I wish the creator would maintain a blog about the project. It is cool to follow him on twitter and watch him work out the technical details of new features (e.g. marching cubes based mesh extraction). There is some definite interesting technical meat in implementing these tools in the context of a voxel engine.
Most people don't realize how limited the palette actually is on NES. The entire gamut is only 54 colors (nominally 64, but there are duplicates and an "unsafe" entry), and any 16x16 block can only have 4 colors. There are some ways to work around this with clever hacks, but it was mostly the artists being clever rather than the programmers.
No code available on https://github.com/ephtracy and no mentions of license. Seems to be no-charge kind of 'free'. Not gonna be switching from vim+openSCAD for doing 3D this time around.
I've tried a wide variety of voxel modeling tools, free and not free, and this one's by far the most intuitive, and prettiest, I've found - in that it's the only one I haven't given up on in intense annoyance after 10 minutes or so.
Might end up using this for an animation project - thanks to the OP!
this is very interesting. I'm wondering how the author built the ui for the app. it's cross-platform, but I don't see it links any other ui libraries. my conclusion is that its ui is built directly with opengl.
I don't know [1], but!... When you reduce things down to a minimum amount of essential detail, things tend to look similar to other things that share the same constraints. I noticed this when researching Mondrian and the De Stijl (neoplasticism) art movement -- they restricted their palette to mostly primary colors. I could ask if Google's logo or the colors in a bucket of LEGO bricks were inspired by Mondrian directly, but another possibility is that the neoplasticists discovered some kind of minimal, universal design pattern that feels timeless and likely to be "rediscovered" again and again. Are Monument Valley, MagicaVoxel (and Minecraft) inspired by Escher, or is it a natural coincidence that comes out of the minimal use of geometry and perspective they all employ?
I've used this in the past and found it to be great. The UI took a little getting used to, but once you did it was fast to accomplish fairly complicated things. Definitely worth a try.
This is not what I think of as voxels either, but I fear our older definition is becoming obsolete. You could make arguments both for and against whether these textured cubes are technically voxels, but in the end, language changes, and trying to fight these changes is futile.
Right, my objection to the textured cubes is that they are not the volume equivalent of a pixel. Pixels are point samples without shape or texture. These cubes have both.
What I call a voxel is much smaller (on the order of a screen pixel), and drawn as a point sprite or screen-facing quad with a single color. Texturing is achieved by having many voxels with different colors/materials.
Here are some videos of what we used to call voxels:
Note that they were not using voxels because they had a certain artistic style to them. They used voxels because with the hardware they had, this was the most realistic rendering they could achieve. Once GPUs came out with hardware-accelerated triangle rasterization, voxel engines died.
For more information about point-sampling, see this classic paper, "A Pixel Is Not A Little Square":
I'm a bit confused about what distinction you're trying to make, or how this project represents a change in the meaning of the word 'voxel'.
Voxels are "volumetric cells" just like pixels are "picture cells". The size of them has absolutely nothing to do with it, and never has. Big voxels are still voxels. The data in the file is specified as volumetric samples... Maybe the issue is the texture you're talking about, but I haven't seen any textures in any of the galleries, other than the few examples that render mesh edges in addition to the cubes. Where are you seeing textures?
Six square polygons enclosing a space is surely just as 'voxel' as meshes generated by marching cubes for medical imaging. I've worked in medial imaging, written more than one volume renderer and used used many more than that, for both games and research. As far as I'm concerned, Magica Voxel is both truly voxel and truly awesome, IMO.
Alvy Ray Smith's paper is great, but how to handle sampling is a different subject completely from whether the scenes are volumetric, which they are. These voxels do have a certain artistic style to them, and the aesthetic choice to give them sharp edges was made intentionally and called out explicitly, i.e., "8-bit".
Voxels with a texture index vs. voxels with a color index is not really a big distinction in my eyes. They're both integers. The way in which you resample them, as well, is not invalidating. Otherwise "pixel art" would also be invalid as it's built around display output methods that are not mathematically correct(NTSC signal, square LCD pixels, etc.).
It takes all of 30 seconds to download the app and run it in order to see first hand it is voxel based, less time than it takes to write comments.
Maybe you've conflated the concepts of underlying data with the chosen method of rendering. But, even if that's why, it's false to say that rendering voxel data with polygons isn't voxels. Voxel data has been rendered with polygons since the term was invented, whether it's iso-surface (marching cubes), splatting, shear warp or cubes. The only time voxel data is not rendered using polygons is when it's ray traced.
http://imgur.com/gallery/8zEE1/