No, and I'm not sure why I would like to do that. One day I might want to make an isometric game on the Spectrum, but I don't think Magicavoxel is the right tool to make graphics for that game.
VOXEL? Never heard of the term. I took a look at a couple of pages they seem to be like Minecraft scenes. I was never very thrilled by that cubical look reminds me of the bad old days of CGA when ANSI graphics were the best you could hope for. Probably ideal for Lego maniacs but otherwise unappealing to me.
Thanks Timmy. The 'vox' is misleading, one tends to associate that with sound not illustration.
Hmmm could work with SpecBAS though because it can handle graphics - well obviously, its a ZXBasic 'mask' - more or less, rather more than less, - running in Windows though limited to 256 colours, like you need any more!
Still prefer more conventional illustrations but the more tools the better, probably will give it a go, you never know when something might come in useful.
Thanks SteveSmith for mentioning Magicavoxel. I downloaded it at about 10am and by 1:45 had managed to produce a drawing of a turtle following a tutorial here:-
which was very clearly explained and got me started to use the program. I tried to figure it out by myself but no luck, too much new stuff to learn. One caveat worth mentioning to Windows users, you may find yourself doing unwanted actions because of the habit of using the left mouse button! Get used to NOT automatically pressing it.
I still am not very happy with the blocky appearance but the program itself is a marvel and easy to get to grips with. That right button rotate and centre wheel pan feature is really useful and much needed. Watch the size of the little red pointer square, if it goes smaller you're painting farther back than you think!
Hmmm could work with SpecBAS though because it can handle graphics - well obviously, its a ZXBasic 'mask' - more or less, rather more than less, - running in Windows though limited to 256 colours, like you need any more!
Voxels were popular quite a while ago, but fell out of favour as being wasteful and costly in rendering - while graphics cards would accelerate texture rendering, the CPU still had to perform mathematical transformations on vertices to inform the card of where to draw them. Voxels, by their nature, required a massive CPU budget as they were effectively very small 3D objects - and the graphical fidelity they brought was disappointing. Minecraft is a voxel engine of sorts, and also has deceptively high PC requirements.
There were optimisation techniques, but again they required CPU grunt work and the graphics cards of the day couldn't help (things like geometry transforms and shaders were yet to appear) and some games employed voxels for landscape rendering - treating pixels on a 2D map as vertical slices rendered into a world.
You can see SpecBAS doing just that here:
Which is a reproduction of a popular game's world map from back in the day.
That was very interesting Dunny, I'm always being surprised by how much I don't know!
Still, I may yet try a few ideas of my own with that program if only because of the sheer ease with which it manipulates those little cubes. It occurred to me that it might be possible to use it to create a scene and then find some software to filter it with to reduce the rectilinear appearance, sort of like as if you put a piece of lightly frosted glass over the image, it would soften it.
I'd never have got anywhere without that tutorial though.
I liked that SpecBAS fly over of the scenery and in fact it looks pretty 'softened' too just as I was saying. Took one look at the listing though and it'll be a long time, if ever, I can get my head around stuff like that!
Dunny I follow what you said about how CPU intensive voxel images are to create but surely once a landscape, building whatever has been created using the program that has to be able to do the necessary computations, once that image is saved as a PNG then surely drawing it is no more resource greedy than any other pixel painted image?
Because in creating it all the hard works been done, as far as the final image is concerned its no more complex than any other to put up on screen? YES/NO?
That Magicavoxel is one hell of a drawing tool, it really suits me, you may remember how much I miss the old DeLuxePaint pixel paint program because of its ease of use. Sure there are a ton of other art programs out there and God knows I've tried out a fair few and they all fell down on the non-intuitive interface, it just didnt fit with my way of thinking and working and I've done quite a few tutorials to give them a fair chance but usually give up because wonderful and impressive though their output may be, it just is antithetical to my methodology.
Useful tools are worth their weight in pixels! I feel that this voxel painting might just be the answer to my graphic creation needs. Shows how far we've come, ten years ago I took a college course to learn Autodesk Inventor and even a powerful desktop computer was working flat out to render the blueprints, whereas this little HP15 laptop is making this Magicavoxel program fly, its amazing watching it manipulate, scale, rotate and apply without so much as a hiccup and I'm still running my word processor, listening to a music video on YouTube and the laptop isn't even breaking a sweat - so to speak. Amazing machine.
Correct! Saving as a PNG is fine, as displaying a PNG is pretty easy on the CPU and can be accelerated simply enough by graphics hardware.
However, that's not really the intended use of voxels. They're three-dimensional in nature, so a good fit for a game engine - you could move around the landscape (as indeed a few games do) but as I mentioned, they're essentially cubes that have to be rendered. These days we have geometry acceleration so are a lot more viable now than they were back in the late 90s when they first burst onto the scene. Back then we only had polygon drawing acceleration and texturing, the CPU had to convert their coordinates into 3D space - and voxels are a LOT more complex than simple polygon planes. So ironically, they fit better today's hardware than what we had when they were popular...
