Art Spotlight: Low-Poly Island

Simon Kratz describes how he carefully decimates a Blender model to achieve a perfect low-poly look.

My name is Simon Kratz and I’m a 3D/VFX artist located in Munich, Germany. I’m working at Klonk Games, a game dev studio me and 9 of my colleagues founded after 3 years of studying together.

Since founding our studio we’ve been using Blender for almost every task in the daily artist work. To start commercial game development we didn’t have the budget to continue working with 3ds Max, which we had learned during our study. We knew Blender was a free alternative and set a goal for ourselves: Learn the basics within one week. So to get comfortable with the Blender toolset I decided to start a little project: the Low Poly Island.

I didn’t actually do much conceptual work or planning for this scene. For our main game project Shift Happens that we just started at that time we had a similar art style in mind so I just wanted to practice this style a bit and see what could be done within one week.