2023 Collab: Week 31 “Voxel Style” - VOTE CLOSED

[FedPete]

This is the Blender Collaboration 2023, week 31 challenge. Don’t be afraid to join, a lot of us are beginners. This is all to practice, have fun, learn, and get together.

This week’s subject is “Voxel Style”.

• Pick a subject of your choice and make a scene on it in voxel style. Anything goes, animals, environments, games, etc. so long as the result looks voxel-based.
• In 3D computer graphics, a voxel represents a value on a regular grid in three-dimensional space. As with pixels in a 2D bitmap, voxels themselves do not typically have their position explicitly encoded with their values. Instead, rendering systems infer the position of a voxel based on its position relative to other voxels.
• Examples

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• Subject selected by the previous Week 29 “Playstation 1 era” winner VVruba

The rules are simple. 1 subject, 1 entry, 1 week.
You create whatever object or scene or whatever you can think of that has something to do with the subject. It can be as simple or complicated as you want, all entries are welcome!
Post your picture here in this thread. At the end of the week, we start to vote. And if you are the winner, you may choose the next subject and win a unique badge.

Deadline: 2023-08-05T21:55:00Z

• Last week’s collab: Blender Collab: Week 30 “Living architecture”
• Next week: 32 - Summer day at the beach.
• See all previous challenges in Hall of Fame 2023
• Halls of fame 2022, 2021, 2020

If you want to stay informed of the @ BlenderCollab ?
Subscribe or unsubscribe to this “BlenderCollab” group.

[Cows]

WIP
Render 1

Render 2

What should I change?

[VVruba]

Bubble Bobble dragons(?) in voxel style.

I used this for reference:

reference

Which I think is part of the OG art for the game. I did add some fruit in the background whereas the full original had enemies sitting in bubbles, which I’m too lazy to do
I did three render passes and combined them in Affinity Photo for the outline, hope that’s not too cheaty.

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Not sure if it’s fair for me to compete in a topic I chose but I really wanted to make something.
I’ll leave the decision to you peeps and I’ll use the result for future posts as well:

• Compete
• Don’t Compete

[VVruba]

I thought that maybe I’ll explain my process for those who maybe don’t know where to get started with this challenge. To get an easy voxel-style look you can use the modifier in Blender and set it to . It may need some clean-up in certain areas which you can do by deleting offending faces and extruding edges with snapping set to vertices.

For colours one easy way of doing it is to use Circle Select [C] then unwrap selected “blocks” and scale the UVs by 0, that way you end up with a single dot that can be then used to “sample” a colour from an image. You could make your own “palette” texture with a bunch of colours or just use a reference image like I did. Another option is to just assign new materials for each colour.

[FedPete]

@VVruba

I did three render passes and combined them in Affinity Photo for the outline

Using other tools is allowed. It’s part of the 3D work process. Many artists use Substance-painter to do materials and paint the model. Your entry obviously shows the use of 3D art (Blender). Remember, the Collab is not a contest, but a means to learn the usage of Blender.

If you want to explore Blender more, then the black and white outline could also be done in the Blender post-processing tools.
It is possible to render your scene in different configurations, manipulate them (as if Photoshop), and then merge them.

Like my Viper! One scene with two generated views, which I manipulate and merge.

[VVruba]

I tried doing it in blender but this was the result:

result

Not to mention it took like 5 min after the render to generate…
Perhaps there is a better way but I couldn’t find anything like “outline” in Blenders post-processing nodes.

I know it’s not a contest and there aren’t any big prizes but there is still some competition and a winner which is why I’m worried about things like unfair advantage by using other software or just having significantly more experience using Blender than others.

[Cows]

Damn it I did it the hard way. Duplicating and moving blocks

[VVruba]

The remesh isn’t perfect so depending on complexity of the object it may be better to do it “the hard way”. Depends really if cleaning up the re-mesh will be quicker or slower than duplicating cubes.

[VVruba]

@Cows

What should I change?

I like the addition of a tree but on its own it feels kinda lonely. Maybe add more trees? And bushes.
You could add something to the water like a kayak or a boat or some ducklings. It’s kind of empty at the moment and there is no reason for us to see so much of it. If you don’t want to add to it than zooming in on the accident would be good.
You could add some debris from the explosion, maybe some still flying through the air leaving smoke behind.
There could also be skid marks on the road from the cars breaking, not sure if it would look appropriate in voxel style but you could try.
The road could use some lamp posts for when it’s nighttime.

[FedPete]

@Cows

Duplicating and moving blocks

You can also go for the basic shape keys!

And my solution would be to explore Grease paint in combination with geo nodes.
But my laptop isn’t fast enough and a lot of study time.
Maybe someone on the web …?

[VVruba]

I don’t think I can edit my previous post because of the poll so here is an updated version of my scene:

I decided to do away with the black outline and only keep the white one, I also added some bloom effects through the compositor to make the scene more “shiny”.

[HobbyPirates]

Eevee

Cycles

I’ve never played with these tools, I just wanted to test it out on one of our projects that’s in progress. Thanks for sharing the information of how to do something like this!

[Kzanna]

To quick test the style, I used a ready-made model. I’m not happy with the result, let’s see if I can do better. I feel that it will be more convenient for me to make a model from individual cubes than to use Remesh (@VVruba , thanks for the tip)

[VVruba]

This already looks quite nice to me but I’m excited to see what you come up with.

I think in general, and this is just my opinion, the smaller cubes that you use the less impressive the result is. When you can approximate the larger shape with bigger elements it gives it that artsy feel, kind of like brush strokes on a painting, or pixel art. That said, it largely depends on your subject too.

[Kzanna]

You’re right about smaller cubes.
Now I am trying to put something from cubes, manually. Harder when modifying ready model. The result is not satisfactory

[VVruba]

A silly as it may sound it might be worth going into Minecraft creative world and doing a mock-up there.

[anastasions]

partially voxel barbie movie props

[Kzanna]

The next attempt was to build a couple of cats and dogs out of cubes. It takes much more time than it appears from the result.

And my last try. These are rather low-poly birds.

[VVruba]

These are really good, I like the dogs&cats especially. I think the bird one could use a lighter sky colour but it’s looking good otherwise.