Look-dev · one robot · five recipes
Robot Dailies
The same chunky robot in (roughly) the same scene, five ways. Each look
lives entirely in rules — a palette, a shader chain, a generator, a lighting
rig — with zero hand-crafted assets. Watch each screen for ~30s (they're live
turntables), then give a verdict per screen: keep ,
kill , or redirect
("warmer", "chunkier", "more fog", "different subject").
SCREEN 01
Voxel
Crossy Road class
Models are ASCII grids in the source — layers of text, chars →
palette. Instanced cubes, flat lambert, high warm ambient, one low sun for long
shadows, orthographic camera. Charm is proportion rules: big head, wide-set eyes.
Anchor: instanced cube batches on layer3; models stay text
grids in Lua. No textures, no meshes on disk.
SCREEN 02
PS1
haunted demo disc
Gouraud vertex lighting, 64×64 nearest-filter textures drawn in
code, vertex snapping, dense fog, one warm lamp — rendered to a 320×240 target,
upscaled with Bayer dither + 5-bit quantize. Crudeness is period-authentic.
Anchor: one vertex tweak + one post shader + low-res render
target. Textures authored as ~20 lines of drawing code each.
SCREEN 03
Low-poly
poly-art dusk
Noise terrain with flat normals and per-face color bands by
height; every prop faceted by deterministic vertex jitter; gradient sky dome;
warm low sun + violet hemisphere fill. No textures anywhere — geometry and
palette do everything.
Anchor: a mesh generator + vertex colors on layer3; the sky
is one tiny shader.
SCREEN 04
Toon
Wind Waker lite
Three-band toon ramp, inverted-hull outlines (a second back-face
pass, slightly inflated), hard blob shadows instead of shadow maps, saturated
palette, sprite clouds. Eyes are just black ovals + a white glint.
Anchor: ramp lighting shader + scaled back-face hull pass;
blob shadows are dark circles. All portable.
rotating idle · 3× nearest
beauty render · all 8 directions
SCREEN 05
Pre-rendered
headless Blender → PNG
A Python script builds the robot from beveled primitives, lights
it with a key/fill/rim rig, and Cycles renders 8 directions × 4 idle frames at
128px on transparent background. Quantized to 40 colors — the whole sheet is
23 KB. The style lives in the lighting rig, not in modeling skill.
Anchor: the engine just draws PNGs — zero runtime cost, any
2D game can wear this. New units = new script runs.
Everything here was authored and verified without hand-touching an asset: four
screens are one JS file each, screen 05 is one Blender script. Sources live in
~/a327ex/lookdev/; each style also runs fullscreen at
localhost:8326/<style>/ while the lookdev server is up.
