I see, well whatever style it is I certainly would like to see more games use it.
Also love the style of The Deer God
But I think that's something different again.
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Flat Shaded Polys are a thing of beauty!
- Thread starter thomasmahler
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I see, well whatever style it is I certainly would like to see more games use it.
Also love the style of The Deer God
But I think that's something different again.
Alex Connolly
Member
A-10 Cuba!, my friends. Flat-shaded glory. Go ugly early.
TheCongressman1
Member
Rolling Torque.
I really like the flat shaded poly thing.
I also love low-poly models with simple, unfiltered textures rendered at high resolutions. Kind of like this guy:
(I know this isn't the same thing that the OP is talking about)
Now that's my jam. I love that look so much.
NumberThree
Member
I was wondering, if it's just screen space ambient occlusion slapped on an actual flat shaded image, would it not count as flat shaded?
More_Badass
Member
Personally I just like clean graphics, with a cohesive art style. Modern games while really good looking just end up too busy, its like a 100 hundred artists each working on his particular object or part of the level.
And i don't know whats the trend in having the screen filled with objects of the same shades of color (yes, brown shooters etc.) Look at early 3D games...different color objects, sharp clear (a little too sharp with them jaggies) graphics.
I dont really like games which pick and go retro but dont actually 'get' why some of those older games gfx worked.
A great 2D example is Shovel Knight, now that game has amazing gfx, it feels like a true retro game with attention to detail within the limitations of system ( or art style in the modern era).
And that game in the previous post....purple and yellow...purple and yellow....thats not a pretty game.
And i don't know whats the trend in having the screen filled with objects of the same shades of color (yes, brown shooters etc.) Look at early 3D games...different color objects, sharp clear (a little too sharp with them jaggies) graphics.
I dont really like games which pick and go retro but dont actually 'get' why some of those older games gfx worked.
A great 2D example is Shovel Knight, now that game has amazing gfx, it feels like a true retro game with attention to detail within the limitations of system ( or art style in the modern era).
And that game in the previous post....purple and yellow...purple and yellow....thats not a pretty game.
PassiveObserver
Member
Wasn't Another World made from polygons?
Didn't know this even existed. Will have to find and then play it on PC with PCSX2, upscaled to 1440p goodness.
I love Tobal 2 but I think it doesn't really use flat shaded polygons, just untextured ones -mostly untextured-.
It seems Tobal 1 did, but I didn't really play it
How did you play Tobal 2 and not 1? Tobal 1 was the one that got the US release and had the FF7 demo in it. And was flat shaded for sure. Tobal 2 was gouraud shading.
ichtyander
Member
Left is a polygon from the OP's screenshot, it has smooth shading. It has a gradient. Right is the same polygon, but edited to have flat shading- it's one solid color:
just to bring the point across, here are both examples with higher contrast
Chasing Aurora for the Wii U does it, pretty neat multiplayer game 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv6ppkmcUEs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv6ppkmcUEs
AW is 2d, but everything is made with polygons and then rotoscoped.
SpacePirate Ridley
Member
Is being hard as hell because we want a very clean look, so that means lot of work with the pixelart for it to look clean, and the strange figures the buildings have (twisting and curving) dont really help with the unfiltering textures.
We had to repeat the village scene just some days ago because I didnt think the edges looked clean enough (it has black lines like a drawing).
U n i o n 0015
Member
It was included as part of Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution in the U.S. Pretty awesome...you could even play with the 4 characters in VF1-polygon style.
IAmRandom31
Banned
Yeah I am a huge fan of Flat Shaded or Cell Shaded type games like DQVIII. They are the best way to get that hand drawn / 2D feel.
So many games this year with artistic looks in the 3D space. Rime and The Witness and Tearaway and The Tomorrow Children and even No Mans Sky has a great artistic look about it.
So many games this year with artistic looks in the 3D space. Rime and The Witness and Tearaway and The Tomorrow Children and even No Mans Sky has a great artistic look about it.
Chasing Aurora for the Wii U does it, pretty neat multiplayer game
It's 2D, not polygonal.
SpookyFries
Member
thank you.
SystemUser
Member
These aren't actually from the games, but from the ad campaign for EA sports about 15 years ago.
I wish the "photo realism" look/style wasn't so dominate in video games.
I wish the "photo realism" look/style wasn't so dominate in video games.
Peterthumpa
Member
Flat shaded or not, Codemaster's take on Mario Kart (F1 Race Stars) has a more simplistic, angular look that looks great.
A shame that the game bombed, for good reasons. No button for drifting was just a stupid decision for a kart racer.
A shame that the game bombed, for good reasons. No button for drifting was just a stupid decision for a kart racer.
I really, really love the hard look of flat shaded games, it's kinda too bad there's really little in this thread...
I mean even in the early era textures were use where it made sense.
There's some in Jumping Flash and Super Mario 64 after all.
