Today’s piece is our first in what will be a long history of guest posts, where we invite one of our wonderful community members to write about whatever subject they’d like within the world of video game development. Big thanks to Zach Soares for this amazing post on Voxels in games. Enjoy!
Hi, I’m Zach and I’m a professional voxel artist who’s been making voxel art for a variety of projects. I’m writing this piece to talk to you all about the implication of voxel art in video games and where I see that going. Voxels are a rendering method that have existed for a long time, in fact, it was in early competition with polygons as the rendering methods for games and well…. we saw how that turned out.
While polygons have been the way games have grown and evolved artistically, voxel art has slowly started to make a push in the medium.
Only recently have voxels started to make a major push as an alternative form of art for video games. The reasoning behind this is the growth of rendering tech and hardware being a lot more capable. Computers would original run solely off of processor chips since graphic cards weren’t common. Now we have graphic cards that can offload a lot of information and processor chips are capable of so much more computing from back when (before 1990s). Although you can attribute the growth of the artistic form to those who make voxel editors. A way to edit voxels outside of the game engine and later passing that over to the game space is extremely important. This impact is the same impact that 2D editing software’s had on games prior to what they were today (what you’d call “programmer art” was what was used before editors and full blow game engines existed).
Thanks to softwares like Qubicle, MagicaVoxel and VoxelShop, artists have been able to express themselves via games using voxels. These tools have the ability to not only export models and pieces as raw voxel objects, they are able to export these models as usable Polygon objects. Now yes, I know earlier I spoke about how voxels and polygons are two different things. I might be contradicting myself at the moment on what is a voxel model but what we’re talking about is voxel art. The art in which voxels are the root or implication.
Voxel art is an interesting thing. It can be seen as pixel art in the third dimension or a totally different thing. It’s best to separate voxels from all other things. It is the only way to really figure out what voxel art is; the same way polygons are separated from 2D illustrations. Pixel art does lend itself to voxels, it does indeed help with the development of the form but it can also restrict the style. Voxels are 3D and thus need to be thought of that way when working with it, otherwise your work will come off as 2-dimensional even if it was being projected in a 3D space.
There are many types of voxel art but I’ll just list and explain a few below.
Vector voxel art: See this as the style that uses only 90 degree bends when representing curves. It is a very clean style that is easy to read at varying scales. Crossy Roads uses this style in the most part.
Pixelated voxels (flat shaded): This style is currently less common but has been done. Utilizing pixel art in its entirety, the artistic pieces done using this style try its best to represent pixel art in a 3D space. This style has to be flat shaded to be forgiving for its bends. With any form of shadows applied the piece and style will be ruined.
Boxy/blocky voxels: Boxy voxels are what I would categories for games in the vein of minecraft. The style is very blocky and looks like the world is made up of cubes, even the characters. It’s a very forgiving style in that it is easy to work with on a technical and artistic level. (this isn’t to say it is easy to execute. It still requires talent and skill to make good looking boxy art). Often this style uses textures on the voxel sides instead of being made purely out of voxels.
Freeform Voxel art: This voxel style ignores the rules of bends from vector art and embraces its curves. While it is the most difficult to manage in terms of technical rendering, it can yield interesting results. The use of SSAO here is meant to emphasize the jagged-ness of voxels when built at a higher resolution. Using simple colors and ignoring manual shading (something often done in pixel art). Applying shading on the model should only be done in-engine as adding your own coloring won’t yield visible results.
These are the four varying forms of voxel art I can distinguish. They each serve their own purposes and can impact the style, and feel of a game tremendously. What’s very important to note is that to be voxels or voxel art it needs to be perfect at the pixel level. A cube is a cube in the same way a pixel is a pixel. They do not bleed into one another, they do not clip into each other, they are stuck in a grid. That is the primary constraint for voxel art that needs to be distinguished although it can be circumvented if you were to make objects individual from one another and later put them together in a 3D modeling software, or engine. To be clear, these are not all the styles that exist for voxel art. I’ve personally made a handful of different looking styles but above is what I would consider the 4 circles.
After looking at the Venn Diagram above you’ll notice some styles can bleed into one another. This hints to the fact that more styles can come from what is already established. The reason why I’ve made these 4 styles the pillars of voxel art is because they are so different from one another but can still lend to each other. A perfectly good example would be games like Trove or Vox which uses a mixed style between Freeform Voxel art and Blocky Voxel art. Their styles work well with SSAO and still have a relatively high level of detail (the voxel resolution/density in models).
This is all I have to summarize when it comes to voxels and their involvement with video games. Unsurprisingly voxels can be used for many other things outside of making models. A good example of its external application would be the particle effects system in Unreal Engine 4 which uses voxels to do advanced dynamic particle systems. Even outside of the realm of games you can use voxels as a means to demonstrate live data since a single voxel can represent a subset of data. This is something used in city rendering but can be very process intensive. All of this is to say that voxel art isn’t a fade, nor is it dying out. It still has room to grow and can very much become a viable way to make high level AAA games, and mobile games alike.
Thanks for reading, talk to you soon!
Zach Soares aka “y2bcrazy”
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