Voxel art
saymygame.com
saymygame.com
Sorry for my website having problem handling so many visits coming from HN :x Really need to change provider.
If it still doesn't work for you, you can check my art on my twitter page : https://twitter.com/Sir_carma
And don't hesitate to ask me questions over there, I'll gladly answer! Cheers Sir_carma
Couldn't bear to see you left hanging like that!
[1] : http://cloudflare.com
Alternatively, if there's a place we can buy the art, that would work as well!
Can you please briefly explain your working pipeline? i.e. What tool you use? Do you use 2d tools to sketch it out first? What are the materials on the voxels?
I only use Magica Voxel, I love its intuitive controls and interface (but it's very limited in terms of max size - 126^3 voxels scenes- and no selection tools, so cube by cube).
There's no "real materials" in Magica voxel, it's only colors. But you can add some attributes to a chosen color (4 attributes available at the moment : diffuse, metal, glass, emission).
I render directly in Magica Voxel then, since the last 6 months, I started to do more and more post-production on my scenes with Adobe Lightroom (could have use Photoshop but it's easier for me on Lightroom), to work on lighting, colors, etc.
All of my work really have to be considered like concept arts (or maybe even sometimes target render) but not in-engine. There's so many cubes in my scenes that in Unity it would be very slow. But I believe we will be soon able to have that quality in-engine!
> Really need to change provider
It's more to do with the Wordpress theme that you're using. Hitchcock loads full resolution images for each portfolio item, rather than providing a smaller and more sensible thumbnail.
Consequently you're getting a home page that is 90mb in size.
If you have any web developer friends you can probably get this fixed for the cost of some beer.
Unfortunately it didn't take me long to feel the limitations of that art style. The lack of sloped surfaces is a huge problem, which can't be mitigated even with custom shaped voxels. Past a certain point, tasteful low-poly modeling (like http://www.chelseasaunders.com) is both easier and looks better, especially when animated.
I think the closest 3D analog to pixel art is not voxel art, but low poly art with low resolution textures. Something like this: http://orig03.deviantart.net/c602/f/2012/065/8/f/lowpoly_nak... is a restricted aesthetic in its own right, and looks great in a variety of views, but would be very hard or impossible to do with voxels. It's a shame that few people are pursuing that direction nowadays, everyone is jumping on the voxel bandwagon.
Btw, does anyone have any examples of this they like? Games, old or new, that used low poly exceptionally well? Several PSX games come to mind for me...
I think that's why in most of the examples in Sir_carma's portfolio are presented from a distance, where the perspective projection will have less effect.
> I think the closest 3D analog to pixel art is not voxel art, but low poly art with low resolution textures.
I disagree. Low-poly art is a vector format, so it makes more sense to me to compare it to 2D vector drawings with a small number of control points.
Voxel art has similar resolution and color limitations to pixel art, and they share a certain aesthetic that I don't see in low-poly designs.
Out of curiosity, do you still feel that voxels are worthwhile? Compared to the amazing stuff that you can achieve with polygons, e.g. http://www.orsispanyol.com/art/.
Still, from the perspective of making something unique looking, many people seem to like voxels. It is almost comparable to the preference of pixel art over vector art. As a warning, if you do anything with voxels, even just something Minecraft-ish, you will be opening the floodgate for many technical battles. :) From a conservative perspective, it is hard to justify the use of them.
https://voxel.codeplex.com/ http://guillaumechereau.github.io/goxel/
I'm the coder of Smith and Winston [http://www.indiedb.com/games/smith-winston] and we've found Qubicle to be the best by far.
Thanks got reawakening fond memories :D
I think that simple 3d models with GI effectively make programmer's art that look minimal, but not necessarily cheap.
I'm sorry, but this just cracks me up! LOL!
(To explain, "regular art" was and still is pixel art, and "pixel art" is pixel art at an artificially low resolution, emulating the lower hardware capabilities of old machines.)
And to answer your question: When computers get fast enough and have enough memory, you could have voxels at higher resolutions. When individual voxels do practically get too small to see, you have the analog of what happened with pixel art.
We were calling pixel artists "pixel artists" before "pixel art" came to be a distinctive low resolution style. That's just a fact.
And, no, there is no such thing as infinite resolution.
Now you're getting philosophical! :)
I thought they were fast enough and with enough memory for this, at least with static scenes in the style of this portfolio. Do you know of any art created this way?
I think the most practical way out would be procedural generation, but then it's arguably not manual art anymore.
I guess it could be practical with the right kind of environment. If you had all the tools of a good pixler like Deluxe Paint extended to a voxel-painting program.
As opposed to throwing rays and calculating the intersection with the fractal's equation.
I'm thinking that maybe rendering voxels is both slower and produces worse results in this case.
