Introduction to Voxel Art for Character Design

Think outside the box and bring your characters to life with Qubicle, Maya or Blender, and Unity

Step into the Voxel art universe, to create your own fantasy character made entirely of 3D cubes with Zach Soares, a self-taught Voxel artist with almost a decade of experience in the field. Start from the very basics and work your way up to creating a full Voxel render from scratch.

Learn how to model, rig, and animate your character, going through scale and color technique, learning Zach’s blocking and animating methodology, and push yourself into a new creative challenge made entirely of 3D blocks.

Start the course by getting to know Zach, his experience with Voxel art and game development, as well as his main sources of inspiration.

Get a quick run-through of what to expect in the course, and see Zach’s method for collecting references to speed up your production, starting with the general concept you want to create.

Understand how to determine the scale of your character, and where to stage the focus. Use your references to pick your colors, finding the right balance between color, textures, and lighting.

Next, have some fun creating animation references using your phone. Press record and enact the movements you want to give to your character. Get started on modeling your character on Qubicle, block and position your scene, and do the same for your character with Zach guiding you through each step as you go.

Work on the pre-rigging phase in Maya, seeing what to look out for when moving your model from Qubicle to Maya and how best to test your model before and during the rigging process. Next, discover Zach’s step by step Voxel rigging methodology, learning the best way to organize your project as you go.

Work on the most exciting part of the process: animating your character. Use Maya or Blender, learning tricks and shortcuts to work more efficiently. Add an extra layer of animation through frame animation using a 3D stop motion process.

Finally, work on setting up your scene and lighting it on Unity with Cinemachine, and capture it with OBS to share your Voxel character with your social media network.

What is this course’s project? Create a Voxel art character and their surroundings using 3D blocks. Zach creates a female character in a mechanical context which you can do along with him.

Who is it for? This course is for anyone who wants to learn about Voxel art, beginners included, who want to push themselves to new creative challenges.

What you need Knowledge of how to use Qubicle, Maya, and Unity will be useful. However, each software will be explained throughout the course.

You will need a computer, the Qubicle software, as well as other software you want to use to model and animate your character, such as Maya and Unity.