
MagicaVoxel – a free 8-bit voxel editor - infinite8s
http://ephtracy.github.io/
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bd
Here are some examples of what talented artist can create with this tool:

[http://imgur.com/gallery/8zEE1/](http://imgur.com/gallery/8zEE1/)

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detaro
The creator also retweets a lot of examples on Twitter:
[https://twitter.com/ephtracy](https://twitter.com/ephtracy)

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FreeFull
Any chance of a Linux version at some point?

Edit: At least it seems to run well under Wine. I suppose a Linux version
isn't too strong of a priority.

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santaclaus
I wish the creator would maintain a blog about the project. It is cool to
follow him on twitter and watch him work out the technical details of new
features (e.g. marching cubes based mesh extraction). There is some definite
interesting technical meat in implementing these tools in the context of a
voxel engine.

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afandian
What does the '8-bit' refer to?

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glibgil
Aesthetics

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krisdol
Which is misused since, if anything, all pictures I've seen resemble 3D
projections of games from the 16 bit/SNES era.

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0xcde4c3db
Most people don't realize how limited the palette actually is on NES. The
entire gamut is only 54 colors (nominally 64, but there are duplicates and an
"unsafe" entry), and any 16x16 block can only have 4 colors. There are some
ways to work around this with clever hacks, but it was mostly the artists
being clever rather than the programmers.

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krisdol
Huh oddly that explains a lot of the aesthetics of NES games.

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daveloyall
What is the license for MagicaVoxel?

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groovy2shoes
Seems to be closed-source.

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kevin_thibedeau
A bit parasitic to use Github for their hosting.

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tcfunk
How so? Is that not what the paid tiers are for?

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daveloyall
If they are using them!

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thenomad
This is extremely impressive.

I've tried a wide variety of voxel modeling tools, free and not free, and this
one's by far the most intuitive, and prettiest, I've found - in that it's the
only one I haven't given up on in intense annoyance after 10 minutes or so.

Might end up using this for an animation project - thanks to the OP!

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billconan
this is very interesting. I'm wondering how the author built the ui for the
app. it's cross-platform, but I don't see it links any other ui libraries. my
conclusion is that its ui is built directly with opengl.

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Wingman4l7
The screenshot looks like a level from the Escher-esque game Monument Valley
-- was MagicaVoxel used in developing that?

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hugs
I don't know [1], but!... When you reduce things down to a minimum amount of
essential detail, things tend to look similar to other things that share the
same constraints. I noticed this when researching Mondrian and the De Stijl
(neoplasticism) art movement -- they restricted their palette to mostly
primary colors. I could ask if Google's logo or the colors in a bucket of LEGO
bricks were inspired by Mondrian directly, but another possibility is that the
neoplasticists discovered some kind of minimal, universal design pattern that
feels timeless and likely to be "rediscovered" again and again. Are Monument
Valley, MagicaVoxel (and Minecraft) inspired by Escher, or is it a natural
coincidence that comes out of the minimal use of geometry and perspective they
all employ?

[1] Edit: I did some more digging... Looks like they used Unity to create
Monument Valley: [https://unity3d.com/showcase/case-stories/monument-
valley](https://unity3d.com/showcase/case-stories/monument-valley)

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thoughtpalette
Looks great, any reason why CMD-Q doesn't work for quitting the application?

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smpetrey
No idea, but the Q has been mapped to move the camera (WASDQE). So maybe CMD-Q
does something else?

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matt2000
I've used this in the past and found it to be great. The UI took a little
getting used to, but once you did it was fast to accomplish fairly complicated
things. Definitely worth a try.

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leke
Can you use this to create object things in games for say the Unity3D
platform?

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phodo
Yes you can export the models into a standard 3D format used by any number of
engines and loaders.

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chasing
Yup, I've used MagicaVoxel on occasion and it's quite a bit of fun.

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jaunkst
Well Done

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SCAQTony
Well done! — I so tweeted this! This will enrich so many people's lives.

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DaveSapien
Emm, they aren't voxels. Square polygons are not volumetric pixels. Looks nice
though!

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arriu
This editor represents data points on a regularly spaced, three-dimensional
grid. The data is undoubtedly voxel based.

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DaveSapien
You're mistaken.

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oofabz
This is not what I think of as voxels either, but I fear our older definition
is becoming obsolete. You could make arguments both for and against whether
these textured cubes are technically voxels, but in the end, language changes,
and trying to fight these changes is futile.

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amock
What do you think of as voxels? It seems like a value at a point in a three
dimensional grid is the volume equivalent of a pixel.

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oofabz
Right, my objection to the textured cubes is that they are not the volume
equivalent of a pixel. Pixels are point samples without shape or texture.
These cubes have both.

What I call a voxel is much smaller (on the order of a screen pixel), and
drawn as a point sprite or screen-facing quad with a single color. Texturing
is achieved by having many voxels with different colors/materials.

Here are some videos of what we used to call voxels:

DOS game:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51E_G7NCXVM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51E_G7NCXVM)

Gameboy game:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zVy-4CEFQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zVy-4CEFQU)

Medical imaging:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrLqFNhVL68](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrLqFNhVL68)

Note that they were not using voxels because they had a certain artistic style
to them. They used voxels because with the hardware they had, this was the
most realistic rendering they could achieve. Once GPUs came out with hardware-
accelerated triangle rasterization, voxel engines died.

For more information about point-sampling, see this classic paper, "A Pixel Is
Not A Little Square":

[http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf](http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf)

And for a more in-depth discussion of sampling, albeit in one dimension, watch
Chris Montgomery's video "Digital Show and Tell":

[http://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml](http://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml)

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dahart
I'm a bit confused about what distinction you're trying to make, or how this
project represents a change in the meaning of the word 'voxel'.

Voxels are "volumetric cells" just like pixels are "picture cells". The size
of them has absolutely nothing to do with it, and never has. Big voxels are
still voxels. The data in the file is specified as volumetric samples... Maybe
the issue is the texture you're talking about, but I haven't seen any textures
in any of the galleries, other than the few examples that render mesh edges in
addition to the cubes. Where are you seeing textures?

Six square polygons enclosing a space is surely just as 'voxel' as meshes
generated by marching cubes for medical imaging. I've worked in medial
imaging, written more than one volume renderer and used used many more than
that, for both games and research. As far as I'm concerned, Magica Voxel is
both truly voxel and truly awesome, IMO.

Alvy Ray Smith's paper is great, but how to handle sampling is a different
subject completely from whether the scenes are volumetric, which they are.
These voxels do have a certain artistic style to them, and the aesthetic
choice to give them sharp edges was made intentionally and called out
explicitly, i.e., "8-bit".

