PicoCad Jam 100

I entered the 100th PicoCAD jam, a challenge to create a tiny themed 3D model in the very limited modelling program PicoCAD. PicoCAD was created in Pico8 by the extremely talented Johan Peitz and was designed to be a minimal but capable tool for creating small 3D models. This was my first attempt at modelling with PicoCAD, and I found the it to be very straightforward to pick up and easy to use, I would definitely consider it in the future for simple modelling projects, and would love to create a small 3d title in Pico8 now that it's clear mesh-based 3D is very possible.

The PicoCAD jam runs regularly but this one had the theme of "hell", in celebration of Johan Peitz's new game Hellgineers. My entry was an attempt to recreate the style and appeal of the Hellgineers graphics in 3D, and I believe I had some success. My entry ended up coming 4th overall in the competition, and 2nd in the category of visuals.

One significant limitation of PicoCAD is the available texture space, which cannot exceed the 128*128 4-bit (only 16 colours!) spritesheet which Pico8 has by default. I was initially concerned that this would prove to be a significant problem, but ended up actually using very little of the texture space available. Given more time to work on my entry, i would have loved to create more advanced and higher resolution textures. Here is the final spritesheet used:

Some additional renders, showing the different objects in the scene and the wireframe of the model;