Voxel Art and Vertex Colors

I’ve been working on a few different game projects- and seeing as cubes are often a recurring theme for me, I figured it was about time to take it to the next level.

I’ve been testing a simple voxel renderer in Unity.

It does all the basic things you’d expect like killing culled faces. I was tempted to make an all out voxel editor - and integrate it into Unity. However- getting things like copy and paste - and all the tools I really want - would take ages to complete. I ventured out and found a free little tool called Sproxel. It was in development for 2 years but seems to have been abandoned in 2012.

Sproxel had some very basic tools. No copy/paste however. Using Sproxel was painfully slow. After trying to create a companion cube - where 6 sides could easily be copy/paste, I was feeling some serious grind.

Qubicle Constructor seemed to be the go-to voxel editor. It even had an exporter just for Unity! But with the $80 price tag - along with $25 for the Unity exporter, I had to keep looking.

Then I came across Paint3D. The videos I saw of it were extremely low res - and the UI seemed dated. But after watching how slices and extrusions were handled, along with copy/paste, I was really excited.

I started up the trial version - which has no export/saving options.  I can understand this limitation - but I have a hard time buying software that I can’t ensure will end up working with my tools. OBJ export seems to be the only format - which is fine if I can ensure the material files and everything works right.

Anyway- after playing around with it for a bit - I can see that it’ll be worth the $20 price tag. I was able to import my models from Sproxel - and was seriously impressed with the automatic lighting and all of the other fancy features.

I’ll make an update to this post after purchase. I’m not exactly the best artist - but I’m hoping this will help me get away from basic cubes.

Anyway- I’ve set up a system to handle OBJ to Unity. The process also bakes some global illumination and self shadowing to the vertex colors.

There is no texture here, just a shader that multiplies vertex colors to a diffuse. The model displayed here is fairly high poly - but nothing too over the top.

I could write a system that pulls vertex colors to a bitmap and then do some basic optimization on the quad geometry - but I figure my time would be better spent on other things.

I’ve been making a lot of compromises lately. Generally I like to write my own tools - and focus hard on optimization, specifically when it comes to rendering. But all of my current projects are targeting PC gamers - and I’m having a hard time making my games run under 200FPS anyway. I think it’s a good time to move on - and use the tools that are already out there.

I’m already using Unity to do most of the work for me. Why not keep moving forward that idea?