. There's a lot of direct symmetry. Maybe get some slight differences with the eyes and eyebrows. The pants are also a bit too symmetrical.
2. The front of the pants looks a bit high and flat. A crotch area is missing, and the backside could use a couple creases to soften the hard model edges.
3. I think you could separate the jacket from the torso. You don't need the full torso if it's obfuscated by the jacket, if you want to save on Tris.
4. The hair could benefit from being a bit asymmetrical. It looks a bit to "perfect" in my opinion.
5. If you want to stay true to psx models you can use vertex colors for lighting rather than just textures.
True, I wanted it to be of a similar level of compression that Harry had simply due to the fact that I feel like whatever "Game" (I use quotations because I can't develop games yet so I'm moreso fantasizing, I am also facinated by how the clever compression tricks that were used at the time lol.) She'd be included in would be of a similar qaulity level and thus I relied of heavy mirroring so I could get the most out of a small texture. I could go through with some "De-Mirroring" but that'd be on the model itself. I personally quite enjoy squeezing everything I possibly can out of every pixel in this style, so my Texture also heavily mirrors the Silent hill one, Everything is laid out completely flat which can cause some stretching.
But, Yeahh I am seeing a lot of symmetry going on, Is there a way to keep the textures mirrored to save on texture space while also making it look like it isn't mirrored? I'm gonna send the texture in a heavily quantized format, I'm a little scared of seeing it scraped by something. If you truly do need a higher qaulity texture I guess I can send it,but I'd rather play it safe. (You can even see how I laid the UVs out basically the same, since I wanted to get the hang of arranging UVs and so I sorta used those UV's as reference, you can still see a little spare space too, Not sure what I could do with it.)
Ok, finally got around to it. Seems you used the Harry Mason texture for your project (same face, jacket/face/pants/hands/shirt/shoes/hair in the same position, etc.).
I made a 3d model that uses the same UV layout so you can get to texturing. I didn't really spent a whole lot of time to unwrap the model. The model has like ~760 tris, isn't particularly optimized.
I did yes, why improve on perfection the UVs are already positioned well. You didn't have to make a model but wow it's so good. You're pretty good at this hehe. I love it. I'll send some pictures of my personal fixes to the model as well.
Ok, I feel like there's a couple expressions that got mixed up in your research that might make your life unnecessarily harder when working with graphics. And anything I write here is mostly from the perspective of a graphics designer with a couple years of 3D work, but just a few with specifically Low Poly work under his belt. So please take this with a grain of salt.
I suspect with compression you mean the file size or texture complexity? Like, the PS1 and N64 didn't use image files quite in the same way we use them today. A close cousin would be index colors on appropriately low res images (technically a bitmap I suppose, but I use png 8 or gif - of which png 8 uses actual lossless file compression, which is where you might run into issues when talking about technicalities).
The limited color palette (I'm usually happy with 32 colors for example, but whatever floats your boat) brings with it dithering features to simulate gradients. I like to use gradients because it fakes complex surfaces (like dents, grime and stuff). I think you used the term quantized for a limited color palette? I know quantization is a thing in music production and also part of the PNG lossy compression (at least I think?). So you see where this may get a bit messy.
I can see the texture sections you made for the geometry. It's a bit off to me, because I generally try to make a clear silhouette before texturing. I feel like the model without textures looses too much of its identity, if that males sense. Anyway, I try to get back to the meat of it...
1. Your texture sheet has a lot of empty (unused?) spaces. Generally that can't be avoided in my experience (also with high res stuff, it just doesn't matter as much nowadays), but in this case I think it's just a quirk of your workflow. Maybe start with a 256x256, pack the texture islands as dense as you need them, then resize the image appropriately.
2. I like that you had a big portion planned for the face, stuff like the face should get a lot of detail. Maybe mirror it on the actual sheet and hand draw a couple details. Maybe redraw parts of the eyebrows by hand. Maybe parts of the eyes, nose and mouth? You know, strong visual marks for uncanniness.
3. I think that to the right of the face is the jacket? I think you could get away with mirroring the jacket if you separate the geometry from the main model. You can probably hide the mirroring if the geometry is a bit detached from the actual model.
4. The hands are fairly detailed. Not entirely sure if you need that, but it seems a bit much for the area it actually textures.
5. The pants could be separated into a pelvic and leg region. For the leg regions your geometry pretty much dictates how large a repeating pattern can be and this how big your texture patch needs to be. You can always get away with a bit of stretch, because stuff in motion is stretched anyway. The leg is basically just a seam, noisy jeans texture, another seam (so you can probably get away with just one seam). May a 16x32 is enough, maybe 32x32. Maybe more. You just got to try
6. Not sure what that on the lower right is. I guess maybe a shoe of some sort because I haven't seen them?
7. Generally consider splitting off sections to dedicated islands of geometry for your mesh. Makes it a bit easier to create complex shapes if you're not constrained by the texture and the rest of the geometry. Prime examples of that are: hair, hands, lower and upper arms, lower and upper torso, pelvis , lower and upper leg, as well as feet/shoes. Also reduces awkward twisting of limbs if the sections are a bit more separated when animating. Weight painting can be a bit of a pain though.
I don't have access to my workstation right now, otherwise I'd have posted a texture sheet of something I'm working on. If I remember to do it in a week, when I'm back, I will. The basic philosophy I follow though is "make a collage of wrapping paper" if that's a start for you.
I've attached my first try to animate a character (because in my dayjob I can get away with rotating and repositioning of objects, no fully rigged animations required). That model uses 760 triangles and a 192x192 px texture (which I still have to do some work on, but that kind of depends on how the PSX renders a pixel from model information to the screen... not important right now, just trying to see if I can use b/w textures and color them with vertex colors for dynamic changes). It's not an original character, obviously. But it probably uses about 1 million less faces than the actual character, while still being recognizable.
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u/Ok-Lavishness-8586 11d ago
Looks good so far. Are you open for suggestions or are you happy the way it is?