Voxelart styles in video games

Zach Soares
Feb 14

(This article is a rewrite from the original I wrote back in 2015. It

has been updated to reflect the times and changes that have occured
in the industry since.)

Hi, I’m Zach and I’ve been making voxel art professionally in the
games industry for 6 years. I’m writing this piece to talk to you all
about the implication of voxel art in video games and where I see
that going. Voxels are a rendering method that have existed for a
long time, in fact, it was in early competition with polygons as the
rendering method for 3d game visualization and well…. we saw how
that turned out, polygons won! While polygons have been the way
games have grown and evolved artistically, voxel art has slowly
started to make a comeback in the medium. A great example of early
era voxel art is Shadow Warrior (1997) and Command and Conquer:
Tiberian Sun (1999), So this is not to say that it has
only recently been used — the last 5–10 years — but only that it
wasn’t feasible in the early days due to performance requirements.

Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun (1999)

In the last 10 years voxel art has started to make a return in the
games industry with games like Minecraft (Early alpha release in
May of 2009) and 3D-Dot Heroes (November 2009 release). This
return has spawned a new wave of developers to create games
around the voxel art aesthetic. The reasoning behind this is the
growth of hardware limitations along with improved rendering
techniques. Thanks to this growth in tech, developers are now able
to make games that make full use of voxels. However, you can
attribute the artistic growth of the medium to the developers
making Voxel Editors. A way to edit voxels outside of the game
engine and later passing that over to the game space is extremely
important. This impact is the same impact that 2D editing software
had on games prior to what they were today (transition of early era
pixelart to photorealistic texturing).

Thanks to softwares like Qubicle, MagicaVoxel, Voxelshop and

many others, artists have been able to express themselves
artistically games using voxels. These tools have the ability to not
only export models and pieces as raw voxel objects, they are able to
export these models as usable Polygon objects. Now yes, I know
earlier I spoke about how voxels and polygons are two different
things. I might be contradicting myself at the moment on what is a
voxel model but what we’re talking about is voxel art. The art in
which voxels are the root or influence. We’ll later touch on some
edge case art styles to better identify what i mean.

Voxel art is fascinating as an art form. It can be seen as pixel art in

the third dimension or something more akin to low-poly art. It’s
best to separate voxels from all others forms of 3d art. This is the
only way to really figure out what voxel art is and can be; the same
way polygons are separated from 2D illustrations. Pixel art does
lend itself to voxels, it does indeed help with the development of the
form but it can also restrict the style. Voxels are 3D and thus need to
be thought of that way when working with it, otherwise your work
will come off as 2-dimensional even if it was being projected in a 3D
space.

There are many types of voxel art but I’ll simply list and explain a
few below which can be considered “base” styles.

Vector voxel art: See this as the style that uses only 90 degree
bends when representing curves. It is a very clean style that is
easy to read at varying scales. Crossy Roads uses this style most
prominently. This style is most optimal for game devices which
have low system requirements. This is why Crossy road looks
the way it does. Not only for its artistic expression in its
simplicity and abstraction of real life objects/characters, but
also due to the hardware limitations posed by smartphones. It is
and was always a perfect match.

Crossy Road by Hipster Whale

Pixelated voxels (flat shaded): This style is currently less

common but has been done. Utilizing pixel art in its entirety, the
artistic pieces done using this style tries its best to represent
pixel art in a 3D space. This style has to be flat shaded to be
forgiving for its bends. Flat Shaded voxelart also benefits from
being able to show all the colors being used due to minimal
presence of shadows, therefore the style benefits from vibrant
colors. With any form of hard shadows applied the piece and
style will be ruined. This is often achieved using raytracing
techniques which are often expensive for computers to…
compute but is rather lightweight for voxel-tech. This can be
seen as the most “pure” form of voxel rendering.

Fugl by Melodive

Voxelnauts by Retro Ronin
 Blocky voxels: Boxy voxels are what I would categorise for
games in the vein of minecraft. The style is very blocky and looks
like the world is made up of cubes, even the characters. It’s a
very forgiving style in that it is easy to work with on a technical
and artistic level. (this isn’t to say it is easy to execute. It still
requires talent and skill to make good looking boxy art). Often
this style uses textures on polygonal cubes instead of being
made edited in direct voxel editors. This is where a major
conflict can arise in what is now defined as “voxel” art. The
reason I would still include this category is because it is still
recreatable in voxel editors, but more importantly it is a style
derived by and inspired by voxel art and so it is worth
mentioning. A pure voxel created art piece in the Boxy style
might not look as complex as something from Hytale but it is
important to note that it -can- be voxel art.

If you follow THIS link I’ll go further into explaining this topic as it
encompasses a whole other set of ideas which detract from this
article’s main goal.

Minecraft by Mojang
 Hytale by Hypixel

Greeble Voxels: This voxel style ignores the rules of bends

from vector art and embraces its curves. While it is the most
difficult to manage in terms of technical rendering, it can yield
interesting results. The use of SSAO here is meant to emphasize
the jagged-ness of voxels when built at a higher resolution.
Using simpler colors and ignoring manual shading (something
often done in pixel art). Applying shading on the model should
only be done in-engine as adding your own coloring won’t yield
visible results. The style lends itself best to realistic renditions of
world objects. Additionally, this style is often brought further in
it’s rendering by using PBR (Physical Based Rendering) to
create more realistic material effects on the voxel objects in
question. You’ll often get a more gritty atmosphere from this
style but it’s not to say that you can’t make more cartoony pieces
using it.

