The model for coins in Super Mario Odyssey is simpler than in Super Mario Galaxy
Despite looking much more detailed, the model for the coins in Super Mario Odyssey is actually 65% simpler than the one used in Super Mario Galaxy, due to taking advantage of modern rendering techniques. Details in image. pic.twitter.com/RHbJ3hpugL
— Supper Mario Broth (@MarioBrothBlog) March 15, 2023
by DrinkMoreCodeMore
22 Comments
That’s actually kind of incredible. I learned how to model Nurbs a decade ago, and it was such a precarious process, where shifting a single point would completely warp the model.
That said, I think there was also the expectation that raising the model’s complexity will somehow raise the quality, when all it does is make more things that can go wrong.
I’m surprised they didn’t use normals and specular maps in Galaxy. There was probably a good reason but those techniques existed back then and were used in games.
I love this account
Isn’t the thumbnail pic the rabbit ear Mario power up from 6 Golden Coins?
Those were a much “simpler” time
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I’ll leave
Nice! It’s really amazing how much normal maps can do to increase detail while increasing performance.
Ok
Plus coins serve a much better purpose in Odyssey.
I never felt more excited to collect coins in a Mario game.
I dont get it normal maps already existed when galaxy released oO
“Simpler” is a bit odd because hi-fidelity normal maps (usually with less compression available than texture images) is arguably a lot less simple than just more polys. It is visually less simple and probably more intensive on a GPU.
It is interesting they were able to mitigate the normal map with such few polys, though. And it looks way better.
Wow nintendo this is unacceptable. Now I’m not going to play my switch again until Tears of the Kingdom comes out.
Confused why he called the one on the coin the “rectangle design.” lol
Very interesting! Light reflections have gotten way better in the last decade from what I can notice, and it’s neat that lighting is used to make the coins look good.
Looks like when the first coin was made, the dude was paid hourly, and the second one, dude was paid per job. lmao
its really cool that the newer coin can get more detail on the inside of the model using this technique. Like, look at the inside of the raised edge along the outside, its able to be completely smooth in comparison to the Galaxy coin which has to look less smooth along the edge because it’s limited by the characteristic of the geometry.
This is a good example of, work smarter, not harder.
dis toght me load xD
Neat!
What the heck? I’m pretty sure the Wii could handle normal mapping. Interesting that they opted to model the whole coin, rather than using a texture. I’m guessing there was probably a memory or gpu performance advantage in not using shader effects.
As someone who loves 3D modelling and just how “graphics work” for things like games and CG animation in general I’m impressed whenever someone can make something look better using less resources purely thanks to improvements in lighting and texturing. Seeing Nintendo games actually use bump-mapping on their models for the first time made me feel like Nintendo was finally in the same gen as its competitors even if they showed up a little late.
Ngl, that’s neat.
The website from which the models are from is a website of **user contributed** models. They are not models ripped from the game, so it doesn’t make sense to use them to evaluate what was in the game.