Voxel Art Maker
Voxel art maker that rebuilds a photo or video from small isometric cubes, each with a lit top and two shaded sides. Free, and it all runs in your browser.
What is voxel art?
A voxel is a value on a three-dimensional grid, so it's the 3D counterpart of a pixel. Voxel art builds scenes out of small cubes the way pixel art uses squares, and Minecraft (2011) made a whole world from them.
Games were showing cubes from a corner long before that. The 1982 arcade game Q*bert put its pyramid of cubes in an isometric view.
How does the voxel art maker draw its cubes?
From a corner, a cube's outline is a hexagon. So the tool covers your picture in cubes packed into offset rows, and each cube takes the color of the area under it. They're true isometric with regular hexagon outlines, which is different from the 2:1 pixel ratio most isometric games go with.
Each cube shows three faces. The top gets lighter, the left side a little darker and the right side darker still, as if the light came from above and to the left.
How to turn a photo into voxel art
Load an image or a video and set Size, the width of one cube in pixels of a 1080p frame. Shading controls how differently the top and the two sides are lit, from flat at 0 up to hard contrast at 1.
Lines is the outline between cubes as a share of their size, and Line colour sets its color. Colour from blends each cube's area (Average, the default) or reads its middle pixel (Centre).
The presets are Cubes, Small, Big blocks, Soft light and Hard light. Hexagon Mosaic uses the same grid but leaves every cell flat, so you get the honeycomb without any cube shading.
Settings for chunky block art, an isometric game wall and soft pastel cubes
Chunky block art: choose Hard light and set Size to 64. That gives about 19 rows of cubes with dark outlines and brightly lit tops.
Isometric game wall: Size 20, Shading 0.8 and Lines 0.06 with a dark Line colour. At Shading 0.8 the right face drops to 60 percent of the cube's color and the left to 84 percent, while the top lifts about a quarter of the way toward white.
Soft pastel cubes: put Soft light (Shading 0.25, no lines) on a light photo with low contrast.
Can I export the cubes as a 3D model?
No. All the cubes sit at the same height in a flat picture, so there's nothing to rotate and no model file to save.
If you want a plan seen straight from above, with one piece per cell, Brick Mosaic Maker draws the picture as studded bricks in sixteen real colors.
Saving voxel art
PNG keeps transparency. Cubes over a clear background fade out along with it, so a cut-out subject saves as a block figure with no backdrop.
Video plays through a grid that never moves. The cubes stay where they are, and only their colors follow the footage.