I'm half hoping that this can get stickied, but really, it's something I've wanted to talk about for a while, partly because it's not formally adressed here.
Today, we're going to (hopefully) break the misconceptions of the simplistic or minimalist art style! I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with the many "simple" packs posted on a weekly to daily basis. Perhaps some of you out there were hoping to make your own simplepack. This is totally fine! You just need to first understand what it means to use a simplistic or minimalist style.
But that's easy right? Just take Minecraft's textures, unshade everything, and you're done, right? Boom, instant modern art, right? WRONG. This is probably the biggest misconception of modern minimalist art. That it must have zero shading and detail for it to be simplistic. And what's unfortunate is that some people who use this method try to justify it by claiming it to be "minimalism" and that those who don't like it "don't understand modern art."
The goal of minimalism is simply to convey a piece's message or theme, using as little material or substance as possible. It's straight to the point, and only emphasizes what matters, without distracting the viewer, or cluttering the piece with unnecessary elements. The elements that ARE there are used to guide you to the central idea of the piece. It really says nothing about what sort of shading to use, or what level of detail to use. It's ultimately HOW you use them that matters.
In order to better understand how to use minimalism in a virtual medium, we're going to take a look at, possibly one of my favourite games, Mirror's Edge. It's a game that looks near-photorealistic at times, but maintains a fairly consistent and well-used minimalist art style.
Bam. Two snapshots from the game. We have an interior scene, and an exterior scene. If you zoom in on the pictures, you can see that the scenery is, in fact, well shaded and quite detailed.
What?! But how can you be minimalistic when there's so much detail?!
Easy. Because the scenery is straight to the point, in regards to the main ideas and themes of the game.
In Mirror's Edge, you play as an outlawed information courrier, living under the regime of a totalitarian government. Information is heavily monitored, and the only way to transport information safely, and privately, is through the use of specialized parkour runners. In the game, you leap from rooftop, to rooftop, breaking in and out of buildings, transporting information, and completing missions, all while dodging gunfire, police officers and swat teams. One of the central themes in Mirror's Edge is "The Flow." Flow is a psychological term, which means complete immersion in an activity, with little to no regard with your surroundings, or personal state. Runners use the flow to effectively find the best paths to follow, when navigating the city's rooftops.
Mirror's Edge is minimalist in how they've coloured their scenery, in order to support the theme of flow. The areas are largely monochromatic, usually using only a single primary/secondary colour, and then leaving a majority white. When you play through the game, you'll find most of the scenery is white. The plants are white, the pavement is white, most of the buildings are white, you get the picture. The reason behind this is that, when living such a dangerous life as that of a runner, you don't have time to take in rich scenery when you're running the risk of death at every turn. Distractions lead to mistakes. Mistakes lead to eating a bullet, or falling to your death. In the game, you only keep an eye out for one colour. Red. Red is your way out. It's the ramp at the edge of a rooftop that leads you to land on a conveniently placed tarp to break your fall. It was also said that the single-colour scenery was also there to serve the purpose of a health bar. The game itself has no heads-up display, and the only way to monitor your health is to see how grey the scenery is getting. They greyer it is, the closer you are to dying.
Long story short, Mirror's edge uses minimalism to emphasize the importance of your person, and your state of flow, and they're able to maintain that minimalism, despite the near-photorealism of a lot of the scenery.
But hold on here... Not ALL minimalist work has shading and detail!
Yep, you're absolutely right there. But the reason they are so successful is because they use something that most simple packs don't. Proper colour selection.
And with this topic, I introduce our second example game! Proteus.
Whee, more pictures.
As you can see, Proteus is a game with zero shading, and is pixelated just like Minecraft. Just by looking at this picture, can you see why this game is set apart from your stereotypical simple pack?
If you answered "colours," then you're correct. Proteus may not be the most detailed game there is, graphically, but it has a well constructed colour palette.
May not look like much, right? But don't you feel that those colours just...work? In a lot of games where shading is seldom used, artists often incorporate a lot of contrasting colours, which complement each other. The darker greens, the intense purple and the soft peach-pink of the sunset all create visual appeal, because of how visually different they are.
And yet they work.
