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i wanna dip my toe into 3d gamedev but its hard because i'm so comfortable with 2d stuff that it feels silly trying to learn so much new shit 🙃 like, i could just continue making 2d games, itd be fine

@eniko I kinda wish I didn’t love 3D so much - always have, right back to when it was total garbage like Driller and Starstrike in the 80’s. Everything takes so much longer.

@sinbad yeah. but i feel like there's caps on how immersive a 2D experience can be

@eniko I guess at least players seem open to more stripped down aesthetics like PS1 or boomer shooters. It’s not something I’m really into but it’s more manageable (especially for someone with 2D skills and a history in raycasters)

@sinbad yeah i've considered 3D + sprites? but that still involves making 3D models and animating them then prerendering into sprites cause otherwise oof ouch

The Seven Voyages Of Steve

@eniko Maybe? You could *probably* get away with 4 directions for characters, same as Zelda style 2D, I think Wolf3D did that (Doom had 8 I think which yeah starts to get cumbersome)

@sinbad @eniko honestly at that point, I'd seriously consider just hopping to PS1 aesthetic. A lot of your skills transfer (PS1 texturing is functionally pixel art), and if you just learn basic 3D animation it's easy to handle the level of animation required by the aesthetic.

You basically gotta do all that anyways for sprites 3D. Might as well skip the "and then render back down to 2D" and just do the sprite-style 3D enviro + PS1 folks tooling around in it or whatever.

@glassbottommeg @sinbad yeah im thinking of trying that route. i've just not managed to model and texture and rig a character im happy with yet lmao

@eniko are you trying that PicoCAD that just came out? I keep seeing great stuff people are making

@britown i havent tried it yet. i dont think it has very good export options though, being made in pico 8 >_>

@eniko oh lame 😕 would've assumed it would plop out an obj or whatever

@britown pico 8 cant manipulate the file system at all sooooooo...

EDIT: just looked it up to make sure and apparently it *can* export somehow? not sure how the creator managed that O_o

@britown @eniko The description page says it can export to OBJ/MTL.

And pico-8 can write files to the disk (for logs, usually), with pretty stringent limitations (fixed path and file extension iirc), I guess that's how picocad manages to do it.

@0xSim @britown oh yeah. forgot about printh. dunno how it's loading or importing files though

@eniko @britown Yep, and I think it also works by drag-n-dropping a file on the pico-8 window when the "game" is running.

edit: ah yes it's on the wiki 😅 the official docs are pretty dry about it

@eniko @glassbottommeg I do think especially when it comes to characters, pixel art and low poly modeling are hugely different skills. There’s much more overlap in pixel art and environmental texturing (big flat areas) but getting a low poly character shape looking good? Tricky stuff. I’d be sticking to robots and spaceships if going that route 😄

@sinbad @eniko @glassbottommeg looking at existing models for reference has been a good help for me for sure