First public release experimental demo of Blackbox Voxel Tool.
Download here (latest version 020c). Post and discuss art in this thread.
Update April 28 2016:
A lot has happened since my last activity here. Although much remains yet to be done.
Several updates have fixed and upgraded Blackbox into a different nature of creativity.
I would hope you have familiarized yourself enough with the first basics of the principle.
The new mechanics invite much experimentation and exploration of a depth unique to this tool.
These videos give a little hint:
Old introduction to topic:
The hotkey system discussed in the accompanied readme.txt may be a bit much at first, but will make more sense eventually.
This release omits the tiling capabilities shown in the videos previously, as well as the animation discussed on my
website.
That will come with the following releases, alongside a better GUI. But it also sports abilities not shown or discussed yet. So do read the readme.
Still, there are a great many more or less obvious features missing that keep this from being an actual tool more than a toy. I consider this tool like the body of a living creature. It has vital organs, a heart, lungs, brain, any of which must be there and work properly, or the body can't live. There is a systemic dependency of functionality, so that the creature can go about the way it's supposed to. But this release right now would cut down from many vital functionality that define its true nature, its workflow, its very usefulness. For example, a selection snapped to grid is just a strange quirk only by itself. It is the crazy possibilities of the new tiling here that decide its usefulness, and entirely change your workflow. But that is not in this release. All you're stuck with is this weird selection then. And there are many other missing features just as important in defining the real identity of this tool.
The purpose of this release is to concentrate on studying the reactive behaviour of the grid, the visual behaviour of coloured cubes by side, the use of perspective on very large scale, and the basic idea behind the control scheme. Try to work around the tight cube limit with what you got, see what kind of visuals you can do with that for a mockup scene. That's enough for now. It will give you a first base of understanding. On the following releases it will start to actually get interesting then going from that.
As you play with it you may eventually notice problems innate to this medium.
Some of it will be solved, some will solve themselves as computers improve, some you may always have to work around.
We are here to study the potential, viability and proper use cases, alongside the limits, of this proposed technique here.
Also a couple more immediate issues remain that will be addressed in the future. Among them:
This project focuses on the very
experience of the pixel art medium's process. It attempts to have a natural approach to it. One of its key features is a resilient and efficient Input Interpolation that enables beautiful line drawing, mostly uninterrupted even across corners and complex environment. However this needs more tweaking. For example, aggressive as it is now, it can happen that it paints a hidden side on edge cases, which prevents a reoptimization of the grid upon large overpainting. When you see it, use shift-paint to recolour the location wholesome, so the grid recovers.
Deleting a voxel can sometimes be a bit jumpy on the edge.
Have fun and work hard.