As they say, variety is the spice of life. The more variety, and strength of colour a simple scene has, the richer and more appealing it looks. This is where most simplepacks fail. They don't alter the colours used in the textures. Nearly all simple packs use Minecraft's default colours, which are more desaturated and fitting of a shaded environment. Having lost the shading, the scenery looks more bland than it did before, with the only real bursts of contrasting colour coming from the wool. And since wool doesn't grow on trees, or coat hillsides, there really isn't much colour bursting from the scenery.
Just a warning about colour contrast. Make sure you use this method responsibly. Bright neon red and blue are quite contrasing, but they don't complement each other very well (And they'll certainly make your eyes bleed.)
So what does this all mean? That there's more to simplistic art than just removing as much detail and shading as you can. All minimalist art uses methods such as colour selection, or monochromatic styles in order to use the minimalist style effectively.
In short:
This is minimalism.
This is Minecraft without shading.
Now, if you WERE planning on making a simple pack, but feel even the slightest bit discouraged now, do not fret! Simple packs can still be amazing, provided you make them right. One of my biggest recommendations to simple pack artists is this.
Make your own textures.
Half the reason bucket fill packs feel boring, and kind of useless is simply because, other than the lack of shading, they don't look any different from regular Minecraft. They just aren't that interesting. Stylize your textures, and make them unique. And don't be afraid you add even a little bit of shading.
Use appropriate contrasting colours.
You're using minimalism. Minimalism without flavor is boring. You want a lot of visual appeal in your scenery to make it look more alive. Try using deeper, more saturated greens for plants, without it being too hard on the eyes. Then try to contrast it with other colours. You could have a more reddish-orange clay dirt, or some bright violet flowers. Try playing with biome palettes a bit. Maybe turn birch trees into amber coloured autumn trees, or pink cherry-blossom trees. It can be a bit difficult to figure out what to colour what for your texture pack, so try to take a step back and just brainstorm for a bit. Maybe utilize MCpatcher or another enhancement mod to add more variety and versatility to your texture pack.
Don't rush things.
A lot of people tackle minimalism because they think it's easy. It is NOT an easy task if you want to do it properly. Be patient, and work meticulously with your textures. If something looks out of place to you, chances are it may look out of place to others. Go back and change it, and see how it goes. Rome wasn't built in a day.
Be open to feedback, good or bad.
This is more for anyone who generally does art. Don't be deterred by negative feedback. Treat it as a learning experience. Take from the feedback and try to improve your work with it. And PLEASE don't be pretentious and try to justify lazy work with some elaborate artist's statement. Seriously. Anyone can take a canvas, draw a red line across it, and say it represents something like gender divides in modern society. Be meaningful, and be open to change.
I hope this thread helps you better understand minimalism and how to use it effectively. If there's anything you want me to add to the topic, please let me know. Thanks for reading.
I've been wanting to write something like this for a long time, but never got around to it! I think this is better than I could ever do. Thanks for putting this out there!
Ah, another great thread made! I wish the target audience were the type to view these. The people who cause these issues in the forums, including creators of bucket fill minimalist packs are the enthusiastic types that jump right into releasing the pack with the expectation of people bowing down to their skill. These types unfortunately are generally completely ignorant to the existence of other opinions, and don't check for threads like these that would warn them of the backlash they will inevitably receive.
You seem fine at wording things and making large posts. Perhaps you could add a part on X-ray packs? They are the other of the two most common problematic packs around here. If you do, I would also suggest you add a table of contents with links to each part. And, just in case you weren't aware of it already, the code for a table of contents would be as follows.
Well I contemplated that. But with this thread, I wanted to tackle an issue that's more easily misunderstood by others. I mean, it's kind of obvious why people wouldn't like X-ray packs, but with people tackling minimalism or simple packs, it's a bit different, simply because opinions are subjective, and in art there is a TON of subjectivity. It's a bit funny to say, but what kind of sparked this thread was one forum user who made a post one of these simplepack threads that to a degree, talked down to its critics, claiming they did not understand modern art. I just wanted to share my take on the matter since, and I'm guilty of this too, many people tend to pursue modern or minimalist art because they thing it's easy and requires little effort, when in reality that isn't the case.
Who knows, maybe some day I can write up a large thread that addresses all types of packs seen to this day, and how to go about them to achieve better results.
Though I do have to agree with one of the comments above that brought up the target audience of Minecraft. Since the age range is quite large, as well as the huge variety of perspectives, and what people seek in Minecraft, you'll have those who see it entirely as a game, while others take it very seriously. And then there are those who just don't know how to take criticism yet, and I've been down that road many times when I first dabbled into art communities and the like. But at least I hope I helped those who want to take content creation seriously, and want to further their understanding.
Nice thread Cyrus! Uh although But I don't think those bucket fillers are going to understand this.
The bucket fillers usually don't come here in the texture discussion although it is the right thread
for this.Because people who are repping here is mostly a popular guys who created great modern
packs. I hope this gets stickied on the resource packs section, so the bucket fillers can see.
Nice thread Cyrus! Uh although But I don't think those bucket fillers are going to understand this.
The bucket fillers usually don't come here in the texture discussion although it is the right thread
for this.Because people who are repping here is mostly a popular guys who created great modern
packs. I hope this gets stickied on the resource packs section, so the bucket fillers can see.
Unfortunately, that is very much true. The people who need to see these are the people who just want popularity, or worse, money. They are the types to dive right in without checking the waters first, and getting to know the people or the rules. It is the same type of people who bump threads, post with no screenshots, and break rules. However, the benefit of these threads is that some of those people do read them, miraculously, and for those that don't, someone can post them a link to here to basically explain the issue. Such is how most of the rule, feedback and other tutorial threads work.
Cyrus: After reading it a few times, I think you should add how the term "minimalism" and/or "simplicity" apply to each of the images, because one reason people create the bucket filled vanilla packs is because they would see those two images and not be able to see the style difference. So you should point it out there.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Fare well everyone! My time to retire has come! "And with that, POW! I'm gone." ---Lord Crump
Yes, people who are lazy never read the rules. Take a look at me. When I created my resource pack called noshades,
I never knew that there was a section called resource pack discussion. I got terrible feedback.(Of course) From that I saw
a banner in someone's signature saying Mini's texture pack tutorial compendium I was shocked. I thought that minecraft without
shading was very mordern and unique but it turns out it isn't. I wish that Mini's texture pack tutorial compendium should be stickied.
Also, I know that Steelfeathers The All-Inclusive Guide to Texturing is useful but It only shows you technical stuff.
I also think you should add in a section talking about cubeworld, and use some refs from that. I've seen so many people going from 'simple pack' to 'cubeworld pack' just to justify them making flat colored textures.
It's funny. Because originally, my texture pack was supposed to be a Simplistic 'texture' pack with extra simple on the side. I was gonna call it a 'Cartoon' texture pack, and when I was looking up other cartoon texture packs, I found Sassgard. It basically changed my view on my own texture pack to disgust. I then started to put a LOT more effort into my own. I'm glad I did to, since I later found out that Simplistic packs are frowned upon.
Thats because when people think simple pack they think of just stripping the shading down to nothing and have flat colors.
Real simple packs like Steelfeathers's Dandelion or Plenty_of_fish's Nemo are prime examples of what simple packs really are. Simple clean designs, not flat bucket fills.
Because I'm looking for flat texture packs but every time I stumble on something that could be it, it ends up being an abandoned project full of negative comments under it about how it's "bucket-fill"
No, something can appear flat without being a bucket fill. A bucket-fill is specifically when a single shade of a single color covers the vast majority of a texture. It's named "bucket fill" after the common tool in a lot of image editing software that fills an area with a solid color with a single click. Needless to say, it's a harsh criticism to call something a bucket fill because it take no skill to make these packs: Literally just click each texture once. That's also why there are thousands of them around: No skill. No thought. No talent. No problem.
On the other hand, textures can be 'flat' while still having texture. For example right now I have a wooden wall in my room. Remove the paneling lines and it's nothing but an entirely flat wood look. While there's no texture in the tactile sense, there is variation in the visual sense. Now you might be thinking "aren't ALL textures flat then? They're all a 2d image!" Well... no. Most good textures try to give the illusion of depth by adding shadows, specular highlights, and other visual cues that make them seem to pop out even though they're completely flat in reality. This is the difference between something seeming flat and actually being flat.
What would be the correct term for something like in this screenshot below from the game Race the Sun? I assumed it was "flat" because of Flat design such as in Metro
First of all, it would help to read the wiki articles that you link to. Flat Design is a genere of User Interface design based on minimalism. What you're seeing in that screenshot is not a user interface.
