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?