Hi,
I know it's not related to voxels only. I started looking into them and found some cool works:
The whole scene looks warm and attractive, what makes it look that way? I know it's not geometry. What post-processing effects could have been used? Could ambient occlusion have been included?
How could it be achieved real-time in-game? I can see a lot of really bad looking voxel examples but I don't understand what is missing:
I think the colors. They are chosen to make such warm feeling. That is the same if you look landscape photos from usual camera and by a professional photographer.
This doesnt mean that some pictures are worse, but the style is different. Look at food photos for commercials, colors there are not "real" but somekind "tale" style. The 4th picture is more natural and realistic (but realistic doesnt mean attractive). Modern games are using often such "hot" colors.
2d achieves this result easier. You just need the right palette.
The top pictures shows coarsly seperated colors and shading gives depth.
Tho bottom picture uses textures with high contrast, producing high frequency details and fighting the more important low frequency shading.
Everything gets a mess. Number one mistake of game graphics for decades and still happening too often.
Use textures with low contrast and distinct shapes to prevent it :)
What else could there be used in better looking ones? It seems that ambient occlusion is used and plays a huge role.
Global Illumination is beautiful, and AO can be used as an approximisation, but it's not really the point.
E. g. The Wittness looks stunning and does not use AO, only baked radiosity.
One detail often unknown is colored shading. I don't know any right term, but what i mean is this:
Look at the yellow roof in the middle picture, in shadow it is orange.
If you make a gradient from yellow straight to black, the middle looks ugly.
If you go yellow -> orange -> dark red -> black it keeps vibrant even in shadow.
You could use this to make a very color vibrant game if that's your goal.
OA can surely improve things, but it remains mainly art not techinques to make things visually outstanding.
The top pictures shows coarsly seperated colors and shading gives depth.
Tho bottom picture uses textures with high contrast, producing high frequency details and fighting the more important low frequency shading.
Everything gets a mess. Number one mistake of game graphics for decades and still happening too often.
Use textures with low contrast and distinct shapes to prevent it
Yeah, it's the textures, Minecraft has some really busy & grainy 8-bit textures, while the above screenshots have little or no textures, some just use colored blocks.
Yeah, it's the textures, Minecraft has some really busy & grainy 8-bit textures, while the above screenshots have little or no textures, some just use colored blocks.
I think thats exactly it, you can find mods that have a similar effect on minecraft aswell. that and the AO aswell. They look nicer and "warm" because it's clean, flat colors as opposed to grainy/grundgy textures
the first image is fuzzy (AA at low rez perhaps?).
the second two are good. hi rez. doesn't seem to be textures, just high rez small solid voxels. and good lighting with some shadows.
the last image is simply too low rez, and thus pixelated.
I think the first image has some depth of field effect going on, but even without it, it's still be 'prettier' than the minecraft one.
