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[Kakapio]

Hey,

So I saw a game a while back on Reddit called In The Shadows. I found the art style very appealing, and thought about using it. Pixel art is simpler than most art, but is still quite hard to learn. Voxel art would be relatively painless, as it could be plain but still look good with 3D lighting effects. Using a 2D sprite for enemies/characters seems like a good idea, with perhaps some sort of lighting shader. Are any of you doing this/are you aware of any games actively doing this?

[Sakar]

Square Enix recently announced Octopath Travelers, which uses a style like that.





Not really voxels, but has a similar vibe to what you describe. I think it could work quite well.

[keo]

I don't know if this counts but it could give you ideas.  Working on something similar but it renders voxels as pixel art, with some post processing like outlining, inner outlining (which helps separate overlapping parts) and indexed shading to match the pixel art style of the game.


It blends in pretty well:

I had to work on a custom animator/renderer for this process, it's not too hard to implement if this is something that interests you and you want to do yourself.  Translate/rotate/scale a 3d array of voxel data based on the rotation, position, scale of the bones they are attached to, so using trig or matrix math to manipulate each point.  Like image rotation algorithms, you will get empty spaces of voxels unless you use some form of interpolation.  To keep it simple I just doubled or triple the voxel data in each position with slight offsets inorder to fill in the gaps.  You might notice it's not perfect.

The choice for me was not so much about style, but having assets that are modular, able to be rotated at arbitrary angles, easy to animate, easy to fix and change designs later in development while having those changes be reflected in all their animations.

For modelling I just take voxel data from other dedicated voxel modelling apps like MagicaVoxel and Qubicle.

[Kakapio]

I don't know if this counts but it could give you ideas.  Working on something similar but it renders voxels as pixel art, with some post processing like outlining, inner outlining (which helps separate overlapping parts) and indexed shading to match the pixel art style of the game.


It blends in pretty well:

I had to work on a custom animator/renderer for this process, it's not too hard to implement if this is something that interests you and you want to do yourself.  Translate/rotate/scale a 3d array of voxel data based on the rotation, position, scale of the bones they are attached to, so using trig or matrix math to manipulate each point.  Like image rotation algorithms, you will get empty spaces of voxels unless you use some form of interpolation.  To keep it simple I just doubled or triple the voxel data in each position with slight offsets inorder to fill in the gaps.  You might notice it's not perfect.

The choice for me was not so much about style, but having assets that are modular, able to be rotated at arbitrary angles, easy to animate, easy to fix and change designs later in development while having those changes be reflected in all their animations.

For modelling I just take voxel data from other dedicated voxel modelling apps like MagicaVoxel and Qubicle.

That's really cool! It looks good :D


Is that a custom engine? If so, did you write it in OpenGL?

[keo]

Thanks!  I should of been explicit, the animation software renders spritesheet images to use in our game engine.
It would be cool if this was rendering in real time, someone more savvy could probably use voxel engine optimization tricks I would assume.

[ProgramGamer]

Good thread

[Kakapio]

Thanks!  I should of been explicit, the animation software renders spritesheet images to use in our game engine.
It would be cool if this was rendering in real time, someone more savvy could probably use voxel engine optimization tricks I would assume.

Interesting! Is this software available to the public?

[keo]

It will be, it's just not as user friendly as I would like it atm.  I'll let you know when it's released, should be in a month or so.

[Kakapio]

It will be, it's just not as user friendly as I would like it atm.  I'll let you know when it's released, should be in a month or so.

Alright, thanks! If you ever need some feedback or someone to test it, I'm down :D

I'm a programmer (albeit a relatively inexperienced one) so I can try to give some advice. Do you have some sort of page set up for it, or maybe a mailing list/development log?

[keo]

Thanks ovicior I might ask for testing at a later date.  I keep an everything blog at dkeobun.tumblr.com

[molikto]

Also take a look at this: http://www.badlogicgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=22738

I think they are rendering voxels at real time, not as a preprocessing process. But their characters is pixel art + normal maps

[keo]

Neat!  Looks great!  I'm trying to find more info on it.  Are they sampling the voxel objects to a rendertexture?  Not sure what's going on. 

[DuskWolf]

I am sorry for resurrecting this thread but I thought Keo's work was pretty awesome and I have been looking into doing something similar.

I was wondering if Keo has made any progress on his engine.