2010-09-25

Voxels

Yeah, yeah, I know, not really getting anywhere with the games. S'bad, but I'll get back to it.

I've been writing a voxel editor recently.
Voxel's aren't an easily concept to explain, although they're a simple concept to understand. In essence a voxel is a 3D pixel. That is a standard bitmap you create in paint is made up of pixels along the x and y dimensions, voxels add a z dimension allowing for easy 3D rendering.

So, I've written a (currently) simple editor for building voxel art with the intention of using it in my future games.
Right now the editor isn't much use for more than simple voxelart. I've been test-driving the editor for most of today and know there's about half a dozen features that need adding to its toolbox.
So, without further ado, this is what I managed yesterday:


For those not in the know, it's called a Menger Sponge which is a fairly basic cube fractal. This is taken to the 3rd iteration and contains 8000 cubes of which I clicked every bloody one (and don't I know it!)

So, will be adding some basic things like copy and paste, colour fill and keyboard shortcuts.
Also need to compress the voxel save files as a 27x27x27 image such as this one clocks in at 9.5MB.
At that point I'll make a simple video explaining more about the editor and if people are very lucky I might release it.

So what is the point in all this? Well it's to develop an art style for projects 3 and 4. Hoping having some artwork to play with will motivate me to make a move on them.

I also might have a try at doing some simple pure-animation using some voxels, will see how the games go first though.