Turntable#

5th Generation#

My previous attempt at targeting retro art went well past the original goal of a PS1 style model, and ended up somewhere a little bit beyond the capabilities of the PS2. I thought I’d give it a second go, but keeping a tighter clamp on the polygon count. The Megaman Legends series was a big inspiration. I took some time to really study the models from MML; when targeting low polygon counts, you really really need large, flat surfaces, with pretty close to all detail added by texture work only.

I was trying to make this model as close to “properly” as I could, as it might have been done at the time - there are plenty of more modern workflows that can make much of this easier by adapting modern tooling and simply feeding it through a pixel art filter or something similar. But I wanted to paint the textures by hand, try to fit the textures onto an appropriately small image rather than cheating, which meant carefully managing exactly what would be included on the texture, what would be mirrored or flipped, etc. In the end, I spent pretty close to the same amount of effort on this as with much more modern and detailed models, despite looking superficially very easy to do.

The little white guy was added in last minute - I needed something there to demonstrate the correct scale.

Gallery#

In retrospect, the original concept had a lot of charm of its own - I might return to that sometime.

But the idea started to evolve when I bumped up the size of the windshield portion. I felt it was an interesting look, but unbalanced the design - so I thought of adding some weight to the back, and one thing led to another until a monocycle jetbike turned into a cargo hauling snowbike.