This is very common practice: to create a terrain with some mountains and valleys, you can start off from a plane, subdivide it and then apply some displacement on it. Modelling the landscape (+”voxelisation”)īefore actually diving into my pseudo-voxels, I first made a landscape with fairly basic 3d tools: namely, a simple plane and some displacement based on a texture. My process can be cut down in four big steps: modelling the landscape and “voxelising” it, adding the buildings and the trees, making the vehicles and the smoke for the boat, and finally animating those vehicles for the end of the sequence. To create this scene, I used Blender’s EEVEE engine that allows for incredible real-time lighting and node-based shading.
My project was indeed heavily inspired (and motivated) by the things I’d seen in voxel art, but I still preferred to be liberated from some of its constraints - that’s “voxelish”! ) About this render… I wanted something uplifting and quiet, a way to create a small scene that is born and grows in a tiny chunk of time. Note that the water and the smoke coming out of the boat’s chimney are more in the cartoon style.Īll in all, my goal was to find my own style. Basically, you can see in the renders above that the ground is made of cubes but that they may collide (so those cubes aren’t real “3d units”) the buildings and trees are made of groups of stretched cubes, but they are rotated so I don’t follow the voxel art rule where all “height layers” in your scene are aligned with one another and finally: my little plane and boat are low-poly but not made out of voxels! That’s why I decided to go for an in-between: I drew inspiration from the voxel art references I’d found, and in particular I looked at the colours they were using, but I eventually only “approximated” voxels. Also, I was really keen on sticking with the tool I know and love, Blender, rather than going for the usual soft for voxel art afficionados: Magicavoxel. There are several well-known voxel artists nowadays: Ex Machina, Sir Carma, Ingen… and plenty more (check out the first link for a longer list)! All of them get their kicks abstracting reality through this particular design style and they make pretty amazing stuff ) “Voxelish”: inspired by… but not completely in-style! :)Īlthough I really like voxel art, I felt like I wanted to twist it to get something a bit more original. 3d cubes, as the “unit” of your 3d scene… and so to build all of your models just by assembling cubes! This idea was especially popularised by the famous game Minecraft, in the 2010s, a sandbox/adventure game where the world is made only of cubes:Ī screenshot of Minecraft: the entire world is made just out of cubes! The goal with voxel art is to use “ voxels”, i.e. Remember the old video games with flashy colour palettes and sharp edges? Well, that’s the sort of visual vibe pixel art wants to revive.Īnd you have a similar trend, in 3d, with voxel art. However, pixel art is about leaving those discontinuities be and even cherishing them to recover some of the early graphics aesthetics.
This can be further helped by having the pixel colours progress gradually, and by essentially “smoothing out” harsh discontinuities. By stepping back and looking at the pixels from afar, the human eye naturally “blends” the discrete pixels into gradients and continuous shades to create the illusion of smoothness. In 2d, the “ unit” of your image is the pixel: images are made of little tiny squares, each with one colour, and all those squares juxtaposed next to each other form complex pictures.
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