And for creating landscapes as static images, sure, they're fine. But you're really under-using them :)
If you know of anything else that might help me to make the most out of them then please do. I lost a link I had only yesterday where some Magicavoxel user said that he imports his drawings into (?) and that allows them to have animated extras. I was thinking of drawing a medieval village that could be walked through possibly a voxel based character but I dont want to bite off more than I can chew.
Here's my first piece of voxel art. I have it saved as .obj too if anyones interested. https://ibb.co/GJN0cXr
I positioned it to show the staircase that goes up on the inside (brown) the exit to the top chequer board tiled floor and put in lots of windows to be able to view the interior when loaded into a voxel paint program as an object.
Took me most of the day to create, with a few breaks for meals etc. from approx. 5am till about 6:30pm, so probably around twelve hours worth of work in all.
I've used voxels to recreate some Speccy games before, as it's a very easy way to create a 3D "world" without any modelling skills. I created them programatically, but I was curious if anyone had used something like Magicavoxel to create some more detailed scenes. The blockiness of old Speccy games translate quite well into voxels, so the feel of the games is retained (e.g,. Ant Attack).
It's not programming-related and you certainly can't use its output in anything, but it's a wonderful little app.
Well now I'm out fifteen bucks. I always swore I'd never try Steam but I took your recommendation and gave it a whirl and frankly it did nothing for me but that may not be its fault.
See I thought it would be a dload to try out on my machine but its not, you have to play it at Steam which is useless for me with a slow landline internet connection. Also it was a bloody massive install over 300 megs took hours to dload and then install the Steam software you have to have to play with the app. It took minutes for changes to take effect, the playing area is far too small, the control icons have no pop up text explaining their purpose, so all in all it wasn't happening for me.
I don't think you should even be thinking about using your creations other than as a png file for now.
Even I would find it hard to work with a voxel based scenery/character, so I doubt you can handle this easily.
Thanks for that sage advice Timmy. I just took a look at Unity (which was the program I mentioned as (?) having forgotten its name) and they call it EASY?! Crikey! I sat through the first tutorial and was completely lost within minutes. Oh well, at least I tried.
If I could write such a program I would make it so you can import a scene you want to make a character move through. Import the character then draw/trace a line showing how/where you want it to move. Allow the character to shrink if going back (call that the Z axis) and finally specify the time/frame rate to control the speed and duration.
All the other bells and whistles can be add on features because the basic action should be simple to implement.
Here's my first piece of voxel art. I have it saved as .obj too if anyones interested. https://ibb.co/GJN0cXr
I positioned it to show the staircase that goes up on the inside (brown) the exit to the top chequer board tiled floor and put in lots of windows to be able to view the interior when loaded into a voxel paint program as an object.
Took me most of the day to create, with a few breaks for meals etc. from approx. 5am till about 6:30pm, so probably around twelve hours worth of work in all.
Why not give Minecraft a whirl then? It's a proper game that revolves around building things using cubes (or voxels if you will). Some really imaginative people have built all sorts of things in it. There is a learning curve though, so YMMV.
Comments
Or do you mean the other way around?
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https://mb.boardhost.com/BikerMike/index.html?1593001131
Nowadays you can draw them using special 3d blocks drawing program, and MagicaVoxel is just one of those programs.
Games List 2016 - Games List 2015 - Games List 2014
Hmmm could work with SpecBAS though because it can handle graphics - well obviously, its a ZXBasic 'mask' - more or less, rather more than less, - running in Windows though limited to 256 colours, like you need any more!
Still prefer more conventional illustrations but the more tools the better, probably will give it a go, you never know when something might come in useful.
https://mb.boardhost.com/BikerMike/index.html?1593001131
SevenFFF / Threetwosevensixseven / colonel32
NXtel • NXTP • ESP Update • ESP Reset • CSpect Plugins
https://www.idtech.com/blog/minecraft-captain-trtl-tutorial-magica-voxel
which was very clearly explained and got me started to use the program. I tried to figure it out by myself but no luck, too much new stuff to learn. One caveat worth mentioning to Windows users, you may find yourself doing unwanted actions because of the habit of using the left mouse button! Get used to NOT automatically pressing it.
I still am not very happy with the blocky appearance but the program itself is a marvel and easy to get to grips with. That right button rotate and centre wheel pan feature is really useful and much needed. Watch the size of the little red pointer square, if it goes smaller you're painting farther back than you think!
https://mb.boardhost.com/BikerMike/index.html?1593001131
Voxels were popular quite a while ago, but fell out of favour as being wasteful and costly in rendering - while graphics cards would accelerate texture rendering, the CPU still had to perform mathematical transformations on vertices to inform the card of where to draw them. Voxels, by their nature, required a massive CPU budget as they were effectively very small 3D objects - and the graphical fidelity they brought was disappointing. Minecraft is a voxel engine of sorts, and also has deceptively high PC requirements.
There were optimisation techniques, but again they required CPU grunt work and the graphics cards of the day couldn't help (things like geometry transforms and shaders were yet to appear) and some games employed voxels for landscape rendering - treating pixels on a 2D map as vertical slices rendered into a world.
