spotvox

A drag-and-drop or command-line tool that renders MagicaVoxel .vox files to pixel art.

It Looks Like...

First, a cartoon-style helicopter, at 2x size with smoothing and a light outline, viewed diagonally:

Then, a large render (8x size) of a tree, with smoothing and a heavy outline, viewed from a side:

A Monument Valley level, at 2x size without smoothing but with a partial outline, viewed diagonally:

A Monument Valley level, at 4x size without smoothing and with no outline, viewed diagonally:

Materials are supported; here's a glowing creature at 2x size with smoothing and a light outline, viewed diagonally:

You can specify more rotations (or fewer); here's a familiar-looking character at 2x size with smoothing and a block outline as an animated GIF, showing 16 rotations:

Viewing these can be a good way to understand what the different edge types mean. Of course, "none" has no outlines, but "partial" only has outlines where part of the model extends out and over itself (and nothing is added over the empty pixels at the edge of the model). The "light" edge mode does what "partial" does but also draws up to 4 pixels in that empty space at the edge, in the same color as the interior edges. Then, "heavy" is like "light" but draws the exterior edge (over the empty space) in black. Lastly, "block" is like "heavy" but can draw up to 8 pixels over the empty space, producing slightly thicker outlines. One idea for these: You can use "block" or "heavy" for important or moving characters/objects, and use "light" or "partial" for background terrain/objects; this makes important things stand out from their surroundings.

Usage

Download a .zip file from the latest in the Releases section; use windows-x64 if you're on 64-bit Windows (most recent installations are 64-bit), or all-platforms if you aren't. Always extract the .zip, of course. On Windows you can drag and drop a .vox file into the .exe or .bat file. When using drag and drop, 3 sizes are created, with smoothing, and with light outlines; these go in a folder next to the .vox. On other platforms, use java -jar spotvox.jar --help from the command line (in the same folder as spotvox.jar) to see usage. Using the command line gives various options, like using more or fewer scales (by default, this produces x1, x2, and x4 scales), changing the style of voxel edges/outlines, and positioning the .vox model in a different size of bounding box, so you can synchronize the sizing of different models' renders. The path to the .vox file to render always goes last. You can use the command line on any platform; if using windows-x64, use spotvox.exe --help instead.

If you get errors loading some models, try loading them in the current MagicaVoxel, editing them in some non-destructive way (like rotating 360 degrees), then saving before you load them again. Older formats of .vox model aren't read correctly at the moment.

Thanks

This project uses the great PicoCLI library for clean command-line handling. The Win64 native-image version would not be possible if not for ByerN's work getting Graal to play nice with libGDX; I have copied some configuration and built libraries here from his example repo. Of course, this uses libGDX; I can't get by without it.

The other libraries this project uses are mostly things I've made over the last few years. SquidSquad is a broad-purpose set of libraries that I use for a few things here. jdkgdxds is a data structure library that SquidSquad uses; it provides similar data structures to libGDX, but greatly expanded. colorful-gdx is a library devoted to color manipulation, which this uses to handle things like the lightness change from an emissive material near other voxels.

This project wouldn't exist without ephtracy and the incredible MagicaVoxel tool. Spotvox is the successor to IsoVoxel, which I wrote a while ago and felt recently that it could really use some better/more consistent color handling, as well as support for materials.

Notes

To build the native EXE, I drop spotvox.jar into graalvm-env/, run the appropriate Visual Studio variable setter (vcvars64.bat), then build_native.bat. This is all ByerN's work, big thanks!