I see a lot of people make this low poly style. I’m not saying it’s ugly, but I wonder why it’s so common. Other games (off roblox) generally have these detailed trees, but ‘good’ looking trees in roblox often, as one of my friends described it, “a dead tree that had green rocks glued on it”. I’m wondering what is making this style so popular and why there’s hasn’t been really any alternatives, beside the block-based tree.
This also applies to other things, but mostly to flora and fauna in games.
That’s actually a very good question. My theory is that low poly builds have that cartoon style to them that some developers want. It makes the game look a lot simpler. Also, there is a huge performance boost when using less detailed graphics such as low poly. So, that is also a plus. This style looks to be best for simulators and camping games. And last, personally, low poly builds look just as good (if not better) than other types of builds.
I think it’s because of all of the reasons that CarbyneUniverse mentioned. Low poly styles are also easier to make than more detailed styles (if you’re using blender). In my opinion, you can build a lot more detailed and make things look a lot better if you’re just using Roblox studio’s tools than you can with low poly. For example, Phantom Forces guns are definitely not low poly and were built in studio, and they look way better than low poly guns do.
It comes down to the cartoony style, performance, and ease of creation.
It’s easy to pull off. You don’t have to focus on details or shapes as much, so it can act like an escape door for the inexperienced because its an acceptable practice. No one will know the difference between the style being picked on purpose, or picked because of skillset limitations.
The real reason is a combination of a few reasons:
Roblox Memory Limits
Roblox games has a very small memory limit to use compared to other games - specifically for mobile use since textures - especially nice textures use up a lot of data. So if you want textures that are decent, you have to sacrifice something else to fit them in. If you wanted a huge game, that’s not an option, so many devs will cut textures and rely simply on Part colours which are Good EnoughTM in favour for accessibility to all platforms.
Cost/Time
Cutting out textures means that you don’t have to hire a texture artist. It costs studios a lot of money for every asset, from 3D modellers, to texture artists (since not every 3D modeller can make textures), and then finally with the world building. That’s three very separate jobs, and cutting out one allows more money and time resources for others.
Textures are Hard
Making decent textures is a fairly advanced skill since it can usually require 3rd party applications in addition to your 3D software. I use Clip Studio and Blender just to fully make an asset. That’s knowing two additional platforms on top of Studio, and that’s not counting buying a drawing tablet (if the artist needs one?).
Here’s a perfect real world scenario:
For Power Simulator, I was hired to make the map. I was told that the requirements were that it would be a huge map that had modest to quick PvP combat. It also had to run well on mobile. So I reasoned with the dev team that the style will be the typical “flat shading/no texture” (which is not called low poly!!)
Here’s the map. It’s huge and has over 35k of a mix of Parts and MeshParts. All textures are small particles and labels for areas and a visual map so players can see where locations are. Minimal stuff.
Check out the memory cost of each. Textures make up maybe 5% of the game but cost more than the entire map.
This isn’t Roblox’s fault though - the fact that over 35 thousand 3D objects only cost 86mb is amazing. It’s just that textures aren’t quite there yet.
So what does that leave studios to do? They can either make a high quality game that’s only for PC and sink a lot of time and money into doing so OR they can make a much quicker game for cheaper and much more accessible to a huge mobile market and chalk up the lack of textures to a “style choice” that looks Good EnoughTM.
What does the future look like? Well, Roblox is always making huge improvements to the engine, and with more options with materials and other memory improvements, maybe we’ll see better visuals.
then again, i think textures cost a lot of memory in comparison to roblox because textures are really images, and i read somewhere that the average image takes up atleast half a megabyte (i need to check) or more, so idk. given how small roblox is, 1 megabyte a picture or more is very big.
I think a large factor is that we can’t really create custom materials for mesh objects, so unless you are going for a flat “low poly” look or a hand painted look using material settings to minimize specularity, textured objects look pretty bad.
One of them is usage, low poly limits the amount of parts, so it makes your game lag-free. It also just looks clean, low poly has this cartoony style that a lot of people love. It also cuts the time of your development by a big fraction, as low poly doesn’t take as much time as to other build styles due to textures and such.
Materials add to memory, but i can see a future on realism styles or other kind of material based styles once we have the ability to do Custom Materials.
For example PBR, tho it is gonna be time consuming and i hope that once the feature arrives it doesnt lack of the perfomance needed to handle large maps with custom materials.
I think it’s because kid’s like the cartoony style and the colors of the low poly style. As everyone already mentioned, it’s also because low poly builds don’t use many parts.
There’s a few reasons. In essecence it comes down to computer science and trend.
What do I mean by that?
Well the computer science side was very nicely answered by @Aotrou
tl:dr
Much less demanding on memory
More cost effective
Textures are difficult to make
The trend explanation is a little different though (obviously)
Low-poly design (at least in use by older ‘professional’ game designers for big studios) is a style that reminds them of games they played when they were younger. I’d also point out that due to a platitude of 8-bit side scroller games being released for mobile, low-poly design looks very refreshing.
It inspires imagination. Low-poly strips away a lot of the detail really just leaving you with the what, who, and where. Having very little texture and otherwise gameplay padding forces the player to use their imagination and generally speaking games that do so stick with the user more. This is basically game-play minimalism, which is my next point.
Minimalism is a trend that has swept across pretty much any sector that uses design (so the world). One person to look at is Jony Ive who has just left Apple and was responsible for so much influence that brought this trend of minimalist design to the world. Have a look at this cover that he designed for magazine ‘Wallpaper’ back in December 2017. (on left) You might think this is a boring cover but actually it illustrates what he was all about, reducing what we use in our lives to nothing. His mission at apple was ultimately to have one device that can do all. Feel free to read the whole article here.
Low-poly design is hugely calming and allows the user to focus more on the visuals and other aspects such as music more.
All in all I think this trend is a hugely exciting one. Where will developers take it? Will it last? Currently on trend is something that we all know doesn’t last but whilst it does it is hugely entertaining. This trend will probably make a resurgence 30 years after it leaves fashion and I can’t wait to see how it is used then.
