Free 3D Printable Pixel Art creator app is out!

[CubePixelArt]

Guys,

our Pixel Art enthusiast team was tinkering
with a 3D printable pixel art creator app,
and it will be a privilege to have you guys feedback
on the user experience.

Here is the beta version for you guys
http://cube.treebuild.com/
all artwork made can be export and saved
or sent to be 3D Print.

Hope you guys like it :] 

Let me know what you think!

[cels]

This is very interesting as a concept, but I've never actually seen anyone make anything visually appealing with "voxels". At least nothing that has the characteristics of pixel art. It either becomes a flat painting or something like Minecraft or Lego.

I haven't really looked into it though, so I'd be very excited to find out that people were actually making something you could call 3D pixel art.

[Decroded]

This is very interesting as a concept, but I've never actually seen anyone make anything visually appealing with "voxels". At least nothing that has the characteristics of pixel art. It either becomes a flat painting or something like Minecraft or Lego.

I haven't really looked into it though, so I'd be very excited to find out that people were actually making something you could call 3D pixel art.

I agree.
long ago I thought it would be amazing to do some voxel street fighter characters then realised its not as simple as lego-ing some blocks together.
For a 3d sprite to look anywhere near the quality of a handcrafted 2d sprite there needs to be light sources defined in every scene, materials with shaders  with self shadowing etc.
basically everything u would expect from a decent 3d engine.
and even then, much tweaking needs to be done to try to   simulate the particular style the original artist used with no real guarantee of how close u can get.

if I had any skill writing shaders and such I would love to attempt such a feat *cough* Gil *cough* 

[CubePixelArt]

  Guys, thank you for the feedback,
noted on the shader, we will definitely continue to
improve the capability of the app.

[AlcopopStar]

I've never actually seen anyone make anything visually appealing with "voxels".

You guys should check Sir Carma out then (https://twitter.com/Sir_carma)

[hawken]

Crossy Road is pretty appealing

[Decroded]

Its a cool tool though.
I had a quick go and have some feedback:

• need more on screen photoshop style tools such as eyedropper, brush sizes (e.g. place more cubes at once to quickly block in large areas)
• to replace a single cube with another colour do i currently need to go press remove, then click on it, the press build, then go back and put it back?
• how can i select all cubes of a certain colour/s and replace them with another colour?
• i would like HSB values for the colour picker
• navigation is pretty good but i found it a bit awkward. holding a button to be able to rotate the camera with the mouse would be nice. perhaps adopt the control scheme of a common 3d software like blender or max. on-screen navigation panel would be nice to get me into it until im comfortable with the hotkeys.
• more control of the palette would be nice since its pretty important
• a pop-up list of hotkeys would be good. ideally we can edit them too.
• label all on-screen controls or add a tool-tip with their associated hotkey
• i like the reference image idea. zooming the reference image would be useful.

I've never actually seen anyone make anything visually appealing with "voxels".

You guys should check Sir Carma out then (https://twitter.com/Sir_carma)

Crossy Road is pretty appealing

Personally I get a vibe of Minecraft & Lego Movie inspired "retro" cheapness from these examples.
The idea that a bunch of is cool somehow just doesn't appeal to me.
It looks "nice" when something is rendered in bright colours, soft shadows and lens flares but you sacrifice the harmony of a limited palette.
I'm not at all against post-processing, non-pixel art effects, atmospheric perspective, the emerging use of shaders in pixel art etc..
But this cube art doesn't seem to respect anything that was done in pixel art post 1980.


Maybe, a voxel could be treated as a single element in 3D space as a pixel is to 2D.
As such it is not rotated and all six faces render the same colour instead of shading as a typical cube.
And we let the rendering engine pick that colour from a limited palette based on shader/lighting.

Its just an idea but I'd love to see what it looks like.

[NowvaB]

I doodled for a good hour and a half,

Here is some opinionated feedback on the controls...
- The right mouse button should be delete.
- Middle mouse button should rotate but if shift is held it should pan.
- I prefer the mouse wheel zoom scroll to be reversed.

Other critique...
It was pretty hard and tedious to make things because I only had to option to place or delete a single block.
It would be much easier to be able to paint with them like a brush. this was the biggest turn off for me.

Another addition would be a tool to recolor blocks so I don't have delete them and place them in a different color..

ability to switch the grid line colors could help.

I'm not sure if this was just google chrome being google chrome but the reference image was pretty blurry.


Overall I really like this tool, It has a nice look to it, i really liked that guide lines option, and ability to place cubes in rows.
and when I finally finished something I was really temped to push that 3d Print button.

Thanks for sharing!

edit: the undo and redo option is great too! don't see that in a lot of online tools.

[hawken]

would be nice to ALT + Drag to rotate the view, this is pretty much a standard in 3D software.

[CubePixelArt]

@NowvaB
@Decroded

Thank you for a the constructive feedback guys,
and also for making it very clear.

Especially the ability to change colours,
add and remove multiple blocks in different shapes.