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[Snakey]

So I was idling in #tigirc when somebody mentioned about the open source Tig pixelation project. I was thinking for a bit, and I thought what about a really good voxel editor which supported standard photoshop like layers, blending and so forth. The premise of the idea is to still allow some form of pixel crafting but also have the added ability to be able to then use the voxel to create many of the other angles. I could then look at doing other things such as allowing for animation, automatic shading and so forth.

I'd like to make it an indie tool too, and perhaps ask for either donations or make it into a commercial product (you know, something like $5USD).

Opinions?

[increpare]

do you have any ideas as to how input would work?

(I wouldn't be willing to contribute financially, but I might be willing to contribute programmingwise)

[Snakey]

I was thinking of having three base concepts when it came to making the voxels. A voxel could contain 'sets', 'slices' and 'layers'.

A set represents a sub voxel within the voxel itself. A place where this would be used for example would be if you were creating a character as your main voxel and then all the little pieces like a helmet, gun or whatever else would be a sub. This would act like sets in Photoshop, and you can toggle them off and on globally. This is so that when you make these set pieces it won't be a stab in the dark in how large things have to be.

A slice is a cross section of the voxel. I decided against standard shelling of voxels, and rather allow people to create cross sections of things instead. This would allow some extra nifty tools, which would allow people to say create exploding voxels which would automatically create a sprite sheet with the voxel being blown up or something along those lines. It also allows better flexibility with animation perhaps. Slices aren't stored really, the user would just choose a vertical or horizontal direction to slice the voxel which he/she could then work on. At least that is how I had it in my head.

Lots of layers can exist within a single slice, and they're there to help aid the coloration of pixels themselves. So you could apply several layers to a slice to produce the same sort coloration effects.

That sort of how I had envisioned it in my head.

[agj]

Sounds interesting, though I don't think that there is enough general interest in a voxel editor. The way you describe it, it sounds more like trixels than regular voxels, actually. Basically, it's probably more work than it's worth, though I would probably toy around with it if it were free and easy enough to use. You should come up with a target user before you actually consider charging for this!

[Snakey]

Yeah, although perhaps I need to sort of provide examples of what this sort of thing could potentially do. Perhaps a prototype is required!

[Titch]

It sounds interesting and useful, I'm just not sure exactly what for.

[Bennett]

I often use 3d models as a template for pixel animations. So I can imagine it would be fairly useful in place of that, since it's probably a lot easier to make a static 3d voxel art than a good 3d mesh.

On the other hand, it's a lot easier to animate a 3d mesh.

Still, a lot of people don't have the access, time, or skills to make 3d meshes as a foundation for their pixel art. So this could have a good niche.

If you go ahead with it, it would be great if it included some logic to improve the niceness of the 2d pixel output. You know, following rules like trying to make straight lines look like

Code:

OO
  OO
    OO
      OO

rather than

Code:

OO
  OOO
     O  
      OO

[Snakey]

I'll try making a prototype this weekend and see how it goes. I've been thinking about animation and I think I know of a way to even use something like skeletal animation to do it. Although because pixel art is pretty 'detailed' in that a single pixel can mean something looks right and wrong, it'll probably be a precursor step more than anything else.

[Snakey]

Here is a quick stab at what I wanted to sort of do. If you were to shrink this image by 25% with nearest neighbor filtering you do sort of get that hand drawn pixelated look.

I have some aliasing issues but then again this tool won't really be able to give you 100% results anyways. Ideally it will just give pixelators a good head start in which they can clean things up. Sort of like how some animators will start off with mo cap and tweak animations.

Only about three hours work, and I hard coded the ammo box into the source code ... so yeah, perhaps a few more weekends and I'll actually have a tool. I just wanted to test out the rendering style and see if it would work for what I wanted it to do.

So far, it seems good.

[agj]

Well, that looks quite good! There are some artifacts, though, in the intersections between voxels; you think that can be fixed?

[Snakey]

I'm not quite sure yet. I'll try spending some time in the weekend to see if I can clean them up, but perhaps not. It still gives pixelators a good head start though, and I guess some pixel clean up may be required.

See what I can do though.