What comes around
May 15, 2014 | 22:36 | Written by: snake911
The animated gif you see above was referenced on this week’s episode of the Retronauts podcast.
The creator designed a low polygon bowl of ramen. A style of design not seen since the 32-bit era. I believe it was Chris Kohler from the podcast that referenced the gif and noted that this generation of gaming (PS4/XBO/WiiU) will probably start designing games with this type of style just as the previous generation (PS3/X360/Wii) used the pixel art style that mimicked 8-bit and 16-bit games. I hope this is true because I love that kind of aesthetic.
During the 32-bit era, this was the gen where game artists were moving away from 2D designs to polygonal 3D designs. And due to the fact that console CPU and graphics rendering were new to polygon generating, the poly counts were low. Well, based on todays standards anyways where they are now able to generate 1.6 billion polygons per second with the PS4 while the PS1 was a paltry 360,000 polygons per second.
Attention to detail were neat to checkout during the 32-bit generation. A lot of creativity was probably poured into 3D designs because, at the time, they were freed from the shackles of expensive manufacturing costs for cartridges that included chips and boards to a simple press of a CD. This allowed them to go wild with art aspects. Also add that they now had a wealth of free space to deal with. 600 megabytes compared to ~8-15 megabytes for 16-bit cartridges.
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