modelling & animating voxel sharks

20/7/2023

I wanted to practice workflows for creating voxel characters and decided I would modelling the shark I use as a rubber duck and programming, and do all of the 3D work blender. My subjects name is Lenny. He is a sword shark.

Voxel art isn't super complicated, its just 3D pixel art, right?

Exactly, but much like pixel art, there are loads of different stylistic choices you can make, and how you approach creating it has a huge impact on your work. In this case, the character I want to create isn't very complicated, so I decided to make a basic 2D pixel art model sheet using the shark plushie as a reference, and tried to keep the pixel resolution low.

This was what I came up with, I ended up making some changes once I had it in Blender, as getting the character into a 3D environment helped me better visualize the form and come up with creative ways to bring it to life.

I also included the colours used in the drawing as individual pixels on the bottom left

This was so that I could also use this image as the texture atlas for the model. You wouldn't do this for game dev and stuff, but for making a short animation it saved me having to import different images and meant I could make simple changes if I needed to.

I then did the following -

Lenny, the sword shark.

It's worth noting I had to upscale this picture for display here, the original image was 52x42 pixels.

open blender and delete default cube.
set up a material using the image and make sure to set the filtering set to closest.
scale a plane in your scene 1:1 with the pixel resolution and apply the material.
place planes on the relevant axis so that you have a reference from different angles
place a cube and use 3 array modifiers to create a grid of cubes the same size as your model.

I used a subtractive workflow to carve the form out of the grid using the model sheet for reference. It gives you a really good starting point to flesh out the character and add detail, working on and developing the pixel art character in 3D is much easier (at least for me). I find it much easier to visualize things like curvature, depth, etc. I came up with a few variations, UV mapped everything onto the texture atlas and got set up for rendering!

introducing the sharks.

Disgruntled
shark

the

This guy stayed as true to the original model sheet as possible, I decided to give this one slightly more personality by making its eyes a lil grumpy. This is the one I ended up animating.

angry shark

the

This one is really similar to the previous model, but it has a different nose and is an uneven width, having the single voxel width fins looks a little nicer in my opinion. This one is also much angrier.

shifty shark

the

This shark was made without a model sheet, and is slightly more stylized. This one is up to something.

Going from creating the model sheet to having 3 variations of Lenny took around half an hour and there's definitely room for improvement!

I'm happy with the results this time, but I'd like to make a geometry nodes set up to optimize the resulting voxel character by removing all internal / overlapping faces so that these characters can be used in game projects. In this case, being able to move those cubes around is going to help us create shape keys and animate our little shark friend. (ps. vertex snapping in blender makes this super easy to do)

I created a couple of shape keys to make Lenny more dynamic and expressive. I then got to work putting together a short 20 frame animation where he hops around, after that I added some finishing touches and animated the ground / water. I worked on this animation for around an hour by the time I was finished rendering and I'm really pleased with how it turned out!

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