The greeble style is coincidentally the style that was used in the
classic voxel games like Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun. The
game made unit models out of voxels so that they could be
destructive and show damage over time. Where previously it was
used for gameplay reasons, it can now be used purely for aesthetic
which is a nice reward for artists patiently waiting. Be wary
however, the work involved in making this style feasible is quite
high due to engines not being designed for voxel models which yield
unusually high polycounts.
 Critical Annihilation by Devoga

Voxel Foliage and Lighting test by John Kerney

These are the four varying forms of voxel art I can distinguish as the
variable extremes. They each serve their own purposes and can
impact the style, and feel of a game tremendously. What’s very
important to note is that to be voxels or voxel art it needs to be
perfect at the pixel level. A cube is a cube in the same way a pixel is a
pixel. They do not bleed into one another, they do not clip into each
other, they are stuck in a grid throughout the creation process. That
is the primary constraint for voxel art that needs to be
distinguished, although it can be circumvented if you were to make
objects individual from one another and later put them together in a
3D modeling software, or engine. To be clear, these are not all the
styles that exist for voxel art. I’ve personally made a handful of
different looking styles touching on the above and more, but above
is what I would consider the 4 circles of voxel styles.
Moments ago I mentioned how the voxel art constraints may be
circumvented using external editing tools and game engines. We’ll
be elaborating on the techniques which can be used to circumvent
these constraints, but nonetheless the base models created are all
from voxel editors and therefore should still be considered voxelart.

All the techniques which circumvent previously mentioned

constraints revolve around animation.

Voxelart and Animation

The world of animation in voxelart is a bit in contention for various
reasons. One is that there’s a lack of tools that allow for all types of
voxelart animation to be possible. Nonetheless, the existing
animation styles people are pursuing touches on 3 techniques;

Rigid body animation, Soft-Body animation and frame based

animation.

Rigid body animation has to do with creating standard 3d

skeletal rigs in any animation tool like blender or maya and then
snapping chunks of a voxel model to a given bone. This way a
model piece (say, a hand or lower arm) moves along with the
bone it’s attached to 1:1 with no warping of the exported mesh.

This technique of voxelart animation presents itself with a lot of

visual complexity which can dictate a specific voxelart style output
due to things like Z fighting of model textures and mesh clipping.
 Elbow joint for a demon king in Last Stand

This is all well and good, it’s the expectation when delving into
animation. Your animation style will guide the voxelart style you
lead yourself with. I go into further depth about how I developed the
aesthetic in the animation below HERE.

Model from Last Stand by Zach Soares

It’s important to know that with each style you’ll encounter a new
issue, so while the animation technique is the same, the resulting
look and feel will be different.

Soft-Body animation is a step further than rigid body

animation style. It entails a little more overhead as you need to
apply proper weights along the topology of a mesh so the
resulting animation is clean. The outcome of an animation here
tends feel less “retro” and more modern with game development
trends. This given rigging method makes it exponentially harder
to deal with if you’re working with certain voxel styles, not
because of the animation itself, but due to retopology overhead.
It’s not to say this rigging process wouldn’t work with other
voxel styles, it’s simply alluding to more complexity in the
pipeline before producing a usable end result.

An example of having to retopologise a model to run more

efficiently for a game, we’ll take the running knight below.
This is what an optimized voxel model looks like when being rigged
in Maya. We’ve had to export the model as a traditional 3D format
so we can go about editing this otherwise we’d be locking ourselves
to the rigid body technique. As you can see we’ve done various edge-
loops along the body, arms and legs so we get the right amount of
flex throughout the animation. Alternatively, if we were to leave the
model unoptimize and in its “raw” voxel output, we’d get the below.

This Output will yield the same results, if not smoother bends, but
at the expense of your games performance. Unless we can get
ourselves a voxelengine which allows the bending of voxel assets
(like in the Atom Engine) we wouldn’t have to concern ourselves
with this issue, but it’s best to avoid it in the long run as it’s largely
inaccessible. This is the reason for retopologizing and why the Soft-
Body rigging technique requires a longer pipeline to get results. For
any traditional animator in the games industry, this won’t seem
unusual, but for beginners it can be quite daunting.
 Bendy Knight by Zach Soares

Frame-Based animation is the most problematic, not

because of any artistic complexities or limitations but
specifically because there are no existing tools that allow for the
form to function effectively. Now, bear with me, there are
methods to make this form of animation work using “tools” like
plug-ins and extentions within game engines, but as it stands
there are no standalone applications comparable to tools like
Aseprite or GraphicsGale for voxelart. This roadblock makes
frame based voxelart animation very frustrating. It requires an
exponential amount of time to execute on a level equal to a
pixelart animation and the technical requirements to make it
work are still quite heavy. With frame-based animations you’re
required to swap every single voxel mesh on a per frame basis in
the same way you’d cycle through various frames of a pixelart
spritesheet. For every frame, the engine will need to recall a new
mesh and then destroy the old one which is not a very enjoyable
task.

An old version of MagicaVoxel briefly allowed people to make frame

based animations like the one below and it really shows how
charming voxelart can be when left to its roots. It feels retro yet new,
familiar but fresh. This is what many are striving for and hopefully
soon we can encounter some games that use it in its full capacity.

Magic Mallet by @Armyoftrolls

I hope you enjoyed this refreshed article on Voxelart Styles in

games. Of course this is not ALL the voxelart styles. As previously
mentioned, there are many more to be found and many
unmentioned, but I consider all of the above as the foundation for
what is voxelart and what can help to define a style in the form. As
new tools come to light and new games are made, we’ll be able to
experience new styles and that something I will always be looking
forward to.