Tea Monster, on 23 May 2013 - 04:25 AM, said:
I'm not an expert on the converting for 8 bit, but you should start off with a nicely textured model. It can be what is called a 'production model' which is in the 30-100k poly bracket. Remember, you are using the render, not the model. What everyone forgets is that you can use funky stuff like bump mapping, SSS and other non-real-time methods to get a nice render. So you can use global illumination, nice shaders and strong, dynamic lighting to get a really nice result. Also, you can use coloured lights to easily get 'firing' effects of the critter shooting
Ignore what certain members of the forum will tell you - both Doom and Duke3D used models as the basis for their sprites. It is the easiest, fastest way of doing this and gives the best results.
Bulls eye.
Aside from rendering, there's always the clunkyness wich occurs when you use 3d models for in game use, which are "reduced" for performance reasons and you reduce them further into sprites. I guess things are a bit different now, since character models have normal maps and +8k polys (Which you could tessellate without artifacts even further if you'd like)
Duke used 3d models while Doom and Blood used real models which were photographed in. While I think the results depend on skills, painting an animated character from scratch is a terrible slog of work - I'd rather not repeat the experience, however I'm pretty satisfied with results.
Fox, on 23 May 2013 - 01:08 PM, said:
The HUD weapons have not been created from 3D models. Wait, the RPG was.
I'm quite sure they all were
Minigunner, on 23 May 2013 - 12:40 PM, said:
- For the love of all things holy, make the texture palette-friendly. This does not mean using only the colors in the target palette, but using the general color ranges is a must.
Can't agree more, however it's a bit different when you're the developer - since you create both the art assets and palette yourself. You can plan ahead and craft the palette so it will work with the stuff you want. Just a little inclusion
Well made and rendered model still might give more or less of the "3d vibe" - you might want that or not. As 2d guy first, my idea is to blur the line - do a simpler render and just jump in and paint. All WGR2 weapons were made from pretty crude models and simple renders, the magic happened in Photoshop afterward

But this is just my way of tackling this.