Introduction to Poly Art Style

So this is my first ever entry on Blogger.  My name is Conor Pendlebury.  I am currently a student at Dundalk Institute of Technology in my final year and final semester.  I am studying Computing in Games Development (Level 8). This Blog is to journal the development and process of creating Poly Art Style artifacts for the module Advanced 3D Concepts. The module aims to create these artifacts for use in our Team Project in which we are creating a game called Haven.  Haven is an adventure game for PC with the aim to teach essential social skills to children aged 8-12 years plus.

What is Poly Art Style? 

Poly Art Style or Low Poly Art Style is vast becoming a new trend in the games developing world. Poly Art Style uses a minimum amount of polygons to create world models. Rather than smoothing out the polygons, we render each of the facets of the model leaving a box like appearance to create something more abstract instead of trying to represent reality. The models created using Poly Art Style are modern, fashionable and approachable to all ages and it is also very cost efficient on our GPU's.

Every 3D modeller takes a careful approach when making assets to use the least amount of polygons whilst achieving the quality they want in that asset. With Poly Art Style, there are no anxieties about this as the asset can be created using a minimum amount of polygons and adding maps such as normal and diffuse to add a higher degree of detail.
With Poly Art Style, although it has simplistic features, lighting, texturing and shadow effects are used to create a beautifully sophisticated model.

Here are a list of games that use the new modern art style:
Toca Nature:
http://tocaboca.com/app/toca-nature/
Shelter 2:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/275100/

Why use Poly Art Style?

Poly Art Style is a modern trending art style that is distinguishable by its box like appearance.  We chose Poly Art Style because of its approachable characteristics.  As Poly Art Style is child friendly, it is suitable for our target audience of children ages 8-12 years plus.

Below are some images to describe visually what we want to achieve for Haven.  As our game is set on a tropical island,  it is important for lighting and colour to be vibrant and colourful.  With Poly Art Style, you can see from the images below, that flat colours and shadows works perfectly.   The lighting is bright and compliments the colour palette Haven uses which is soft and gentle colours.  The aim of creating our environment for Haven is to have a beautiful island capable of being used as a relaxation source.

How to create Poly Art Styled Artifacts?

• Create a basic primitive in a modelling package.
• Turn off “smoothing” to lower the polygons.
• Use “Editable Poly” to modify the shape as desired.
• Use “Extrude” to add more polygons as needed.
• Use Modular Modelling to add features to the model such as leaves etc...
• “Attach” all objects together.