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Comment by LukeB_UK | Hacker News Reader

I've not tried voxel art yet, but I've been playing with pixel art for the past 18 months or so and the limitations are actually fun for me. It means that you have to come up with some creative solutions.

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Just like pixel art, voxel art looks great in a parallel projection where all voxels have the same visual size. But in a perspective projection, when some voxels are much closer to the camera than others, the limitations become insurmountable. It's similar to early FPS games like Doom, where enemy sprites would become very pixelated up close. The wakeup call for me was unlocking first person mode in Fez and slowly realizing that it doesn't look too good, even though the same scene would look amazing in side view.

I think the closest 3D analog to pixel art is not voxel art, but low poly art with low resolution textures. Something like this: http://orig03.deviantart.net/c602/f/2012/065/8/f/lowpoly_nak... is a restricted aesthetic in its own right, and looks great in a variety of views, but would be very hard or impossible to do with voxels. It's a shame that few people are pursuing that direction nowadays, everyone is jumping on the voxel bandwagon.

I agree re: low poly models (to achieve an aesthetic instead of for performance) being the next generation of pixel art. The Witness had a very distinct visual style where the models are almost entirely low poly but the textures are high res and lighting, post processing, etc. are all modern. There's a lot that can be done there.

Btw, does anyone have any examples of this they like? Games, old or new, that used low poly exceptionally well? Several PSX games come to mind for me...

The Witness has an amazing art style, but unfortunately it's completely out of reach for individual developers, so it's not quite analogous to pixel art. Check out Sky Rogue or Drift Stage for something that's more realistically achievable.

> But in a perspective projection, when some voxels are much closer to the camera than others

I think that's why in most of the examples in Sir_carma's portfolio are presented from a distance, where the perspective projection will have less effect.

> I think the closest 3D analog to pixel art is not voxel art, but low poly art with low resolution textures.

I disagree. Low-poly art is a vector format, so it makes more sense to me to compare it to 2D vector drawings with a small number of control points.

Voxel art has similar resolution and color limitations to pixel art, and they share a certain aesthetic that I don't see in low-poly designs.

I think that right about now is when we'll see a renaissance in low-poly artwork. I say this because I think the people who grew up playing PS1 era games are now going to do something similar to what the people who grew up playing 8-bit and 16-bit games did. See Bob Mackey's piece on this: http://www.usgamer.net/articles/back-in-1995-and-the-changin...

Orthographic projection can be used (you could bake a voxel model into a sprite sheet like Doom used). Still, even with perspective it looks "ok" IMO - but then again I am hugely biased! :)

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