I just wanted to share with you some artwork we have done for our upcoming game. The game is ‘Voxeliens’ (basically a 3D version of space invaders) and we’ve used Blender for various aspects of it’s production. However, what I wanted to show off here is one of the character renders we have made as promotional material.
It’s fairly basic compared to much of the work on this forum but it is true to the visual style of the game (which is based on voxels). The image was made on about five hours by assembling the character from blocks and then using ambient occlusion and emissive surfaces for the lighting. Hope you like it!
I’m a new user so I don’t think I’m allowed to post links… if you want to know more about our game then just search for ‘Voxeliens’ and you should find it. If anyone else feels that posting the link would be appropriate then please do so
Looks pretty cool, won’t he be a little high poly though? (if there are a lot of them). I would just use a few textures but thats because I can’t even use GLSL, lol.
Their game isn’t being made with the BGE (if you didn’t know, sorry if you did :)). It is being made directly in C++, and since it is based on voxels, they will be able to handle a lot of polys and stuff much better. Much like Minecraft if you are familiar with that.
@VolumesOfFun
Went and looked at your site and I have to say, that’s a pretty cool looking little game you have there! I really like the look of it. As for the render, I do like it, but 5 hrs! Ouch (and no offense :)). Nice picture though.
“Assembled from blocks”, “five hours”??? Are you manually placing the blocks, or are you starting with a 3D array of blocks? If you’re doing it manually, I’d suggest starting with an array.
I’ll just clarify a few points. The character was indeed modeled by placing individual blocks though I could copy an paste the muliple layers of the body and the legs so it didn’t really take that long. The five hours I mentioned was the total time for modeling, lighting and rendering, with the final render taking something like 15 minutes. I did a few test renders first as I was trying to get the lighting to look good.
The model above was made for promotional purposes such as ‘box art’ and isn’t actually used in the game. The version from the game is has a lower polygon count and uses normal mapping to simulate the beveled edges. Also the lighting is lower quality as our game engine doesn’t support the nice ambient occlusion and emissive surfaces of Blender. The in-game version is below so you can compare.
So your proposed workflow would be to use the array modifier to create an array of the blocks, and then delete some of them to ‘carve out’ the shape. Presumably I’d colour the the blocks afterwards. Interesting, I’ll keep that in mind for the future.
Yep, ok, I can see that makes sense. Espessially as the size of the models increases (and we might want larger voxel models for our next project). I still have a lot to learn about Blender as I’m more programmer than artist, so I shall give that a go. Thanks again!
Add 3 array modifiers. Set to Count 9 and 1.1 relative offset on X, Y and Z respectively.
Apply the modifiers.
Edit mode. Mesh->Vertices->Separate->by Loose Pieces (takes a minute(729 pieces))
Object Mode.
Select, using boundary select, and delete to match this profile in both ortho front and ortho side view.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]176348[/ATTACH]
On each side delete the two cubes for the eyes.
Set materials on a bunch of cubes at the same time. Select many that need the same material and apply the material(applies to the last selected), then do Ctrl-L and choose Materials to apply the material to the rest of the selection.
It should takes like 15 minutes if you’ve already got your materials ready to go. Not putting down what you’ve been doing, I know your early on the learning curve, just saying Blender can produce a really quick solution if you know some shortcuts. I’m still new too! In order to do this I had to look up and learn the Ctrl-L shortcut to link a material to a whole selection.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]176347[/ATTACH]
Again, I think what your doing is great, and the game looks like fun.
No offense taken, it’s always great to learn new tricks. When it comes to art I’m still at the ‘my only tool is a hammer’ stage. It get there in the end but it’s good to see there are better approaches. Carving the shape out in 2D (step 8) is obvious when you think about it and yet I missed that trick.
Of course, this is part of the reason that the voxel art style really appeals to us for our game. It makes it possible for a programmer to still come up with some nice looking assets.
