Suggestions

[ggnoxx]

I’ve tried to draw something random today...xD

Really nice job on startup time and memory optimization. Even when I run it with a crappy ancient laptop, it’s much faster now. You could let us choose the quality, though.

Some suggestions and the like:
- A fill tool for voxels. i.e.: you draw a closed 2D outline (like a circumference). With this you could fill the surface delimited by the outline with voxels.
- A push tool that clicking on a voxel face, moves it in or out towards the center(left or right mouse) or something like that. Sometimes I felt I needed to quickly move a voxel without having to make selections, or erasing it.
- To be able to modify the light source settings. Position, color, intensity, etc. I don’t get how the light works. As I rotate the camera, it looks like sometimes the light source switches from top to bottom, left or right.. Is it global? or it moves around?
- To be able to paint more than one texture at a time. Like selecting NxM cells from texture manager, and painting them all at once. Or having a texture matrix tool where you put textures in a grid from your texture manager, and then you can paint with it, like a stamp.
- A more controllable way to make cubes/boxes with the shift+drag thing. It could work as in any other 3D software, where you select the base first, and then the height. i.e pressing shift all the time, drag the mouse and you make a rectangle(the base), release the mouse and it drags the height. Finally release shift and it draws the cube.
- To add an Optimize function, which would remove all the inner, “invisible” voxels.
- You should already know the color picker is weird. It takes the color from anywhere your mouse is pointing. Picking the color from a voxel, it should take the base color not the shaded one, after applying the lighting.
- The eraser is too aggressive. When you hold and drag the mouse, it removes a lot of voxels. Even removing voxels one by one sometimes I erase more than I want to. Maybe when holding the mouse it should stick to the current plane (like the drawing tool does) and not erase everything it touches.
- Same with selections. Selecting a rectangle takes all the voxels in it, from all the planes. I'm not saying to change this, as it is useful, but adding a key modifier to select just the voxels on the same plane, or the visible voxels in the selection rectangle. Well, I can always select a plane from the side views but then I have to search it while selecting it from the 3D view would be much easier.

That's all.
Merry Christmas!!

[flux]

I’ve tried to draw something random today...xD

Really nice job on startup time and memory optimization. Even when I run it with a crappy ancient laptop, it’s much faster now. You could let us choose the quality, though.

That looks really awesome! I'm very pleased to hear that it runs much faster for you now and yes, there will be an option to change the quality later on.

I found out yesterday that I can already plug in the exported COLLADA files into an 3D printer. Will post some stuff I printed soon!

- A fill tool for voxels. i.e.: you draw a closed 2D outline (like a circumference). With this you could fill the surface delimited by the outline with voxels.

Yeah, I had that before, but it got lost when I reworked the tools. I really need to restructure how the tools work (again) and sane-itize it.

- A push tool that clicking on a voxel face, moves it in or out towards the center(left or right mouse) or something like that. Sometimes I felt I needed to quickly move a voxel without having to make selections, or erasing it.

There will be an extrude/intrude tool. Not entirely sure how it will work yet, but that might be helpful.

- To be able to modify the light source settings. Position, color, intensity, etc. I don’t get how the light works. As I rotate the camera, it looks like sometimes the light source switches from top to bottom, left or right.. Is it global? or it moves around?

There are two lightning settings atm (the button with the lamp), one uses atmospheric (global) lighting and two light sources (top back left and bottom front right) and the other uses atmospheric lightning a negative light from the position of the camera (tricky, huh? =D). Place able light sources is certainly not a priority atm. There will be a "beautify" option to create a nice looking render in high quality with shadows and so on. I also don't see what different color/position/brightness lights are really useful for.

- To be able to paint more than one texture at a time. Like selecting NxM cells from texture manager, and painting them all at once. Or having a texture matrix tool where you put textures in a grid from your texture manager, and then you can paint with it, like a stamp.