I think you can even find some textures in StarFox/Starwing (man do I love this game btw).
I mean even in the early era textures were use where it made sense.
There's some in Jumping Flash and Super Mario 64 after all.
I think you can even find some textures in StarFox/Starwing (man do I love this game btw).
Übermatik;149242553 said:
Well, a few pictures get it right.
You know what got me interested in flat shaded polys? An old screensaver on my 386 from a program called After Dark. It would slowly draw procedurally generated hills/mountains comprised of nothing but flat shaded polygons. I've been looking for a clip of this on Youtube but it's pretty hard to find.
eso76
Member
With AA solutions finally being capable of near jaggy free IQ (infamous, ryse, fh2) and proper ambient occlusion yeah, flat poly art could look amazing. Very much like those gorgeous examples in the OP.
Additionally, the resources it would free (both in terms of graphics and development costs) could be spent in interesting new ways.
Yeah I hope we see more games like the examples posted in this thread in the near future
Additionally, the resources it would free (both in terms of graphics and development costs) could be spent in interesting new ways.
Yeah I hope we see more games like the examples posted in this thread in the near future
Conkerkid11
Member
The number of games in this thread that I want to play, but when I visit the website, the release date isn't listed... I'm getting very sad.
Journeywalker
Banned
The high-concept is very similar, but I'm glad the gameplay is completely different. Regardless, I'll check it out. It looks beautiful.
5 minutes in 3ds Max. Did I get it right?
I think this explains what the OP meant perfectly. In pure flat shading, the normals are not interpolated ("smoothed") and no additional ligthing models are used. However, you can still have more complex lighting techniques, while still using the surface normals as is, therefore making the polygon outlines an integral part of the picture. This is the "raw" look that makes those pictures so interesting. Actual flat shading with no extras looks terrible.
evilromero
Member
I said this years ago that there's a place for low poly art/style. I'm glad others agree because at the time the general consensus was no way.
Ingueferroque
Banned
I loved the look of mid 90's era flight sims.
(FA18 Hornet, A10 Cuba,...)
(FA18 Hornet, A10 Cuba,...)
Couldn't you do this with an emulator?
TheHollowNight
Member
I'm glad more people are appreciating flat-shading as a visual style. It's one we decided to adopt for our first game!
2 is just a step up from one. Style, focus on forms and colors. It's like painted papercraft vs. simple origami. It's timeless art. 3 and on. ..ZZZZ
Tobal 1 > Tobal 2
Tekken 3 Arcade was stunning.
I think your all confusing 'flat shading' with good lighting. The thing that stands out the best from all of the flat surface models, particularly this
is the lighting. Beautiful GI lighting. The reason it looks so good with 'flat' single colour surfaces, is that the lighting information isnt hidden with textures, It creates nice 'soft' surfaces. The two (good GI and flat surfaces) complement each other very well.
'Ambient Rendering' is a technique used by environment/character artists, to purely show geometric detail. The crudest technique is to apply an AO shader/light in the scene. Better examples use full GI (Environment/Character artist, usually dont know how to light jack, so they use the crude GI method).
This is on the nose. For a more specific example relatable to the OP, I mocked up a quick scene for comparison. Both of these renders are straight out of 3d, and feature no post work. While the image in the OP probably has a decent amount of post done to the final image.
Flat shader but with Global Illumination / Ambient Occlusion / slight Depth of Field while using only a single light source to act as sunlight:
Straight flat render, no effects, but with multiple lights to act as fills, etc (otherwise it'd be pitch black inside the cave):
These are super rough examples, but maybe it's a bit easier to understand when you have the exact same scene you can A / B side by side to see the difference.
Yes, it was.
Here's a postmortem from GDC.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014630/Classic-Game-Postmortem-OUT-OF
Source review, just awesome.
http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/
The Real Abed
Perma-Junior
Not at 1080p resolution. You'd only be getting the same 240p polygons stretched up unfiltered to 1080p. Not actual 1080p polygons.
What we want is an old school Star Fox remake with simple flat polygons with 1080p rendering resolution for the polygons. Like this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqK8hjJcc7Q
Or like this but with higher resolution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OzSvsCbqko
The first video is the PS2 version of Sega Ages 2500 Virtua Racing run in an emulator with the 720p setting turned on. The second is just the arcade version running in widescreen with the same non-filtered non-shadowed polygons. Take the high resolution of video #1 and merge it with the look of video #2 and replace Virtua Racing with a new Star Fox game designed to look and feel like the original and you have the perfect Star Fox. I'd call it NEW Star Fox.
veggiesaurus
Member
exactly. What the OP really likes is the style of normal computation that is done for each polygon independently, without interpolating between neighbouring polygons. It's entirely possible to still have per-pixel lighting and all sorts of lovely shader effects, the borders between polygons will just be extremely noticeable.