I can confidently say that the native description of the objects seen in that video is a direct mapping from 3d-coordinates to values. [Edit: So you can't just simply directly calculate an intersection point with a polygon. If you wanna cast a ray, you have to sample the mapping all along the way the ray is taking, in discrete steps, until you get a "hit". Optionally, you can then use e.g. bisection to get a more precise position of the intersection.]
For you edification, here's another video of a high-res voxel world. The voxel models used where converted from vectorized surface models. But the description of the models used by the renderer is a proper voxel description, maybe some octree-like thing, or whatever they came up with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3Ets6bWjEQ
examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/low_poly/ http://lopoco.tumblr.com
Just like pixel art is inspired by the aesthetics of low resolution graphics and/or limited color palettes, low poly is inspired by those of early 3d art and games, like N64, Playstation, etc.
I meant voxel art in the way of 2D art that is not inspired in the limitations of resolution or color palettes. Think of scanned drawings, "HD" video games or most DeviantArt stuff. These works are made of 2D pixels, but the 2D pixels are small enough to not be individually visible.
This is what I was talking about specifically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AvCxa9Y9NU
Raytracing also lets you produce a 2D raster image of a 3D scene with arbitary-resolution surfaces in it, although that still relies on geometric scene descriptions.
Otherwise, it's a bit of a problem to produce; too many voxels to hand-place.
Volume rendering is an entire sub-field of computer graphics that deals with many representations of 3D data.
CG clouds are often volume rendered using continuous noise fields. CG haze and smoke are sometimes volume rendered using shape descriptions of the boundary, and 3D modulation functions.
Google "Volumetric siggraph" to find a ton of papers about other ways to do 3D volume rendering. Check the images tab for lots of examples of volume rendering.
*edit: btw I can tell you stories about volume rendering non-voxel data from CG production if you want. I used several non-voxel volumetric rendering techniques for fire, smoke and water on the Shrek and Madagascar movies.
A fun presentation I remember from siggraph was when Digital Domain presented their volume rendered they called "Voxel Bitch" and talked about rendering the avalanche sequence in the Vin Diesel "XXX" movie. IIRC, voxel bitch was a volume renderer, not limited to regular 3D voxel grids.
https://www.siggraph.org/conferences/reports/s2002/tech/film...
Yes!
So, volume rendering in production. I was in the effects department at PDI/DreamWorks, and I used several different volume rendering techniques over the years. We all did, part of why it was such a cool place to work was how free we were to use or invent whatever techniques we wanted to get our shots done - most CG production is a lot more fixed pipeline and regimented than that.
Particle rendering (aka splatting) is probably the main staple for volumetrics in the FX toolbox. Particles are best thought of as soft transparent spheres, but usually implemented as camera facing polygons. I used large volumetric particle sets for impact dust from feet & fight sequences in Shrek, and for smoke and fog and fire in later Shrek productions and in Madagascar. The visible texture actually comes from changes in particle density, and particle simulations were often in the millions of particles.
We used a ray-marching volume renderer implemented inside of a shader for some of the foggy sets in the Shrek productions. Pretty much the same tricks going around ShaderToy today. Dragon fire was another ray-marching shader that would ray-trace spinning spheres, and then ray-march through a noise field inside each sphere.
In one shot on Madagascar, I used a combination of particles and volume rendering and geometry when the boat blows it's horn and flattens the island. I happened to be working on the island's foliage as well. We didn't have low res standins for the plans for a shot this wide, and it was taking more than 12 hours to render IIRC. We wrote a script that culled any geometric or volumetric detail that projected down to smaller than a pixel, and it brought renders down to an hour or two, and turned out to cut something like 90% of the scene geometry. Doh.
- Google "generative art". You'll find lots of images and you can usually work out roughly how they were made. Try to reverse engineer them and create your own facsimile.
- Check out links here http://blog.hvidtfeldts.net/index.php/generative-art-links/
- Manning have a book here: https://www.manning.com/books/generative-art
- GRATUITOUS SELF PROMOTION ALERT! I'm working on book which is part functional programming (in Scala) and part generative art.
Current draft is here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8669329/creative-scala.p...
Code is here: https://github.com/underscoreio/doodle
Discussion forum is here: https://gitter.im/underscoreio/scala
Feedback very much appreciated!
if you see beautiful art and feel a yearning to explore art it probably means you might have some talent for it.
the best place to start in my opinion is by learning about colour theory which is one of the fudamentals of visual art, like with programming learning some fudamentals at the beginning saves alot of time in the long run. Learning how to use colours will instantly stop the stuff you make from looking like it is made by a 5 year old, it will make it look at minimum presentable and something you will want to show to other people and that they will react positively to.
It is a time taking investment but a very emotionally rewarding one.