Voxel Section Editor III progresses with 3D models.
The idea may sound stupid for some of you, but it actually makes a lot of sense in this site. It should help modders to bring their old mods to newer games and it will also help a lot of people to create detailed 3D models. Although VXLSE III has its limitations (256 colours/243 normals) and volume pixels do have mathematical limits as well, it is intuitive to add detail to your graphical object with an interface that shows you what you are painting and where you are painting it, while it is more intuitive to generate the shape with a geometric modelling program. It makes more sense when you look at the voxels submitted to our Voxels forum and the 3D models displayed at Media Hut and 3D Models forum.
Anyway, we had preliminary results on the task of generating 3D models from voxels already and we can export them into the awful .obj file format using VXLSE III. The problem is that we were obtaining models that had serious problems with their topology and, for this reason, when we generated textures or simplified the mesh, the results would be bad or the mesh would still be too much detailed to run in any existing C&C game.
Today we are proud to announce that we have a new mesh extraction method that no longer had topological problems. The pictures below shows some of the results on units from Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge:
Of course that we still have several steps to code or improve until we also extract all textures automatically and export everything in a way that is accepted by Generals, C&C3, Red Alert 3 and any future decent game, so we can simplify the process of creating graphics for these games.
