Technique · Fields
Low-poly forest
A faceted landscape of triangular mountains and trees with crystal, diamond-scaled, pom-pom and bare crowns, in a warm palette.
Low-poly forest is a field drawn for every pixel by the graphics chip. Every piece on Synapse Drip is made from a recipe that layers techniques like this one, and you can change any of it in the Studio.
Good to know
- The Utah teapot, modelled by Martin Newell in 1975 from a few dozen curved patches, became a standard test object in computer graphics.
- A flat-shaded triangle has one colour; shading by facet rather than by smooth gradient gives the crystalline look of low-poly art.
- Japanese woodblock printers and mid-century poster designers both reduced hills to a few flat tones.
- Low-poly modelling grew out of real limits: early 3D games could draw only a few hundred to about a thousand polygons per character, so artists learned to suggest a form with as few as they could.
The mathematics
- Three points define a plane, so a triangle is always flat: that is why triangles are the unit of real-time graphics.
- The crystal crowns are Voronoi tilings: each facet is the set of points closest to one random seed, and its shade comes from the dot product of a random normal with the light direction.
- The skyline of 5 overlapping triangular mountains is the upper envelope of their profiles: at each column, the highest of the 5 lines.
- For a triangulated sphere, Euler's formula V - E + F = 2 with E = 3F / 2 gives F = 2V - 4: twelve vertices make twenty faces, the icosahedron.
In art
- Cubist painters of the 1900s broke objects into planes; low-poly art does it for other reasons, but the look is related.
- Games that once used faceted worlds because of hardware limits later adopted them as a style by choice.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree