Hi there! I am Sumi, a Japanese voxel artist.
Have you heard about all the new Voxel art showing up in OpenSea? It has become all the rage in the NFT space in recent years. An NFT (non-fungible token), is based on blockchain technology. Blockchains manage the creation and trading of unique NFT art items and collections. See Introduction to NFTs – Beginner Series for more on NFTs and blockchain.
Made by Sumi
Even if you haven't heard of voxel art, you might have heard of popular virtual world games such as Minecraft and Roblox. They are built entirely of voxels.
I began designing voxel art first as a hobby at the end of last year. This luckily led me to join a popular voxel art collection called “CryptoCities”, which are tradable on OpenSea. OpenSea is the biggest NFT marketplace in the world for selling and purchasing virtual assets such as NFTs on the blockchain.
CryptoCities, meanwhile, is made up of voxel-based microcosms displaying iconic cities from real life or fiction. Their new project called "suburbs" displays apartments and stores in cities such as futuristic Tokyo, which will be released soon for sale on OpenSea. The setting of this project is in the future, specifically in Tokyo in 2121. The voxel artists from around the world express the cyberpunk style rooms. You will be able to explore the "suburbs" world using VR in the future too.
Voxel art is even easy for beginners, which is one of the reasons it attracted me, as well as the attractive cute square shape of voxel design.
In this article, I will introduce "What is voxel art?" and "How to make it". I hope this article can assist readers who are interested in making NFT art or digital art like I was 12 months ago.
What is voxel art?
Put simply, voxel art is a 3D version of pixel art. Whereas pixel art consists of squares, voxel art consists of cubes. Voxel art is often compared to Legos because both use cubes for building objects. The main difference between the two is that voxels are a type of digital construct, while Lego is physical and made of plastic.
Made by Sumi
Voxel art is also not a new thing and has been around for decades. One of the reasons why voxel art has become popular is because Minecraft has exploded in popularity with famous players such as Sethbling and Dream on YouTube.
Voxel art has since spread around the world thanks to games such as Minecraft and Roblox, and also thanks to the recent popularity of the metaverse worlds The Sandbox and Cryptovoxels.
The two pros of voxel art are as follows:
・It's one of the easiest forms of digital art for beginners.
・You can start designing voxel art at no cost.
You can make voxel art on your computer as well as pixel art. In my situation, I had no experience with making art. I'm not even good at drawing a picture, but I was able to easily start making voxel art without any upfront costs!
How to make voxel art
Two popular software programs available for creating voxel art are MagicaVoxel and The Sandbox Game Maker, which are both free software for making voxel art.
The Sandbox is one of the top NFT games in the virtual world and metaverse category. Using cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and the native token SAND, you can buy and sell LANDs in a virtual world and sell any characters or objects that you make. This makes The Sandbox a project beyond just a normal game.
For this article, though, I want to briefly introduce how to make voxel art using the MagicaVoxel software, which is where I have the most experience.
1. Download MagicaVoxel
① Access the official website (https://ephtracy.github.io/)
② Click "Download 0.99.6.4 (Latest)"
③ If you are a Windows user, click "MagicaVoxel-0.99.6.4-win64.zip".
If you are a Mac user, click "MagicaVoxel-0.99.6.2-macos-10.15.zip"
※A version might change due to developmental status on MagicaVoxel.
④ Double-click the zip file you just downloaded and open the newly created folder
⑤ Double-click the icon of MagicaVoxel in the folder → MagicaVoxel is now activated and a modeling screen should appear
2. Choose a color you like and start putting down voxels
You can place voxels in a 3D space on your computer screen and make a character, a room, a building, etc.
3. Save your voxel art as an image
You can save your voxel art as an image and post it on social media and then mint it as an NFT on a platform such as OpenSea or LooksRare. (You can also create animations using other software like VoxEdit, Unity, and Blender.)
Book recommendation
You might be feeling that it's too difficult to learn how to make voxel art and learn the various techniques all on your own. If that's you, I recommend a book called "Voxel Art Improvement Collection Japanese Craft Book" to get you started.
Published by a popular Japanese voxel artist, uevoxel, you can learn how to make voxel art and various useful techniques. It's a Japanese book, but the book has a lot of pictures, so non-Japanese readers can still learn a lot from it (using the Google Translation app). You will also see that there are some non-Japanese readers leaving good reviews on the book's product page.
In this article, we explored what voxel art is and how to make voxel art. I hope this information helps people who are interested in making NFT art or digital art.
As always, we welcome comments and questions in the discussion area below. Thank you!