Voxel Art - Waterfall Valley

This is the biggest project I've finished so far

(More of the same coming soon)

Conception

After watching many of William Santacruz's voxel art videos on youtube, I decided to look up what program he used. After finding out that it was free, I decided to try it out myself. The first voxel art I made was this waterfall. It's not that great, but it did spark an interest in voxel art even more.

After making the waterfall, I started working on another voxel art project about Rand (which I've made a post about here). After finishing that, I decided to try and make a better waterfall. An idea came to my head to try and derive it off pixel art (credit to Mamaru for the awesome pixel art).

Starting out

Starting out, the idea was quite a bit different from the final product. I though I'd make it look like a full scene. In reality, it would just be an illusion. This could work because of positioning of the camera in the pixel art (the bottom right corner). Starting out, the scene just had a ridge close to the camera with a waterfall and a background ridge with another waterfall. After weeks and weeks of making that part of the scene, I decided to add another tiny ridge to hide the left part of the scene. After completing that, I put the project on hold. This was because a whole bunch of other projects were going on at the same time.

Early development pictures

I made the ridge in the background different heights to match pixel art. Then I laid out the ridge close to the camera but didn't worked on it just yet.

 The background ridge has been added with a 

grass top and the less high part now has trees.

The ridge close to the camera has been built up.

A tree has been added next to the camera to try and hide the left side.

The tree has been removed, a new waterfall has been added to the background ridge, and the left side has a new, small ridge.

Picking it back up

After finishing most of my other projects, I decided to pick this project back up. After looking at what I had achieved, I decided that what I had made was not enough. Starting off I added trees to the left part, I made the ground near the camera and the left side ridge one part, and added water to the floor. After finishing that I made a decision. I wanted to make it look good from all angles. It was a tough decision to make since I knew how much work it would take, but I'm glad I decided to go ahead with it. After mapping out an inner and outer "wall", I got to work. I connected the taller part of the background ridge to the inner wall and just went with that height for the rest of it. The rest was just making the entire wall the same hight. After finishing the inner wall, I worked on the outer wall. This was tedious because of the way my process works (more on that later). The only thing that changed after that was that I removed the trees from the higher part of the background ridge and made the ground close to the camera extend to the bottom right corner. After that...well, you'll see.

Wall build up

Before and after building the wall

The process and scraped ideas

The process was pretty easy for the most part. Copy a bit of the pixel art here, add my own stuff there and so on and so forth. Making the rock formations however, was very tedious. Nevertheless, I do have a four step process on how I did it.

1. Make an outline of where you want the rock formation to be.

2. Pull it up by two or three voxels.

3. Make a rough outline of the line, going back and forth between mimicking the line, and going behind or in front of it. You can also use going back or forward more to make an incline or a decline.

4. Pull the rough outline up by two or three voxels.

Repeat until the desired height is achieved.

Scraped ideas

The first scraped idea was to generate more greenery. This was scraped due to time. The second idea was to have a house and trees on the higher part of the background ridge. You can still see the house and a few trees on the ridge in the wall building pictures. This was scraped because of the higher part being flush with the wall. It really didn't look that good and kinda killed the look. The third idea was to have to ground near the camera have trees. This was scraped so you could see the left part of the scene. And finally, the forth idea was to have a rainbow over the valley. This was scarped due to not having much room left in Magicavoxel, and not wanting to take away from the main piece.

Final Images

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for...the final images!

These are all 1080p, so you could use them as wallpapers. You can download them here.

Overview

I'm super happy how these came out! This project has taken me at least 35 hours of work and feel as though it was worth it. Personally, I wouldn't alter a thing.

My takeaway

Sticking with a project through till the end can be super rewarding.

Bye for now,

Scott