But to answer your question, judging from that screenshot, it's minimalism in a certain sense. There is light and shadow, as well as gradient shading to give an appearance of depth and material. Colors are few and far between, but they're more effective because of it. Notice how the sun and that star are both yellow; a good indicator to the viewer that they are important things to be keeping track of.
But it's not flat. Flat requires there to be no shadows. Look at those towers in the distance. See the shadow along the curvature? Or even on the plane itself where the light obviously hits it at specific angles as it tilts. That's not "flat" due simply to the fact that those are obviously 3d objects.
Yea I should technically be giving someone a warning for this, but in my opinion tutorials that are still relevant to the current version of Minecraft are always acceptable to be posted on. Other mods may disagree with me, but I'll always allow posting on a relevant tutorial thread.
I'll also be nice ignore the fact that you're technically off-topic.
Today, we're going to (hopefully) break the misconceptions of the simplistic or minimalist art style! I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with the many "simple" packs posted on a weekly to daily basis. Perhaps some of you out there were hoping to make your own simplepack. This is totally fine! You just need to first understand what it means to use a simplistic or minimalist style.
But that's easy right? Just take Minecraft's textures, unshade everything, and you're done, right? Boom, instant modern art, right? WRONG. This is probably the biggest misconception of modern minimalist art. That it must have zero shading and detail for it to be simplistic. And what's unfortunate is that some people who use this method try to justify it by claiming it to be "minimalism" and that those who don't like it "don't understand modern art."
The goal of minimalism is simply to convey a piece's message or theme, using as little material or substance as possible. It's straight to the point, and only emphasizes what matters, without distracting the viewer, or cluttering the piece with unnecessary elements. The elements that ARE there are used to guide you to the central idea of the piece. It really says nothing about what sort of shading to use, or what level of detail to use. It's ultimately HOW you use them that matters.
In order to better understand how to use minimalism in a virtual medium, we're going to take a look at, possibly one of my favourite games, Mirror's Edge. It's a game that looks near-photorealistic at times, but maintains a fairly consistent and well-used minimalist art style.
Bam. Two snapshots from the game. We have an interior scene, and an exterior scene. If you zoom in on the pictures, you can see that the scenery is, in fact, well shaded and quite detailed.
What?! But how can you be minimalistic when there's so much detail?!
Easy. Because the scenery is straight to the point, in regards to the main ideas and themes of the game.
In Mirror's Edge, you play as an outlawed information courrier, living under the regime of a totalitarian government. Information is heavily monitored, and the only way to transport information safely, and privately, is through the use of specialized parkour runners. In the game, you leap from rooftop, to rooftop, breaking in and out of buildings, transporting information, and completing missions, all while dodging gunfire, police officers and swat teams. One of the central themes in Mirror's Edge is "The Flow." Flow is a psychological term, which means complete immersion in an activity, with little to no regard with your surroundings, or personal state. Runners use the flow to effectively find the best paths to follow, when navigating the city's rooftops.
Mirror's Edge is minimalist in how they've coloured their scenery, in order to support the theme of flow. The areas are largely monochromatic, usually using only a single primary/secondary colour, and then leaving a majority white. When you play through the game, you'll find most of the scenery is white. The plants are white, the pavement is white, most of the buildings are white, you get the picture. The reason behind this is that, when living such a dangerous life as that of a runner, you don't have time to take in rich scenery when you're running the risk of death at every turn. Distractions lead to mistakes. Mistakes lead to eating a bullet, or falling to your death. In the game, you only keep an eye out for one colour. Red. Red is your way out. It's the ramp at the edge of a rooftop that leads you to land on a conveniently placed tarp to break your fall. It was also said that the single-colour scenery was also there to serve the purpose of a health bar. The game itself has no heads-up display, and the only way to monitor your health is to see how grey the scenery is getting. They greyer it is, the closer you are to dying.
Long story short, Mirror's edge uses minimalism to emphasize the importance of your person, and your state of flow, and they're able to maintain that minimalism, despite the near-photorealism of a lot of the scenery.
But hold on here... Not ALL minimalist work has shading and detail!
Yep, you're absolutely right there. But the reason they are so successful is because they use something that most simple packs don't. Proper colour selection.
And with this topic, I introduce our second example game! Proteus.
Whee, more pictures.
As you can see, Proteus is a game with zero shading, and is pixelated just like Minecraft. Just by looking at this picture, can you see why this game is set apart from your stereotypical simple pack?
