Vertex Colour Low Poly Test

[mdgunn]

Testing the look of an island in low poly style using only vertex colours from model.  NO TEXTURES.  

 

Eye Level

Edited November 11, 2018 by mdgunn
Added eye level

[aiaf]

Looks great, not using texture could give more performance maybe.

And how you do the vertex colors in blender ?

 

[mdgunn]

It's slightly tricky to figure out until you/ve done it.  I'm still not sure of the exact steps, just that I can do it eventually.

Basically in the Render tab there is a bake button and a checkbox to bake to vertex colour.  Rather than full render you should select Textures as it's just the texture colour that we want. (that you've set up previously with UV mapping).  I think you need to put the object into edit mode and maybe even select all faces (may not be necessary) and then hit the bake button.  If you go into Vertex Paint mode...or maybe even in other modes now you should see the vertexes have a colour even if the mode is not showing the texture material (if you know what I mean).

 

[aiaf]

Seem vertex painting is pretty easy to do.

Single issue is that you need some vertexes in the model to work ok.

Just made a test export to fbx and leadwerks , no more textures

 

 

[mdgunn]

Not sure I mentioned but the terrain vertex colours were done by projecting an existing texture (which had been generated by the terrain program) onto the vertexes, not painting.  If there are existing textures on objects then you can do the same to project their textures, otherwise you can paint them.

Sometimes the way the vertex colours smear can look a bit odd and it can be better just to use the low poly palettes for objects.  If the low poly palette is used by lots of objects then this very small texture shared by everything probably has virtually no hit hit on performance so no need to vertex paint.  With the terrains the texture can be much bigger and has to be unique for every terrain so vertex paint can make more sense for low poly terrain than low poly objects.

 

[aiaf]

Rgr makes sense.

Do we have the low poly island from above commited to git ?

Need more work ? from my point of view looks great we could use it

[mdgunn]

I don't think I specifically said in this forum what happened before I switched to doing mostly the doc....

I added some info here now...

 

[Thirsty Panther]

13 hours ago, aiaf said:

Seem vertex painting is pretty easy to do.

Single issue is that you need some vertexes in the model to work ok.

Just made a test export to fbx and leadwerks , no more textures

 

 

I didn't even know that vertex painting was a thing. Seems that 3D coat can do this and I don't have to worry about UVs etc.

I'm learning quiet a bit doing this project.

Thanks.

[mdgunn]

When doing vertex colours I usually still apply a super simple white material (usually the white one in Material/Simple) . I forget if this is necessary but it may be something you need to do.

If you notice the colours freaking out in leadwerks (I've seen them flip colours to a 'negative' version) it is possible to get it back.  Usually if you reassign the material or switch to another and back it sorts itself out. May be just a strange temporary editor issue rather than a permanently saved problem with the model material.

 

 

[Thirsty Panther]

A quick mock up of a Sci-Fi Machine using vertex painting and importing into Leadwerks from 3D Coat. 

So easy. Thanks mdgunn. No more trying to work out UV maps etc. Model, paint, import, job done.

This object took me about 15mins to make.

 

[mdgunn]

Good work.

Not sure how common it is to replace many objects with vertex colour. There may be down-sides in a fully populated world. It is something we can experiment with.

What sort of poly count do these objects have? 

My best guess is that the optimal approach would be to use the low_poly_palette (in the Material/Simple directory) to colour object faces and keep poly counts as low as possible and not increase them to capture colour too much.  By using low_poly_pallete on as many objects as possible reduces texture usage to almost zero and keeps speed high by sharing the same texture between many/all objects and having quite simplistic UV mapping (basically move faces to the colour you want them to have).

Another benefit of low_poly_pallete is that if you want to switch colour shades you can do this for your entire world just by updating one texture (say you wanted a less or more saturated look to everything). (You could do this with a post-process filter of course but with a low poly palette you can individually tweak around with specific mapped colours).

For terrains the gentle flow of colours that you get of vertex colouring is probably a desirable trait, whereas on objects you nay want a more defined boundary to colour changes.  Terrains are probably a best case scenario for the advantages of vertex colour .....as long as the look of it is OK with the environment we aim for. 

For objects I suspect that objects may have higher poly count than we would want if we pursue vertex colour too far but these props will help us investigate this further.