cube kingdom is the bee’s knees. it’s a super simple 3D modelling program: just click on one side of a cube to draw another cube next to it. it’s like doodling pixel-by-pixel, but in three dimensions.
this 3D jill was made in the first version of cube kingdom. i tried to make a model that would resemble jill’s normal sprite when seen from the front and profile when seen from the side. because there are some inconsistancies between these two perspectives, i had to use some tricks to hide and show certain cubes when seen from different angles - particularly around the eye and mouth. download the model if you want to see how sneaky i was.
cube kingdom version two added the ability to put textures on cubes (and to change the palette, which is why 3D jill has such a small range of colors). i put together a set of tiles from bubble bobble and began texturing scenes with them. you can see more if you poke around my twitpic.
4 comments
hmmm. this gives me an idea
low-res voxels! it’s a good look.
awesome! i’ve been playing with this ever since the post on indie games blog. seems a lot of kids who grew up drawing with pixels also played with lego, and this is a fascinating new layer to spriting.
the nuances of using voxels changes things a bit as you’ve mentioned. i like how you’ve used countours to approximate the original sprites. the inability to rely on outlines, and the persistence of the outside cubes are challenging new limitations i think.
the cko files cube kingdom spits out are incredibly easy to parse; i’ve been working on a game with it!
Awesome.
All of this Cube Kingdom stuff makes me want to see you do a game in 3D. It’d certainly be interesting.
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