A SMALL COLLECTION OF HUGE VOXEL SCENES
巨大ボクセルシーンの小さなコレクション
The Floating Island project adresses a small collection of dreamy dioramas dedicated to nature and calmness. Some basic objects in the presented scenes - like the huge snake-like tree - or complex terrains were made in Moi3D or Nomad Sculpt; and later imported to Magicavoxel. The majoritoy of modelling and rendering job featured in this project was made in free 3d graphic software Magicavoxel by Ephtracy. Post-processing was made with 2D applications like Photoshop.
A by-product of this project was a technique on how to generate realistic voxel grass in Magicavoxel software.
Preamble
序文
This project was planned as as small series of large dioramas ...
- Trini-Tree: snake-shaped tree on a rock
- Calmness: idyllic mountain scene in the clouds
- Victoria: Victorian Steampunk city
- Snake's Pit: ancient temple ruins
Each diorama had a different topic and style. From the beginning the "Floating Islands" collection became a challenging project because of its scale (up to a voxel volume of 1000^3), the complexity of the assets; and the fact that I didn't want to use shaders for generating automated vegetation. In retrospect those self-imposed limitations resulted in developing unique techniques in MagicaVoxel to ...
- Placing and arranging hand-made grass on complex base topology like rocks and free form voxel surfaces.
- Managing to animate floating grass (which was a side product of the 1st technique).
- Managing to animate grass during turn-table render.
Considering my actual knowledge, modeling and assembling those huge diorama scenes from scratch would accompany with 12h - 24h of work. The immense amount of work for creating such large concepts designs forced me to temporarily quit this series after the 2nd scene.
Trini-Tree
トリニ・ツリー
My 1st really complex project addressed a fanart refering to Seiken Densetsu 2 (Secret of Mana) franchise (by Squaresoft) and Donkey Kong from Donkey Kong Country franchise (by Nintendo). Both SNES titles are my all-time favorite video games so it was logical to make a fanart project in MagicaVoxel. To achieve an organic, snake-like structure I modeled the base structure of the tree in Moi3D. It is a simple process. All you need ist using a B-splines as lead curve and 2D curves that represent the cross-sections of the resulting tree segments. Then I exported the tree as obj file and imported last named to MagicaVoxel.
It is not easy to create realistic grass on complex surfaces inside Magicavoxel without using 3rd party shaders. However, there are techniques that can be very helpful to support the manual process. While modelling the Trini-Tree scene I discovered a technique how to solve this problem. I described this technique in this tutorial "Voxel Grass "ボクセルグラス""
Calmness
落ち着き
Calmness is the 2nd entry of the Floating Islands collection. This artwork represents a calm and peaceful place in the sky. This rocky island in the clouds is covered with dense ground vegetation (sun flowers and corn fields) and has some complex trees on it. In the center of that floating island is an old farm house and a pond which consists of a higher and lower part. From technical point of view this is the most complex scene I've ever did. You need to zoom-in to realize that it is made of voxels. Over the time I modified the scene by adding an underground entrance and landing place for a hot-air balloon.
