The Sandbox - How VoxEdit works

The Mission

This month I have the opportunity to work with a new software called VoxEdit to create a series of characters and assets. In this article I want to present a full explanation about this software (what it is for? how it works?) and my opinion about it.

Resources

• VoxEdit

VoxEdit, What it is?

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VoxEdit is a software to create, rig and animate your own custom voxel models. Right at the moment I'm writing this, the software is on a beta release from 31 of January 2020.

The software was created by The SandBox, a platform that allows you to sell voxels and gaming experiences on the Blockchain.

Althought there is still ways in which this software can be improved, is otherwise a great way to start creating your first models on voxels, since its interface is really simple and friendly for new users, which some features can be helpfull to new users.
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In this article, I want to talk about the difference interface that exist and what I found is the best way to work into create full humanoid characters.

VoxEdit, the modeler

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Once you open the program, you will find an interface with all the options that this software offers.
In this first article I just want to talk about the modeler and the animator.

So without further to do, let's begin. Once you click the modeler panel you will find small menu where you can access the most recent models that you have created, create a new asset and access a tutorial that explains the basic controls of this software.
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Once you create a new asset or open one you created before, you will find yourself with the modeler.

To explain the different tools I divided the interface in parts, which I divided not only for position but for use too:
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• 1 → Top part or Tools related to the viewer
• 2 → Tools to create Voxels
• 3 → Tools to create colour palettes
• 4 → Viewer

Although right now it seems there is too much, don't worry, they are really easier to use than you think. In the viewer part you can see the model on perspective or ortographic. You can also see the voxel as a pixelated image.

Tools related to the viewer:

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From left to right, the tools are these:
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• The home button
• Save button
• Duplicates the number of voxels
• Reduces the number of voxels by half
• Cut the space that is not used on the voxels
• This Trio of tools rotate the model around the axis, red in X, green for Y and blue for Z

• Inverts the model in the axis
• Acivates the simmetry mode that allows you to work on both sides at the same time. this mode is incremental, being able to activate the 3 axis at the same time to work on the 4 corners at the same time
• Density of voxels, you can choose the density you want in each of the axis
• You can view the "wireframe" of the model in different ways, each voxel individually, a mix between faces and voxels, faces and nothing

• The last button serves as a focus button, to center the camera into the model.

Tools to create Voxels:

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This set of tools are divided in several parts; the different modes for the tools, how can you apply the voxels, a colour picker and a pivot. From top to bottom:

Mode tools

• Select tool: you can select voxels and move them
• Add voxels
• Paint voxels
• Erase voxels 

​Tools for Voxels
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• Pencil to add one voxel add a time
• Line to add voxels creating a rect line
• Add/paint/erase voxels in an area that you can select
• Add/paint/erase voxels in a face
• Add/paint/erase in an area that has the same colour

Colour Picker

• Allows you pick the colour of the model without having to go to the palette, you can pick this tool clicking the alt button

Pivot

• To move the pivot to a different part of the model

Tools Colour Palette:

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One of the best things, in my opinion, of this software, is the colour palette.
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On the first part you can select the color you want, you can also past the code to get the colour. This part is pretty standard you can find similar pickers on photoshop and other softwares.

But the interesting part comes from the menu below (The 3 stripes), where you can store the different colours you use on the model. Change it form there. And save and load colour palettes.
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For example, to create an humanoid character that is composed by several parts, you will need the same palette to work, this feature allows you to save the colour palette and load it on the next part.

VoxEdit, the animator

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In comparision with the modeler part, the animator has less tools to use, which in some parts makes it really difficult to understand.
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But first things first, this is the first thing we see when we click on the animator in voxedit, we can see that is very similar to the modeler's start page, however in here we can see that instead of tutorials we have templates with animations already made. We will talk about this later on.

If we create a new project we can find these different tools:

To explain the different tools here I also divided the interface in different sections:
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• 1 → Top part or Tools related to skeleton
• 2 → The rigging section
• 3 → Timeline and animations
• 4 → Library on where we can see all the models that are inside the same folders as the animator, you can also import other vxm models, which creates a copy of the model in the folder.

Tools related to the rig or skeleton

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From left to right:
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• The home button to return to the principal page
• Save button
• Select the model part you are interested in
• Move the part of the model
• Rotate the part selected
• Two tools to choose between moving only the model or the bone, this is important becasue if you have selected the model you only move the model selected but if you move bone you move the one you selected and the children of the bone
• This button allows you to see the skeleton

• Allows you to see the boundaries of the voxels that you have created and imported into the scene
• Inverse kinematics
• Focuses the models in your scene

Rig

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On this part we can see the rig. When we start a new project we only have the root bone, to create a new bone we click on the three dots menu.

This menu allow us to create a child node, rename the node and duplicate or delete the node.
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Once we have the rig created we can add a model from the library, dragging the model into the bone. Once we have done this we can access to a button that is really useful, the pencil that appears on the model allows us to access the modeler window and retouch the model from the animator.
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When we have retouched the model, we can return to the animator window, you just need to click on the home button in the modeler window.

Timeline and animations

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From this window we can create the animations, here appears the different bones we created, and see the keyframes. It's important to notice that the animation is always recording, so it your are still creating the rig, don't move the timeline because if we move it we will create a keyframe.
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Once we have the fully animated model, we can create a new animation selecting the menu from the iddle animation, and select new animation. From this menu we can choose and change the animation.

On the Template you can find a set of animations already made, but you can retouch them because the controls of the animation are deactivated.

VoxEdit, a pipeline

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Once these two parts are explained, I'm going to propose one of the possible pipelines to create your own characters.

For that purpose, first I'm going to explain how the characters work in here. The characters are composed of different parts, in particular NINE (9) essential parts.
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• Head
• Chest
• Hips
• Leg x2
• Foreleg x2
• Feet x2
• Arm x2
• Forearm x2
• Hand x2

Once we have the parts defined, here comes the essential part and where the pipeline divides in two sections, you can either create the parts from the modeler and then import them into the animator. Or open the template and edit the models from the animator.

The first one has a lot of disanvantages, for example you can't control the proportions of the different parts of the models, so when you import them into the animator template to use the animations, the parts does not fit.

If you decide to create a new animation scene, you don't have the animations made, so you need to create them from scratch.
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So if your objective is to create humanoid models, I would recommend to open a template and edit each one of the pieces of the model from the pencil button as we explained on the animator section.

The proportions are already made and the animations work with the model, the cons are that you move the parts, not rotate them and you can edit the animations to make them custom for your model.

Conclusion

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All in all, this software is really easy to use and has a few things that are pretty great.
​Such as the connection of the animator with the modeler, and the colour palette.
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However there is still a lot of room for improvement, the software is a bit slow and has no keyboard gestures, which is quite umconfortable (there is no CTRL+S). So you can only save by clicking the save button. There're are all quite small faults but I noticed that these small things slow your work process making the modeling quite slow feat.

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​Laura Usón

​3D ARTIST

​Passionate about videogames, movies and creatures. artist by day and superhero at night.

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