Yeah that sounds good. But also not a priority. Textures are meant to refine resolution of selected voxel atm, not to create huge areas. Other stuff needs to come first (color palette, animation, format rework, ...) and before textures are scalable I need to come up with a very innovative optimization idea.

- A more controllable way to make cubes/boxes with the shift+drag thing. It could work as in any other 3D software, where you select the base first, and then the height. i.e pressing shift all the time, drag the mouse and you make a rectangle(the base), release the mouse and it drags the height. Finally release shift and it draws the cube.

There will be tools to create cubes, circles etc. I think the shift select works good as it is now. The only thing I was thinking to change is that you can also drag to empty space.

- To add an Optimize function, which would remove all the inner, “invisible” voxels.

The funny thing is: A voxel object is actually more optimized if the inner parts are filled. That's why the wireframe mode exists (you can see holes in it). So if anything I'd need an optimize function that fills inner regions.

- You should already know the color picker is weird. It takes the color from anywhere your mouse is pointing. Picking the color from a voxel, it should take the base color not the shaded one, after applying the lighting.

There are two color pickers: One is a tool and it should work exactly as you want it to (pick the color of the voxel you selected) and the other is the hotkey ("P" by default), that selects a color anywhere on the screen (this is useful when you want to extract a color form an image for example!).

- The eraser is too aggressive. When you hold and drag the mouse, it removes a lot of voxels. Even removing voxels one by one sometimes I erase more than I want to. Maybe when holding the mouse it should stick to the current plane (like the drawing tool does) and not erase everything it touches.

I hundred percent agree. It's actually already on my todo list (somewhere).

- Same with selections. Selecting a rectangle takes all the voxels in it, from all the planes. I'm not saying to change this, as it is useful, but adding a key modifier to select just the voxels on the same plane, or the visible voxels in the selection rectangle. Well, I can always select a plane from the side views but then I have to search it while selecting it from the 3D view would be much easier.

Just to better understand - why and for what would you want to use that? Color a specific area?

Merry Christmas!!

Same to you =)

Thank you very much for you feedback! I really, really appreciate it!

[ggnoxx]

That was all I could think about. Thanks for taking the time to explain everything, I've learned a lot lol =)
And 3D PRINTER! I'd love to see FO figures or something like that! I could draw some models.
So I remembered Gamer saying something about the voxel version of FO that will never happen, and thought about how it could have looked like...

Well, that was hard... I wish there was a way to export a spritesheet and "magically" get a 3D voxel version.

I'll be back when I come up with any more low priority suggestions

[graspee]

Here's my list of suggestions; some have been mentioned already:

circle tool

sphere tool

freehand line tool (Bresenham)

A kind of "fill select tool". Either does whole select or widens an existing select such that all voxels the same colour that touch are selected.
extrude

A three prong tool in 3d space to be able to move the selection one axis at a time (for when you want to move something in one plane and you don't want to have to keep your hand steady to make sure it doesn't go 'off course'.

option to write voxel colours to vertices in exported file

import full resolution pictures to use as a guide (separate to and in addition to the import picture and voxelize it). Ability to scale these pictures if you want but also option not to scale them (because some programs scaling the pictures oddly without telling you is enough to drive one mad).

Import picture to voxelize taking account of which view you are in to align the picture to that plane so you don't have to mess about rotating it.

Thanks for your hard work!

[Pajaroide]

Just wanted to say I love VoxelShop! It's amazing! I'm currently doing a Unity game with it and wanted to tell you that I'll donate as soon as I win some money with it.

The only thing I would add is something akin to "brush size" or in this case cube size (3x3 cubes, 4x4, etc). And maybe a more flexible camera, modeling gets a bit difficult in bigger scenes because of the center-based rotation. =)

Thank you!

[flux]

Thank you guys! Lots of these have been implemented now, and there is a big list of stuff I want to still do!

https://github.com/simlu/voxelshop/issues