So today…
– I pondered and experimented on a way to implement pixel art style graphics in 3d. I think Fez did it really well but I don’t want to copy it. I need to go back play it again and see how they handled camera angles and rotation.
– The idea is to have pixel art in a VR environment with freedom of head look. It may actually be impossible to get it to look good but it’s worth a try.
– Cube maps projected on 3d mesh for tiles? 2D camera facing sprites for everything else?
– Must experiment more. The low resolution in the current VR dev kit isn’t very nice to already pixelated images. There’s bound to be a sweet spot for the character to screen size ratio. It may end up being a non-problem considering the consumer release will have the higher resolution displays.
– Next job is to create a mock up of the current scene and replace all the visuals with the pixel art versions and see if it works at all. Otherwise a completely different style is required.
Simple voxel test
– After creating some simple voxels to test the visuals, there’s no visual win using them for any type of character sprites. Next I’ll need to test the 3d world tiles, there should be much more of an effect there considering they actually change camera angle more.
Dumping some test models into the scene to test a more enclosed feeling
– Without any kind of visual coherency, I tried adding a bit of clutter to the scene to see if it improves the feel. It does… and it’s certainly something that would work regardless of the final art style…. will revisit later.
– Now to build a more complete and simple level to test everything working together….tomorrow
-Ryan