Create vehicles and wheels for The Sandbox
Creating cars and wheels in The Sandbox involves ensuring balanced designs by referencing real-life examples and using gradients for added dimension
Mission
How to make circular wheels and cars in Vox Edit, as we can create voxelised objects and then rotate them in the engine. Creating the illusion of "circular objects”.
Resources
- Magical Voxel
- Vox Edit
- Pureref
First steps
Look up for both real and voxel art references of the vehicle we are going to make, a hot rod, and I will compile all the references in Pureref.
Blocking
Use two 32x32x32 blocks to determine the height of a humanoid character and make your asset proportional to the rest.
Make a blocking using flat colors focusing only on creating shapes and silhouettes.
Modeling
From the blocking we started to create more specific shapes and contours, as well as adding some color to get an idea of what the final color palette will look like.
We create the shapes and the different parts of the vehicle using flat colors.
Texturing
To create detail and volume we will separate by parts using the Region selection tool and selecting the different colors.
Copy and paste in a separate piece two times.
Using one of these copies to make a color gradient.
Use the Boolean to substitute the flat color for the color gradient in the piece below.
And repeat the action in the piece below one more time.
I use this technique to be able to make gradients and details without losing any shape or color, because when copying the part using the Region Select I use that part as if it were a mold.To make the rest of the pieces that require gradient I use the same technique.
To make the glass, I will use the same technique of copying the piece and making it as a mold, but with the difference that to try to imitate the reflection of the glass I create a piece made of diagonal stripes of different shades of the same color as the glass.
And then I use the Boolean to replace the color of the stripe piece with the flat color of the glass.
To try to recreate the shine of chrome metal, I make diagonal stripes with light colors.
And I use it to Boolean all parts that are metal.
Wheels
Now comes the most complicated part, which is to make the round wheels.
The first thing you have to do is to divide the wheel into equal portions, depending on its design you will need to divide it into more or less parts.
To make the wheel you will only need to make a portion of the wheel as the same piece will be copied several times.
Now that we have all the pieces we are going to Vox Edit.The first thing to do is to use the center of the wheel as a pivot point to build everything else.
For correct rotations, the pivot point must be placed exactly in the center of the part, since this will be our central axis.
We create a child node in the central piece, which remains empty, and in turn we create another child node in the empty node and in this one we place the piece we want to use to form the wheel.
Copy the empty node that has inside it another node with the part and rotate it by holding the Shift button until it is in the right position.
We continue copying and rotating the same empty node until we complete a full rotation.
To continue with the other parts of the wheel, we start again from the central piece, we create another child node in the central piece.
Inside this node we follow exactly the same structure we have used before, which is to create an empty child node, which will be the one we copy and rotate as many times as necessary, and inside this another child node that contains the part we are going to use.
Now we simply copy and rotate while holding the shift button, to complete a full turn as we have done with the previous piece.
For the final part, which will be the same once again. We create again a child node in the central part and inside it an empty child node and inside it another child node with the part we are going to use this time.
Now we copy again the empty node that has inside it the node with the part and rotate it to complete a full turn.
We have the complete wheel and we only have to copy the central piece and having all the nodes inside it, they are copied with it.
Conclusion
To sum up, it is very important to make a good blocking so that the asset is not unbalanced in size with the rest of the object, take good references from real life photos and models that other people have made, use gradients and outline the edges of some pieces to give more volume to the asset.
When you go to Vox Edit to make the wheels it is very important that you place the pivot point in the exact center of the piece on which you are going to mount the wheel.
Don't worry too much about the size of the pieces you are going to use to make the wheel because in Vox Edit you can also edit the pieces by adding voxels or changing colors.
