Crispoly¶
Overview¶
Welcome to Crispoly by Imphenzia.
Crispoly are 3D assets with a low poly aesthetic that are colorized with the Imphenzia PixPal Pro palette textures and materials. They are:
- Super FAST to create - perfect for us Indiedevs and small teams
- Super SMALL file size - keeps your game size down
- Super HIGH performance - makes your game run fast
- Sharing ONE common material - performance and simplicity
- Scaling INFINITELY without pixelation - no matter how close you zoom
The name Crispoly comes from "CRISP" and "POLYGONS" - crisp because edges are sharp and colors are clear, and polygons because... it's polygons =)
Crispoly assets are FAST to create¶
If you're a solo-dev or in a small team, you need an art style that is fast to produce all the assets that you need for the game. Since you don't need to UV-unwrap and texture paint Crispoly-style assets, it's ten times faster! And you may think, "I'm buying an asset pack - why do I have to care about that?!". Good questions. The reason is, I encourage everyone to use Crispoly assets as TEMPLATES and create your own variants. For example, there are two cowboys in the Toon Universal Character pack, and if you're making a wild west gunslinger game, the whole idea is that you should quickly be able to use those cowboys as templates and make your own unique variants that only exist in YOUR game.
Crispoly assets are SMALL¶
Most 3D assets grow large because they often use dedicated textures. You may have a base-color map, a normal map, a specular, a metallic and a roughness map. Maybe even an emission texture. And if those textures are 2048x2048 pixels, you're looking at around 10MB texture data per asset. That makes your game grow quickly, and it eats up VRAM for anyone who plays the game. Crispoly assets use a the Imphenzia PixPal Pro palette texture materials 4 low resolution 256 x 256 pixel textures, only about 90kb on disk as PNG files and 0.75MB of VRAM as uncompressed textures (and it's important that they are uncompressed in memory - more on that later!)
Not only is 0.75MB exceptionally small, but ALL Crispoly assets use the SAME 4 textures, so even if you have thousands of assets in your game - you're still using under ONE megabyte of VRAM.
Crispoly assets provide HIGH performance¶
Thanks to the small textures, there is very little bandwidth required to read texture data from VRAM. There is no need to load and unload texture maps during runtime. In a typical full-screen scenario, a PixPal palette material can be hundreds of thousands of times cheaper in texture bandwidth than a traditional 4×2048 texture setup, while using about 1/64th of the VRAM.
PixPal vs Traditional Texture Workflow (Performance Comparison):
| Category | PixPal Palette Material (4 × 256², ~10 texels used) | Traditional Workflow (4 × 2048², full-screen) |
|---|---|---|
| Texture Resolution | 256×256 × 4 | 2048×2048 × 4 |
| VRAM Usage | ~1 MB total | ~64 MB total |
| Unique Texels Accessed | ~10 total | ~8,000,000+ |
| Texture Bandwidth Cost | Extremely low (cache-friendly) | Very high (millions of unique reads) |
| Relative Bandwidth Load | 1× | 200,000× – 800,000× higher |
| Mipmapping Impact | Negligible | Significant (large texture footprint) |
| Practical GPU Cost | Near zero | Heavy (memory-bound) |
Crispoly assets share ONE common material¶
All the objects can share ONE single material. This can combine more objects into the same draw call to increase performance even more AND we already know it leads to a small file size AND it's easy to manage a single material. With PixPal Pro comes a feature to create TINTED variants and that is handled by material instances with different color parameters, but they all share the same underlay shader material.
Crispoly assets scale infinitely¶
When you get close to objects with textures, the pixels will begin to show. How much will depend on the resolution of your textures and how much time you spent UV-unwrapping and share textures within your 3D asset, but with the palette colorization method that Crispoly uses, you can get infinitely close without any pixelation. You may find it lacks details when you get up close, but thanks to clean vectors and polygons, there will never be a jagged line when you get up-close, even at 8K resolution, the edges will remain sharp as a knife =)