Difference between revisions of "Polycount:About"

Latest revision as of 12:00, 2 April 2024

Polycount is a videogame artist community where hobbyists and professionals alike hone their craft. Notoriously honest in critique, our community of artists have been posting, collaborating, and helping each other since 1997. If you’re looking to improve your skillset, learn new tricks or techniques, or just share an opinion on videogame art, come visit us at https://www.polycount.com/.

The Polycount Crew

History

Created, maintained, and contributed to by professional videogame artists, Polycount was founded by Andrew ‘r13′ Risch on April 1st, 1998 along with his good friend Ted ‘bearkub’ Shockey. It was originally known as the Q2PMP, as its first purpose was to store and showcase Quake 2 plug-in player models. Q2PMP was built into a considerable archive of user-made player models, at a time when there were several sites vying to serve custom player models to Quake 2 players.

Competition did not remain constant, however. With games like Quake 2, Half-Life, and Unreal Tournament supporting custom player models, the creation of and demand for player models grew rapidly. But not all sites could keep up with the demand. R13 remembers that a few webmasters of competing sites of the era (such as the 3D Bodyshop) gave up, they handed him their entire site backed up on a CD.

The Q2PMP prospered and grew, attracting a steady following of hobbyists and artists who enjoyed creating custom player models. Early Polycount fixtures included AlphaWolf, BurntKona, Gwot, Malekyth, Rorshach, JatotenRascot, LuppyLuptonium, Shatter, Shine, Sumaleth, Stecki, and Wrath, just to name a few. This era was for some the golden age of plug-in player models, since Quake 2 provided a great deal of creative expression when creating player models, but with a minimum of technical experience that would be necessary for later titles. Polycount still maintains an extensive database of player models from the Q2PMP era.

Polycount evolved into the now familiar green and black format the night before Quake III Arena was released in 2000. Quake 2 was arguably easier to create custom models for; but Quake III allowed for characters with 32-bit textures with an impressive array of shader effects, as well as higher polygon counts. Q3 was the entry point for much of the second wave of well known Polycount artists, such as BobotheSeal and DarkHorizon. The community continued to grow. Many of the longer standing members of the community began getting industry jobs, often as a direct result of their community involvement (a trend which still continues).

Although as of 2005, many FPS games have become exceedingly complicated to create custom player model content for, Polycount remains a vital community where hobbyists and professionals alike hone their craft.

The heart of Polycount is the Forum. Notoriously honest in critique, our community of professional and hobbyist artists have been posting, collaborating, and helping each other like no other 3D art website since Polycount began back in 1997. If you’re looking to improve your skillset, learn new tricks or techniques, or just have an opinion on all things videogame art, be sure to check out the forum.

In May of 2010 the site was updated to augment the forum with regular updates curated by our editors. This ‘Polycount Update’ brought exclusive Interviews, Articles and Tutorials as well as reports from the rest of the 3D community. We do our best to report news that we know you will find useful, entertaining, or engaging.

This relaunch was kicked off with a new contest exclusively for Valve’s Team Fortress 2 called the ‘Polycount Pack’. It was a 5 week contest that yielded some amazing entries and highlighted the talent of the Polycount community. The winners had their artwork released in a massive Team-Fortress 2 update, the Man-conomy Update, where the winners earned an average of $45,000 from the first week of their items being on sale. Read all about the contest right here.

With over 50,000 contributing professionals or hobbyist game artists and some 3 million views a month Polycount truly is the videogame art resource & community. Our mission is to provide 3D videogame artists the best resource for 3D news, discussion, and community. Every decision, update, and move we make internally is with our community’s best interests in mind.

Also check out OldSiteCredits for more history.

Using the Polycount Greentooth Logo

The ‘Greentooth’ Logo is Polycount’s unofficially official logo. That is, it is not ours but it is yours. It was created by our community and adopted by our community as the sole representation of the entire Polycount Community.

As we see it, the Greentooth logo falls in to the ‘Creative Commons’ and is free for you to use in your artwork, projects, independent or “AAA” videogames. All that we ask is that you do not make money off of it directly – that is, selling items specifically branded with the Greentooth logo. (E.g. A micro-transaction item branded with the Greentooth logo isn’t allowed, but you’re more than welcome to use it elsewhere in your videogame as you see fit.)

If you would like to see specific examples of how Greentooth has appeared in many of todays most famous videogames, check out the Reddit post about Greentooth and the Polycount Thread Greentooth Sightings in Videogames.

If you have any further questions regarding the logo or its use please contact us.

Forum Snapshots

Snapshots of how the forum has appeared over the years, some courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

1998	1998	1999	1999
2000	2001	2004	2008
2009	2011	2015	2016
2017	April Fools 2017	20th Anniversary 2018	21st Birthday 2019, Your Aprils fools shit is dumb.
Happy 22nd Polycount	2020	Happy Birthday Polycount 2024