i wanted to make some mobile sized characters, but im having trouble figuring out what the restrictions the DS has in terms of texture sizes and polycounts.
also, how do you pull up the poly counter for 3dsmax9?
each character is at about 400 polys
each texture page per character are 128x128
nice job man. Ur characters r actually fitting DS character limits.
Polycount per character depends on total polys in the view of camera, but generally 300-500 tris per character is ok.
Total limit of tris rendered in frame is about 2000. You can have texture size 256 but its not worth it because usually characters wont be rendered big enough on the DS screen due to its size 
so, 64 or 128 texture plus 300-500 tris, 20-24 bones per character - just right.
I have an aesthetical suggestion about ur characters though
Since DS uses Nearest Neighbour texture filtering type (just like on ur screengrabs) I would not suggest to do contrasted textures. The reason is that ur current characters will flicker a lot on real DS because they will appear smaller than on screengrabs, and all black (or other dark) lines against light skin and clothes will flicker. That one of most important things that I learned while doing graphic content for DS is to avoid high contract in textures. And most of all avoi pure white/black.
Just keep transitions smoother, avoid extreme lightness or darkness, but don`t be afraid of saturation
The girl in gren could have her hair color darker, cause it risks to fade with the face color.
sweet, thanks for the reply
so what i should do is keep the color contrast low on shaded areas and on face details like the eyes and mouth, and smooth out contrast transitions for shaded areas. thanks for the help.
also i was lurking around and saw some work from Tennis which is awesome. looks like the textures he made were treated almost like an environment as compared to the more traditional way. its seems like it saves a whole lot of texture space and decreases the texture page size as well. is this a better way to go for mobile assets?
“looks like the textures he made were treated almost like an environment as compared to the more traditional way” - sry, can`t understand the meaning 
However, his stuff is awesome, that was good to see thet indeed His textures r made on by-pixel base I think, as classical pixel art. Nice saturated colors as well. I would still reduce some contrast though, but it might be the question of taste, I just get bothered a lot by flickering graphics.
But still there is less contrast between areas in his textures than in yours. If there r darker lines, the hole texture is dark as well. Your textures on the other hand have pale or almost white large spots and black lines over them.
Wanna try to go through the challenge and do 64x64 textures eh
Tennis is a good example of how to do it so I would indeed look at his stuff. One thing you can keep in mind is that areas that have one colour (most of the arms, legs etc) don’t have to be unwrapped “properly”, you can just squeeze those uvs in on a block of skin colour for example. That will help a lot in keeping the texture res down too. I like your characters, got any more? Maybe an environment for them?
“looks like the textures he made were treated almost like an environment as compared to the more traditional way” - sry, can`t understand the meaning
sorry lol, i ment that the uvs were treated like tiles. almost all of those pieces in the texture page were square blocks. then each face was placed on one square rather then
being “properly” unwrapped.
like on this image, the skirt texture looks face mapped, and the arms were squeezed on that small patch of flesh tone. hmm… i hope that makes some kinda sense lol.
I like your characters, got any more? Maybe an environment for them?
this is for a self made game project, kinda like an update of my old college demo project, so ill be slowly making assets for it. im either going to make the monsters for the 1st level next or the environtment, havnt decided. in the mean time i want to nail these main characters down.
thanks for the help guys:thumbsup:
yes, in low poly u often have to map all face or couple of faces on to one pixel. models dont have to be “classically unwraped” because there is not enough detail and there is no bump or any other channel. Thus is the character has plain color somewhere it is better to use only one pixel for that spot
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