2/1/2019
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Grandia Saturn Vs Psx Differences

Grandia-Playstation/2 ports vs. Original Saturn/Dreamcast versions - posted in Retro: I've been wanting to try the first two Grandia games after hearing so much about them. I've heard a bunch of people saying bad things about the Grandia 2 PS2 port and was wondering how the ports compared to the originals, and exactly what the issue with the.

Psx

Grandia Saturn Vs Psx Differences

Nesh is right about the legacy of old game assets. In the days of Quake 3 I think it was around 800 triangles per character and the modeler had to be pretty clever to make the most out of that, especially in getting reasonably curved silhouettes from every possible angle. It's kinda hard to find good images nowadays, but Paul Steed* had an ongoing 3D character column on loonygames where he showed a lot of actual assets and explained processes. You can see here how the mesh was carefully optimized down as much as possible while maintaining a more or less curved silhouette.

The usual method was to start with a quad mesh like a very simple cylinder, push and pull vertices to get a good shape, and then decimate it down a lot. You can also see that the low number of polygons helps to keep the wireframe display clean and how you could assign skin weights down to the specific vertex level. Today with an 50-100k mesh the display gets messy and unreadable, and most of the skin weighting is done using brush based painting tools. Here, a mostly quad mesh works much better. But modelers still use triangles here and there to terminate or add detail. * I've basically learned low poly modeling from Steed's articles, it was an invaluable resource.