Personal project: Karma

"Karma" was a small personal project intended as a texture & rendering study for the PlayStation game Vagrant Story (2000). I've always loved this particular era in game rendering, where modern techniques and classic pixel art existed side-by-side. This was more of a technical test for myself than an artistic one, but I really enjoyed it.

The main goals of this test were to

• Master the Vagrant Story texturing style
• Get convincing retro results using a modular building set
• Figure out a workflow to use vertex colors for lighting in Unity

Overall, I was really happy with the results, and I'd love to return to this style someday.

Texture atlases were designed roughly around PS1 technical assumptions, with each block limited to (roughly) a 16-color palette. Texel density was (mostly) consistent at 32 pixels for every worldspace meter.

I built the modular kit in Blender as proof of concept while iterating on the textures. Since the style is so low-poly, it was pretty painless to go back and forth making adjustments. It was also an easy way to get familiar in Blender while transitioning from Maya.

The final test scenes. While it wasn't really built to have jaw-dropping key views, I'm happy with how it's convincing as an "I clipped outside the walls in Vagrant Story and found an unused area" demo.