If you answered "colours," then you're correct. Proteus may not be the most detailed game there is, graphically, but it has a well constructed colour palette.
May not look like much, right? But don't you feel that those colours just...work? In a lot of games where shading is seldom used, artists often incorporate a lot of contrasting colours, which complement each other. The darker greens, the intense purple and the soft peach-pink of the sunset all create visual appeal, because of how visually different they are.
And yet they work.
As they say, variety is the spice of life. The more variety, and strength of colour a simple scene has, the richer and more appealing it looks. This is where most simplepacks fail. They don't alter the colours used in the textures. Nearly all simple packs use Minecraft's default colours, which are more desaturated and fitting of a shaded environment. Having lost the shading, the scenery looks more bland than it did before, with the only real bursts of contrasting colour coming from the wool. And since wool doesn't grow on trees, or coat hillsides, there really isn't much colour bursting from the scenery.
Just a warning about colour contrast. Make sure you use this method responsibly. Bright neon red and blue are quite contrasing, but they don't complement each other very well (And they'll certainly make your eyes bleed.)
So what does this all mean? That there's more to simplistic art than just removing as much detail and shading as you can. All minimalist art uses methods such as colour selection, or monochromatic styles in order to use the minimalist style effectively.
In short:
This is minimalism.
This is Minecraft without shading.
Now, if you WERE planning on making a simple pack, but feel even the slightest bit discouraged now, do not fret! Simple packs can still be amazing, provided you make them right. One of my biggest recommendations to simple pack artists is this.
Make your own textures.
Half the reason bucket fill packs feel boring, and kind of useless is simply because, other than the lack of shading, they don't look any different from regular Minecraft. They just aren't that interesting. Stylize your textures, and make them unique. And don't be afraid you add even a little bit of shading.
Use appropriate contrasting colours.
You're using minimalism. Minimalism without flavor is boring. You want a lot of visual appeal in your scenery to make it look more alive. Try using deeper, more saturated greens for plants, without it being too hard on the eyes. Then try to contrast it with other colours. You could have a more reddish-orange clay dirt, or some bright violet flowers. Try playing with biome palettes a bit. Maybe turn birch trees into amber coloured autumn trees, or pink cherry-blossom trees. It can be a bit difficult to figure out what to colour what for your texture pack, so try to take a step back and just brainstorm for a bit. Maybe utilize MCpatcher or another enhancement mod to add more variety and versatility to your texture pack.
Don't rush things.
A lot of people tackle minimalism because they think it's easy. It is NOT an easy task if you want to do it properly. Be patient, and work meticulously with your textures. If something looks out of place to you, chances are it may look out of place to others. Go back and change it, and see how it goes. Rome wasn't built in a day.
Be open to feedback, good or bad.
This is more for anyone who generally does art. Don't be deterred by negative feedback. Treat it as a learning experience. Take from the feedback and try to improve your work with it. And PLEASE don't be pretentious and try to justify lazy work with some elaborate artist's statement. Seriously. Anyone can take a canvas, draw a red line across it, and say it represents something like gender divides in modern society. Be meaningful, and be open to change.
I hope this thread helps you better understand minimalism and how to use it effectively. If there's anything you want me to add to the topic, please let me know. Thanks for reading.
Examples
http://www.minecraft...rt-updated-731/
http://www.minecraft..._ bubbly__st__0
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/143282-16x18-fez-community-texture-pack-v10/
Oh, and thanks for the thread!
I would recommend Steelfeather's "Dandelion ."
That's the one I'd been looking for, but I'd forgotten the name. x3
You seem fine at wording things and making large posts. Perhaps you could add a part on X-ray packs? They are the other of the two most common problematic packs around here. If you do, I would also suggest you add a table of contents with links to each part. And, just in case you weren't aware of it already, the code for a table of contents would be as follows.
text here
destination here
"And with that, POW! I'm gone." ---Lord Crump
Well I contemplated that. But with this thread, I wanted to tackle an issue that's more easily misunderstood by others. I mean, it's kind of obvious why people wouldn't like X-ray packs, but with people tackling minimalism or simple packs, it's a bit different, simply because opinions are subjective, and in art there is a TON of subjectivity. It's a bit funny to say, but what kind of sparked this thread was one forum user who made a post one of these simplepack threads that to a degree, talked down to its critics, claiming they did not understand modern art. I just wanted to share my take on the matter since, and I'm guilty of this too, many people tend to pursue modern or minimalist art because they thing it's easy and requires little effort, when in reality that isn't the case.
Who knows, maybe some day I can write up a large thread that addresses all types of packs seen to this day, and how to go about them to achieve better results.
Though I do have to agree with one of the comments above that brought up the target audience of Minecraft. Since the age range is quite large, as well as the huge variety of perspectives, and what people seek in Minecraft, you'll have those who see it entirely as a game, while others take it very seriously. And then there are those who just don't know how to take criticism yet, and I've been down that road many times when I first dabbled into art communities and the like. But at least I hope I helped those who want to take content creation seriously, and want to further their understanding.
The bucket fillers usually don't come here in the texture discussion although it is the right thread
for this.Because people who are repping here is mostly a popular guys who created great modern
packs. I hope this gets stickied on the resource packs section, so the bucket fillers can see.
Unfortunately, that is very much true. The people who need to see these are the people who just want popularity, or worse, money. They are the types to dive right in without checking the waters first, and getting to know the people or the rules. It is the same type of people who bump threads, post with no screenshots, and break rules. However, the benefit of these threads is that some of those people do read them, miraculously, and for those that don't, someone can post them a link to here to basically explain the issue. Such is how most of the rule, feedback and other tutorial threads work.
Cyrus: After reading it a few times, I think you should add how the term "minimalism" and/or "simplicity" apply to each of the images, because one reason people create the bucket filled vanilla packs is because they would see those two images and not be able to see the style difference. So you should point it out there.
"And with that, POW! I'm gone." ---Lord Crump
I never knew that there was a section called resource pack discussion. I got terrible feedback.(Of course) From that I saw
a banner in someone's signature saying Mini's texture pack tutorial compendium I was shocked. I thought that minecraft without
shading was very mordern and unique but it turns out it isn't. I wish that Mini's texture pack tutorial compendium should be stickied.
Also, I know that Steelfeathers The All-Inclusive Guide to Texturing is useful but It only shows you technical stuff.
But yes I really like how you explained Cyrus!
I also think you should add in a section talking about cubeworld, and use some refs from that. I've seen so many people going from 'simple pack' to 'cubeworld pack' just to justify them making flat colored textures.
Real simple packs like Steelfeathers's Dandelion or Plenty_of_fish's Nemo are prime examples of what simple packs really are. Simple clean designs, not flat bucket fills.
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No, something can appear flat without being a bucket fill. A bucket-fill is specifically when a single shade of a single color covers the vast majority of a texture. It's named "bucket fill" after the common tool in a lot of image editing software that fills an area with a solid color with a single click. Needless to say, it's a harsh criticism to call something a bucket fill because it take no skill to make these packs: Literally just click each texture once. That's also why there are thousands of them around: No skill. No thought. No talent. No problem.
On the other hand, textures can be 'flat' while still having texture. For example right now I have a wooden wall in my room. Remove the paneling lines and it's nothing but an entirely flat wood look. While there's no texture in the tactile sense, there is variation in the visual sense. Now you might be thinking "aren't ALL textures flat then? They're all a 2d image!" Well... no. Most good textures try to give the illusion of depth by adding shadows, specular highlights, and other visual cues that make them seem to pop out even though they're completely flat in reality. This is the difference between something seeming flat and actually being flat.
Wow this is necroposting that I can get behind XD
First of all, it would help to read the wiki articles that you link to. Flat Design is a genere of User Interface design based on minimalism. What you're seeing in that screenshot is not a user interface.
But to answer your question, judging from that screenshot, it's minimalism in a certain sense. There is light and shadow, as well as gradient shading to give an appearance of depth and material. Colors are few and far between, but they're more effective because of it. Notice how the sun and that star are both yellow; a good indicator to the viewer that they are important things to be keeping track of.
But it's not flat. Flat requires there to be no shadows. Look at those towers in the distance. See the shadow along the curvature? Or even on the plane itself where the light obviously hits it at specific angles as it tilts. That's not "flat" due simply to the fact that those are obviously 3d objects.
Yea I should technically be giving someone a warning for this, but in my opinion tutorials that are still relevant to the current version of Minecraft are always acceptable to be posted on. Other mods may disagree with me, but I'll always allow posting on a relevant tutorial thread.
I'll also be nice ignore the fact that you're technically off-topic.