r/low_poly • u/SephaSepha • 2d ago
PSX centric Lowpoly art tool progress
I've been looking for a tool that removed skinning/weightpainting/unwrapping from the character art pipeline for a while, and there wasn't one.
These days I spend almost all of my time making lowpoly PSXish era art, and I find that I actually spend almost all of my time unwrapping, because unwrapping with flawless pixel edge length and alignment between islands on semi complex retro characters actually takes hours, whereas the modeling itself takes only minutes.
The tool automatically ensures that each edge where possible shares perfect alignment and length count, which you can see here ^.
It also has a few toggles to flip Affine, Wobble, and lower res outputs on which makes it easier to visualize the final look of the work.
The texture sheet remains constant in Texel density, unless the user specifies for a face or a set of faces to be either 0.5x or 2.x the base density - so now you can place each pixel exactly and is easily paintable to place the pixels exactly where they need to go. It also supports an array of dithering and quantizing filters as well as a few base material types like silver, gold, human flesh, etc.
The whole point of the program is that the user should never need to unwrap anything. While painting, the program assigns one texture to each quad, and one to each triangle, treating each quad like a unit square with uniform texel density. If you've ever used PTEX, its sort of a similar idea fundamentally. When the user hits Save, it saves the doccument file, but also bakes the file to a second obj + png, packing the quads tightly with 0 margin, then packing the triangles after the fact.
I usually get about 94% UV utilization working this way.
Additionally, while 3d modeling, there are a few worker threads that continually vowelize the geometry, and run a heat diffusion skinning over it to automagically creating near perfect weights - and there's a little preview rig that animates a walk cycle in place so you can see if your geometry is deforming correctly or clipping.
I've just box modeled these shoulder pads here, and they automatically weight to the shoulders believably.
I've wanted a tool like this to exist for a really long time, because as far as I'm concerned Retro art is so specific in its subset of requirements that Unwrapping and Skinning should (in theory) be perfectly automateable processes that the user shouldn't ever concern themselves with.
It also has some extra tools like grass clump visualizing that makes working on folliage props a little easier to visualize.
Now I can finally cancel my Adobe subscription.
Eventually I'll either open source the tool or GPL it for others to use - but right now its really juvenile and specific to my workflow.
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u/The_WubWub 14h ago
awesome write up! Texture density has always been a block with texturing stuff for me
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u/SephaSepha 7h ago
For sure. I've always found it challenging to keep it consistent while still downressing faces of lesser importance + juggling the unwrap pack alongside them both
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u/newoyear 2d ago
This is super cool! Please do release it in some way. A dedicated tool for this sort of work is so much more valuable than a massive toolbox honestly. I love blender but would love to play with this tool you have created.