I have recently been planning on creating a low poly castle and sharing it to the devforum community.
The castle ain’t finished, I just need some tips to convert these normal buildings to low poly first. Any tips or suggestions?“Low Poly” in itself means low polygon count, which means fewer faces. There are very few circular/cylindrical shapes in low poly styles as much so as octagons or even hexagons. Just changing the cylinders to a more octagonal-shape would probably help your build a lot.
I would also recommend using a reference image of a low poly castle for inspiration if nothing else.
You could look at this topic to create low poly. Builds in Roblox studio I would recommend you check! Out this thread. This will help you out to create that low poly builds
by low poly im going to assume your objective is less lag/ simplicity so here are a few tips
Have as thin walls as possible
if you have symmetrical windows / parts then just resize it onto both sides
Dont hollow things out
Use shapes with less sides - replace cylinders with decagons or dodecahedrons
also in relation to lag
Dont use materials
Dont have unanchored parts if not necessary
Dont union parts unless collisions are intended
Alright as you can see in that image its smooth. You need to create segments or remove its phong tag (depending on the software you use) after that i’d suggest making the castle a bit reflective because it gives off that low poly cartoony effect. I don’t recommend using a reference image but i’d look at examples to give an idea. Low poly is usually using your creativity.
Many people confuse low-poly with a cartoony style of building, when in actual fact, low-poly applies in a vast range of areas in game development.
A Low-Poly game is meant to have as little memory consumption in meshes and objects as possible, and is most certainly not a building style. The concept of low-poly meshes is used everywhere, from Fortnite to Counter Strike, so that the best performance can be achieved, and on Roblox, you can do this through changing the CollisionFidelity of meshes and unions to box (collision box is a cube round the object) or shell (basic collision box of object), however this really depends on how the player will interact with the object. Additionally, if you are creating the meshes yourself (which you aren’t right now but in the future), an object that is considered low-poly, should have the least amount of polygons upon it possible.
A cartoony game is obviously styled with less intricate detail, and is meant to be attractive in the sense of colour scheme, and simplicity. Many people confuse this with low-poly, when in actual fact, you can have an excessively high-poly cartoony game that’d achieve the exact same visual effect as a low-poly cartoony game. However, obviously we want to make sure that our games have reliable performance, so we will want to take the low poly route.
As an answer to your question, yes it is possible to create a low-poly game without blender. But it should be noted that parts have a low efficiency rate per detail, which means that for each detail in a object, it’ll waste more parts on it than a mesh or similar. Thus, my only suggestion is if you want to build it with parts, try and make sure you are using as little parts as possible. I go on more about efficiency rate per detail in my guide here:
As for converting it to low poly, I can’t properly judge whether its low poly or not, as I don’t know the part-count in that object. For all I know, it could have a million cylinders stacked upon each other. It comes down to what objects you are using, and where. For example, if there is a part that the player is very unlikely to touch, like a roof, then you can ask whether collisions are actually needed for that part, and can adjust to turn it off if they aren’t needed, saving memory.
A good key for low-poly building on Roblox is:
Materials are good to use, as long as you try to use them efficiently. However, it should be noted that there is a big gap of performance when it comes to Glass or the Forcefield material. These require a little more memory as they have custom features (distortion of light, etc) and as such you should be careful when using these. In the long run though, materials are much better than having textures on all 6 sides.
Unioning is actually alright to use, as long as you use it effectively. Roblox now have L.O.D (level of detail), so by utilizing this on a tower-union (1 union), that has box collisions, you will likely have a more efficient tower than one made out of parts. The issue with unioning is it can sometimes hog memory in areas that a mesh wouldn’t, but as long as you are careful about how this is interacted/seen in game, you should be fine.
This doesn’t necessarily boost performance, as some of those shapes might have more triangles than a normal cylinder. In the end, using Roblox’s own system is just fine, as if its not optimized enough now (which I heavily doubt), it most certainly will be in the future.
If you need any extra help to boost your game performance, I wrote a handy guide here;
