BOXEL, spelled out in its own blocks: white face forward, candy-colored sides Open source · Rust · MIT / Apache-2.0 · runs on a potato

The open-source
Blender of blocky

Boxel edits boxels: voxels, upgraded, so every cube face can wear its own material, white up front, candy scramble on the sides. Built for indie devs, pixel artists going 3D, and anyone who bounced off Blender's UV unwrap or hit MagicaVoxel's one-color-per-cube ceiling. Model it, generate it, rig it, light it, ship it into Unity or Godot. Light enough to hold 60fps on a decade-old laptop, so it'll run fine on yours. No cloud, no subscriptions, nothing leaves your machine.

Get early access See the gallery

Not a screenshot. That's a live glTF export, rendered right here in your browser, the same file that drops straight into Unity or Godot.

A single boxel-built letter B spinning, showing white front face and candy side faces The BOXEL wordmark building itself out of falling, bouncing cubes

Yeah, the logo's boxels too. Every letter up there is the same six-face cube, just stretched into type. Watch the whole word build itself.

The Boxel editor: tool rail, a red voxel dragon in the viewport with the ViewCube corner gizmo, hierarchy and inspector panels
2.8M+
voxels per world, culled & streamed
60 fps
on 2014 laptop silicon
022
one-click procedural generators
073
free starter models in the library
008
dynamic point lights, live in the viewport
000
bytes phoned home
01 / WHY

Why boxel

Built different on purpose

Not "another voxel tool." Four bets almost nobody else in this space is making, stacked into one editor.

Voxel++

Real per-face materials

Grass on top, dirt on the sides, chrome on one face and matte everywhere else, all on the same grid a flat voxel tool uses. Per-face overrides are sparse, so a one-color boxel still costs exactly what a voxel costs.

Scriptable

An agent can drive it

A loopback HTTP server opens the moment the app does. Every edit, camera move, and screenshot is one call, so a script, or an AI agent, can build something, look at what it actually made, and fix its own mistakes.

Potato-friendly

Runs where nothing else bothers

2.8M voxels, culled and streamed, holding 60fps on a 2014 AMD APU: the kind of chip every "runs great" tool quietly assumes you don't have. A school laptop or a Steam Deck on battery is home turf here, not an edge case.

Yours

Actually open source

MIT or Apache-2.0, your choice. No account, no cloud round-trip, no subscription tier. Clone it, build it, it's yours, and nothing you make ever leaves your machine unless you ship it.

02 / WHAT

What's a boxel?

Same grid. Six times the surface.

A 2x2x2 cluster of eight boxels spinning: every corner where cubes meet shows exactly three clean colors, no repeats

One cube, six materials, white face forward, candy scramble everywhere else. Scale it up and every shared corner still reads three clean colors. That's not luck, that's the whole pitch.

A block with grass-painted top faces and dirt sides, spinning

Minecraft's grass block is secretly a boxel: grass tops, dirt sides, same cubes.

Never touched voxels? A voxel is a 3D pixel. one colored cube on a grid. Stack a few thousand and you get Minecraft. Every model on this page is just cubes.

A voxel is one cube, one color. A boxel is one cube whose six faces each wear their own material: one white face for the read, a candy-colored scramble on the rest.

The single-boxel mark: one cube, six different colored faces One cube, six faces, six materials. That's the whole pitch, distilled into a logo.

Grass on top, dirt on the sides, no split cubes. Per-face overrides are sparse, so a one-color boxel costs exactly what a voxel costs. You only pay for the faces you paint. Import your MagicaVoxel art, then do the face and rect tricks flat voxels can't. Metal, glass, emissive: all on one cube. Voxel++, basically.

03 / FEATURES

Everything in one tool

Model, generate, rig, render

One tool for the whole pipeline, so nothing has to round-trip through three other apps just to end up modeled, generated, rigged, lit, and exported.

Build
spinning voxel owl

Modeless editing

Left-drag builds, right-drag orbits. That's the whole tutorial. Extrude, paint faces, sculpt, mirror, flood-fill. Undo on all of it.

