Lego and Minecraft are very powerful mediums for all ages and walks of life, lets talk about voxels!

Voxel artwork is incredible, its basically pixel art but in a 3D environment, this is my first serious shot at using this art form and I think it turned out stellar!

Let me walk you through my voxel city! First off we have a store which is the centerpiece of this design, I picked a fun and interesting color pallet with lots of reflective/transparent materials. My personal favorite aspect of the store has to be the chimney and chairs on the roof, it just adds this cozy feel to the scene. Next we have this cute park scene, including a bench a giant oak tree and a little apartment entrance. My original design did not include any streetlamps but I found it a much needed ambient source of light in this dark night scene. Something else I added near the end of modeling has to be the vines crawling up the buildings, I love the green contrast against the white flowers. Finally we have the background, which is just some more buildings with bright window lights, to tie everything together we have a starry skybox that is out of focus.

Like mentioned Voxels are the 3D version of pixels, in a nutshell. It really was like building with Legos, super satisfying with a video game like pleasure with every placement of each voxel. I used the program MagicaVoxels for building the structures but also texturing the various colors of my scene. It was very easy with a small learning curve, they have great documentation along with the powerful basics like key board short-cuts. After creating the model in MagicaVoxels I then exported it to be used in Cinema 4D with Octane for some additional FX, I'm aware MagicaVoxels has a lighting engine but I much prefer Octanes incredible lighting.

Overall this was such a fun project that I could literally spend monthly happily working on, I highly recommend voxel modeling if you are new to 3D modeling in general because the learning curve is so easy to get a hang of.