The Polygonal Evolution of Iconic PlayStation Characters

The Polygonal Evolution of Iconic PlayStation Characters

The official PlayStation Blogs have been updated with a new post by Sony that aims to share the evolution of 5 iconic characters with the community.

Kazuya Mishima, Tekken Series

  • PlayStation: ~ 100 polygons
  • PlayStation 4: 2800 for the head (6000 including hair and inside mouth)

“You can see a stark difference between the model for Kazuya in Tekken 1 and that of Tekken 7,” says Michael Murray, producer of Tekken at Bandai Namco “As a character, Kazuya Mishima doesn’t really speak a lot in the game, and much of the character is portrayed in his eyes and facial expression. Not only that, but the added detail in the Tekken 7 model lets us more accurately portray the character by giving a sense of age, and also the scars on his face that help tell the story of the character.”

Kratos, God of War Series

  • PS2: 1200
  • PS3: 5700
  • PS4: 32000

“The Kratos model for the new God of War was created from scratch with the intent of pushing the technology of what we have done before at Santa Monica Studio,” says Rafael Grassetti, art director at Santa Monica Studios. “The geometry was made with a higher density from most of the games because we were going to explore things like muscle deformation systems underneath the skin and we needed enough geometry to drive that information.

“Kratos from God of War 2 (PS2) had 5,700 polygons for his entire body, 1,200 of those for the face and used five textures. Kratos from God of War 3 (PS3) had 64,000 polygons for his entire body, 5,700 for the face, which was already a big improvement. But compared to what we can do with the PS4 system, it is still not enough for what we wanted to accomplish. The Kratos for God of War (PS4) has 80,000 polygons in total, with 32,000 for the face – 30x what we had for the PS2 models.

“That allowed us to create systems that could deform that geometry and achieve a level of detail for the muscles that we couldn’t do before. On top of that, we used a combination of layers of normal maps for smaller wrinkles and pores that we weren’t able to use in past generations because of the limitation of textures. Kratos (PS4) uses over 140 textures.”

Check out the entire blog post on the PlayStation site to learn more and see the evolution of Rathalos and Palico from the Monster Hunter series as well as Sie Daniel Fortesque from Medievil.




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