Generate
spinning voxel fox

Procedural + worlds

Terrain, caves, dungeons, mazes, forests, gyroid lattices, knots. One click each. Worlds stream in chunks and hold millions of voxels without a hiccup.

Render
spinning voxel penguin

A real HDR render stack

Linear HDR, bloom in the right order, one ACES tonemap at the end. Emission glows in color instead of clipping to white. (We learned that one the hard way.)

Export
spinning voxel frog

Game-engine export

glTF / GLB with albedo, baked normal and emissive maps, so they drop into Unity or Godot and it just blooms. Plus .vox, OBJ, STL, sprite sheets and GIF turntables.

Animate
voxel humanoid rig walking

Animation timeline

Keyframes plus procedural rigs. One click drops a jointed humanoid; pick Walk and it walks. This one's doing it right now. Bakes to glTF animation channels.

Script
spinning voxel rabbit

Agent-drivable

Every edit, camera move and screenshot is a loopback HTTP call. Script it, or point an agent at it, and it can build, look at what it made, and fix its own mistakes.

04 / DEPTH

How deep it goes

More tool than the screenshots let on

Every entry below is a shipped feature, not a roadmap wish. One click drops a whole matrix, and everything stays editable after the fact.

Procedural generators one click, whole matrix, re-roll until it's right

TerrainDungeonsCaves MazesForests Deciduous & conifer treesPipe tangles Crystal clustersTPMS lattices Nautilus shellsWave Function Collapse networks Menger spongeVoronoi cells Helix / DNA spiralsTorus knots Metaball cloudsCellular-automata caves Text-to-voxel

Non-destructive shape primitives add, subtract, or intersect; every shape stays editable, move it, resize it, recolor it, or delete it later

BoxRounded boxSphere CapsuleDomeDiamond CylinderConePyramid WedgeTorusTube Triangular prismHex prismStar

Non-destructive modifier stack reorder, tweak live, or bake when you're happy

NoiseHSV adjustLevels DitherMirrorShell TwistTaperWave ShearArrayRadial array DisplaceInfill lattice

Formats in, formats out no lock-in either direction

In: .vox, .qb, .bbmodel In: OBJ / STL / PLY meshes In: PNG heightmap Out: glTF / GLB with animation Out: .vox (round-trips) Out: OBJ / STL Out: JSON interchange Out: turntable sheet & GIF
05 / IN THE BOX

Also in the box

The stuff you'd otherwise find in week three

06 / WHO

Who it's for

Built for the people who'd rather be making things

Indie gamedevs

Export glTF/GLB with baked albedo, normal, and emissive maps. Drop it in Unity or Godot and it just blooms, no manual material setup.

Pixel artists going 3D

Import your MagicaVoxel .vox straight in. Same cube grid you already think in, now with six faces instead of one color.

Anyone who bounced off Blender

Left-drag builds, right-drag orbits. No UV unwrapping, no node graphs, no forty-minute onboarding video before your first cube.

Old hardware, tight budgets

A decade-old laptop holds 60fps in a 2.8M-voxel world. No RTX card required, no subscription tier gatekeeping the good export formats.

Builders who'd rather prompt than click

Point an agent at the HTTP control API and it can build, screenshot itself, and self-correct. Prompt-to-voxel runs on a local model, no metered API.

07 / QUICK START

Quick start

Zero to blocky in 60 seconds

1

Run it

cargo run --release -p boxel. A Rust workspace, builds local, no installer, no account.

2

Build

Left-drag places cubes. Right-drag orbits. Scroll zooms, F frames your model, hold RMB + WASD to fly. That's the tutorial.

3

Paint & cheat

Pick a color, Paint does faces, Fill does regions. Or skip to the Generate tab and one-click a terrain, tree, or dungeon to mess with.

4

Ship it

Export → glTF and drop it in Unity or Godot with materials intact. Or .vox, OBJ, STL, a sprite sheet, a spinning GIF like the critters above.

Get it

Downloads are coming soon

The repo is still private while Boxel is rough around the edges. Downloads land with the first public release. Early builds and the dev log show up in the Discord first.

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