Low poly is beautiful. But it wasn’t always beautiful.
Back in the 90s when 3D games were just coming out, it certainly was low poly, and it certainly was not beautiful.. Apart from the nostalgia
But let’s face it, it was not very pretty to look at. Yet, today we are seeing a lot of new content pop up in super low poly, low detail environments, and yet – it looks gorgeous.
Read on as we explore the world of low poly, how we can make it beautiful and why it looks beautiful when in the past, it looked quite awful.
Further down we will take a look at how I created the featured image for this post, step by step.
Lighting
Lighting is THE most important part. All the rest is of course important as well. But, if you don’t get the lighting right, it will never look good.
Let’s take a look at how I created the featured image for this post to get an understanding of how we can approach lighting.
Recreating the featured image
This was a quick and simple scene, certainly not perfect, but should work for our test
Scene from render camera in viewport
Scene from above in viewport
Starting off, let’s add a directional light. This will be representing our sun. I’ve chosen to have the sun to our left, giving some nice back light on the mountains.
Directional Light
While this could be a style on it’s own, it’s not quite what we are after. We have the direct light from the sun, but we don’t have the contribution from the sky.
Let’s add a skydome to fill in the shadow areas. While you can just use a blue sphere, I highly recommend using a cubemap with a photographed sky, this can greatly help improve realism.
Skydome
Much better, but we are still lacking some components. While we do have the light coming from the sky.
What we need to add now is indirect light. Right now, the light rays hit the surface, and then die. We need for them to bounce off the surface and keep illuminating. 2-3 bounces is generally enough for this purpose.
This is one of the most important steps, and quite easily forgotten. You can do this in Unreal and Unity, but it needs to be baked. As this is quite an expensive process.
Indirect bounce light
That is a lot better, while subtle, it gives us a more expensive look. The indirect light helps with ironing out some of the darker, muddy areas seen in the previous picture – leaving us with a clean, fresh look.
Now only one thing left, the specular component.
Specular component (Notice the walkway)
While very subtle on the rocks, as I’ve set the specularity to be quite rough, rocks generally aren’t that shiny.
The major difference can be seen on the pathway. I decided to make the path quite shiny, it was looking a little flat in previous versions.
I am happy with this, let’s move on to Post Processing.
Post Processing
We’ve set the lighting at this point, but there are many tricks we can apply afterwards to improve our result.
Depth haze
The first thing, especially in this image, is depth queuing. We can see the bridge, but it’s not quite as readable as we would like.
What can really help here is to add some depth haze to separate the foreground from the background.
Depth haze
This is where you can also go a bit crazy for different moods. We can crank it up a lot more to have a bit more of a cloudy, dangerous feel, as if we are really high up. Feel free to play with the color of the haze as well.
High altitude, inside cloud feel
Volcanic setting
I will go with the less extreme version, but the option is definitely there for you to play around with.
Color correction
This is where you can let your imagination run wild. Color correcting the final image is a great way to set the mood and get the right “feel” to an image. And it’s ok to go crazy, as it’s very easy to just start over.
Color correction
In this case, I’d like for it to be a bit more dynamic. I’m going to warm up the highlights and cool off the shade slightly and add some vignetting.
Be careful with the saturation, a lot of great low poly stuff gets ruined by cranking the saturation too much. Especially on grass, if it turns into a green neon light, try backing off on the saturation a bit, and consider adding a bit more specular. Specularity can help with ensuring that highlights roll of to a more pleasant desaturated range instead of that screamy bright color.
Depth of Field – Defocus
A lot of low poly artists like to add quite an extreme amount of defocus, this can help with realism. It also contributes to a miniature look, which can work really well with low poly.
Let’s try adding some defocus to our mountain pass:
Mountain Pass – By Ponty
And there you have it, this is the image you saw at the top