You can see SpecBAS doing just that here:
Which is a reproduction of a popular game's world map from back in the day.
Still, I may yet try a few ideas of my own with that program if only because of the sheer ease with which it manipulates those little cubes. It occurred to me that it might be possible to use it to create a scene and then find some software to filter it with to reduce the rectilinear appearance, sort of like as if you put a piece of lightly frosted glass over the image, it would soften it.
I'd never have got anywhere without that tutorial though.
I liked that SpecBAS fly over of the scenery and in fact it looks pretty 'softened' too just as I was saying. Took one look at the listing though and it'll be a long time, if ever, I can get my head around stuff like that!
https://mb.boardhost.com/BikerMike/index.html?1593001131
and there was many games with it, but now I dont remember the names.
Because in creating it all the hard works been done, as far as the final image is concerned its no more complex than any other to put up on screen? YES/NO?
That Magicavoxel is one hell of a drawing tool, it really suits me, you may remember how much I miss the old DeLuxePaint pixel paint program because of its ease of use. Sure there are a ton of other art programs out there and God knows I've tried out a fair few and they all fell down on the non-intuitive interface, it just didnt fit with my way of thinking and working and I've done quite a few tutorials to give them a fair chance but usually give up because wonderful and impressive though their output may be, it just is antithetical to my methodology.
Useful tools are worth their weight in pixels! I feel that this voxel painting might just be the answer to my graphic creation needs. Shows how far we've come, ten years ago I took a college course to learn Autodesk Inventor and even a powerful desktop computer was working flat out to render the blueprints, whereas this little HP15 laptop is making this Magicavoxel program fly, its amazing watching it manipulate, scale, rotate and apply without so much as a hiccup and I'm still running my word processor, listening to a music video on YouTube and the laptop isn't even breaking a sweat - so to speak. Amazing machine.
https://mb.boardhost.com/BikerMike/index.html?1593001131
However, that's not really the intended use of voxels. They're three-dimensional in nature, so a good fit for a game engine - you could move around the landscape (as indeed a few games do) but as I mentioned, they're essentially cubes that have to be rendered. These days we have geometry acceleration so are a lot more viable now than they were back in the late 90s when they first burst onto the scene. Back then we only had polygon drawing acceleration and texturing, the CPU had to convert their coordinates into 3D space - and voxels are a LOT more complex than simple polygon planes. So ironically, they fit better today's hardware than what we had when they were popular...
And for creating landscapes as static images, sure, they're fine. But you're really under-using them :)
https://mb.boardhost.com/BikerMike/index.html?1593001131
Even I would find it hard to work with a voxel based scenery/character, so I doubt you can handle this easily.
Games List 2016 - Games List 2015 - Games List 2014
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1043390/
It's not programming-related and you certainly can't use its output in anything, but it's a wonderful little app.
https://ibb.co/GJN0cXr
I positioned it to show the staircase that goes up on the inside (brown) the exit to the top chequer board tiled floor and put in lots of windows to be able to view the interior when loaded into a voxel paint program as an object.
Took me most of the day to create, with a few breaks for meals etc. from approx. 5am till about 6:30pm, so probably around twelve hours worth of work in all.
https://mb.boardhost.com/BikerMike/index.html?1593001131
- IONIAN-GAMES.com -
Lego is good'n'all, but it's not really a game. Unless you create some kind of tabletop rpg rules or something.
Well now I'm out fifteen bucks. I always swore I'd never try Steam but I took your recommendation and gave it a whirl and frankly it did nothing for me but that may not be its fault.
See I thought it would be a dload to try out on my machine but its not, you have to play it at Steam which is useless for me with a slow landline internet connection. Also it was a bloody massive install over 300 megs took hours to dload and then install the Steam software you have to have to play with the app. It took minutes for changes to take effect, the playing area is far too small, the control icons have no pop up text explaining their purpose, so all in all it wasn't happening for me.
https://mb.boardhost.com/BikerMike/index.html?1593001131
Thanks for that sage advice Timmy. I just took a look at Unity (which was the program I mentioned as (?) having forgotten its name) and they call it EASY?! Crikey! I sat through the first tutorial and was completely lost within minutes. Oh well, at least I tried.
If I could write such a program I would make it so you can import a scene you want to make a character move through. Import the character then draw/trace a line showing how/where you want it to move. Allow the character to shrink if going back (call that the Z axis) and finally specify the time/frame rate to control the speed and duration.
All the other bells and whistles can be add on features because the basic action should be simple to implement.
https://mb.boardhost.com/BikerMike/index.html?1593001131
https://mb.boardhost.com/BikerMike/index.html?1593001131
Haven't we been here before?
@luny@mstdn.games
https://www.luny.co.uk
Why not give Minecraft a whirl then? It's a proper game that revolves around building things using cubes (or voxels if you will). Some really imaginative people have built all sorts of things in it. There is a learning curve though, so YMMV.
Bytes:Chuntey - Spectrum tech blog.