The Rule Of Polygons

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Skip to the end for: a low poly terrain tutorial!

Why does low poly art look cool?

Low poly art is simpler than a child's drawing.

Or so it would seem.

Low poly art is a delicate balance. A balance between complexity and simplicity.

How?

Look at the image above.

The trees are made of very simple shapes. Squares and triangles. Can't get much simpler than that.

The complexity is in the lighting, the shadows, and the materials. I even added detail with a bit of noise, just like I would in a photorealistic render.

And it's lit with an area light—fairly realistic lighting.

The combination of these 2 things—simple shapes with realistic shading—is what makes low-poly art so appealing.

The other important factor is scale.

Polygon size versus object size.

I call this the Rule Of Polygons. 

The Rule Of Polygons says that an object's polygons must be roughly proportional to the size of the object.

(Details are a bit of an exception though—think of details as separate from the main object.)

For example, if I had a tree, and I wanted a smaller tree, I could simply scale it down.

But that would look wrong in the scene.

If 'treetop' polygons are roughly a certain size, it would not make sense for other 'treetop' polygons to be a different size.

A better way to do this would be to model a new, smaller tree, based off the large one, but proportionately smaller.

Here's an example:

The scaled version of the tree looks—wrong. It throws of the scale of the scene.

But when I rebuild the tree from scratch and use polygons of the right size, it matches much better. (I didn't redo the trunk, since it's exactly the same as the original.)

A bit more effort, but a 100% better result. Well worth it.

Try it out sometime.

I've been playing with low poly a lot recently—it's quite fun. I developed a system for making low poly terrain with Geometry Nodes.

The short video (7m) below ↓ will show you how to build it. Give it a go!

Tutorials

In this 7m video you'll learn how to build my low-poly terrain generator from scratch—it's easier than it sounds.

Here's an unrelated tutorial by Polygon Runway. He shows you how to make some animated candles—and they're awesome!

News

• The Blender 3.4 splash screen files include some nice (instructive) extras—check those out to have your mind melted by vast networks of Geometry Nodes.

• The Sample UV Surface demo file is neat too.

Thanks for reading, and have a great week!

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