Voxel animations

Hey guys,

I was curious, how you think this was made? I’m not trying to make voel animations, I’m just trying to understand them ^^

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=729VkxC4Z6E[/video]

do you mean the character animations? if so thats sorta an old school way of how they used to do animations with primitives. The model is broken down into different parts, and they are just rotated/translated/scaled each frame. They do it in an OpenGL book im currently reading from 2001 ^^

So it’s a standard bone animation, but the mesh is the voxels? I somehow suspected that they were not using just pure voxels in the animations because the grass stretches. Graphics like this one looks really, really cool imo.

Ok, I just lost the power to edit posts?

So you think it’s a way different technique from this one. This doesn’t seems to be regular polygon mesh bone animations.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKdRri5jSMs[/video]

I can only quote myself ^^

So it’s a standard bone animation

Don’t bone animations modify the buffers? I don’t think it does that. Im no expert on voxels, or animations so, im just giving an opinion ^^

Well, I have no idea, I’m trying to understand how tricky can be to develop art like that.

Any other opinions?

Animations as they are in fact just modify the mesh buffer. Another way is to do “hardware skinning” which is basically geometry shaders to do the movement. But theres no secret magic, you will have to change the vertex positions, no matter if you do it in the shader or in the mesh.

Do you think it’s easier then to, for example, create the voxel model in some editor (like Blender, or even some voxel editor and then import into Blender), create the bone animations there and then import?

Heh, no. The purpose of voxels is that you generate them procedurally, else you could call any mesh “voxels”.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoFYEtj2tDw[/video]

Something like this? That looks like some really complicated stuff.

CubeWorld looks like pretty classic pre-skinning days animation to me. each animated body part acts like a separate object and there is no “skinning”. The people look like combined body+head and separate feet and arms. These are then animated either with keyframes or bones but they are just objects with position and orientation. Even the dragon/lizard thing looks like just body/head and four legs.

It’s very “old school” and perfect for that game since it’s blocks (no need to smooth joints) and has a retro pixel-art look to it anyway.

Thanks for your comments ^^

The 3D Dot Game Heroes approach was to build first the base stand character with a voxel editor, then build 5 another frames: walk 1, walk 2, attack, spell and forgot the other one. Then it replaces the whole model with the the model for the right animation. Works really well also for voxel games, and as the game only have at maximum 10 characters at the screen, the performance is not an issue.

A lot of voxel projects these days are using this editor to make voxel-style characters: