So this is my very sad, very shitty first #ScreenshotSaturday for #IridiumMoons.
It's a test image for creating PS1/Quake style #Raw3D textures by making a 3D model of a wall section in Blender, lighting it, and then rendering it in orthographic projection to a .png image.
The test here is to see how small a rivet in a wall panel can be to still be visible as such when rendered at 64 pixels per meter. (Cylinder radius 1 cm to to 6 cm.)
400% magnification for browser viewing.
I quite like the noise you can create in GIMP with the Plasma render desaturated to greyscale a lot more than the Solid Noise.
The problem is that it creates noise that is mostly white with little black, which brightens up the colors below significantly.
If I can figure out how to get the layer to have equal amounts of white and black, I think this would work well for my wall textures.
New Site Post: Graphics Style References
https://iridiummoons.com/2026/05/14/visual-style-references/
A collection of reference footage from other games that represent the overall graphics style (though not visual design aesthetic) I am aspiring to with Iridium Moons.
Pixel art indie games have been around for quite some time now and have well established themselves as a style that will almost certainly stick around for our lifetime. It's just a very practical solution to get appealing 2D graphics with very limited resources.
Low-fidelity 3D graphics are fairly new as a common thing, though. Dusk kicked in the door 8 years ago, but the style has regained widespread popularity only in the last 5 years. I think most is yet to come here.
Though I actually haven't given this much thought yet at all.
Metal Gear Solid seems like a really nice #Raw3D look with relatively realistic human proportions andhead textures that suggest just enough of a face to let the brain fill in the details. (Drawing faces is always the worst.)
But the options are endless and this is a decisions that probably should be thought well through.
Any other suggestions for realistic looking low-polygon human styles from games?
Playing around with #Blockbench for an hour, it's certainly different from what I was starting to get used to with Blender, and I don't like different.
But this really seems like it's what I should have been learning to use from the start. For my goals this seems perfect, with just the functions that I need.
For 9 out of 10 people, #Blockbench is probably not an alternative to #Blender. But for low fidelity, PS1/Quake style #Raw3D models, this not just looks like it could do the job, it actually might even be considerably more accessible. It does modeling, texturing, rigging, and animating for Godot, Unity, and Unreal Engine.
Despite the popularity with block games, it also does cylinders and spheres.
https://www.blockbench.net/gallery
I don't know about the AI code contribution policy, though.
I was wondering if 16 different wall crack decals would be enough, or if I should make another set of 16 more.
I managed to access the decal texture files of Half-Life, and that game's number of different wall cracks is a total of 2.
Just 2.
It's always the same two cracks and nobody ever notices. 😅
Panzer Dragoon II was released 30 years ago on 22nd March 1996 in Japan for the Saturn.
#1996InVideoGames #90sGames #VideoGameHistory #retrogames #retrogaming #PanzerDragoon #Raw3D #SegaSaturn #Sega
Randomly wondering how many new games use PS1/Quake style Raw3D graphics and don't aim for a horror aesthetic. 🤔
Surely one or two must exist. 😅
Yora
