Well, 2021 has been a pretty crazy year! We remain as productive as possible, and are trying to stay on top of things as we close out the year. Lets take a look at a few things we have gotten through this month.
New Artist!
We are very excited to welcome ‘Lagiaxel’ to our team! Lagiaxel has been working as a freelance illustrator for 6 years now, and has recently started exploring voxels as a new design medium. After coming across his portfolio on twitter, and chatting with him for a bit, we feel this is a great selection for our team. We are looking forward to getting to know him better as a friend, and as an artist.
As you can see Lagiaxel has an eye for detail, and texturing. We would like to invite everyone to follow him on the socials.
Twitter -https://twitter.com/lagiaxel
Insta- https://www.instagram.com/lagiaxel/
Running in the background:
We have some pretty incredible inhouse tools in our pipeline that have allowed us to go beyond the standard limitations of the VoxEdit software. Check out how fluid this centipede animation is. This would have been very difficult to pull off with the standard tool set, which means we had to improvise, and make some of our own tools to solve our specific problems.
Not only will this tool be able to provide us with some of the best animations in its class, it can translate motion capture data into a usable format for us, which will open the doors too unlimited options. Stay tuned for more information on this in future updates.
Land Production
Risking a spoiler here, but I thought everyone would like to get a feel for how we approach developing a LAND parcel in the Sandbox metaverse.
Our first step here is to build a mock-up of our level. This helps us strategize path finding, caves, tunnels, and basic quests for the players to get through. We start this process out in MagicaVoxel building a 1:32 scale model of the entire LAND. Here we are defining some basic colors, and blocks. MagicaVoxel makes it easy for us to make swift changes if needed.
Once we have established the ground work, we start the process of getting this built in the Sandbox Game Maker. Block type, and color designations have already been established in MagicaVoxel, and this process is far less painful than it seems. Here you can see a quick sample of the result:
Now that we have established the building blocks for this level, it is time to go through and detail this thing with decorations, and get much of the physics up and going. Our goal during this phase is to have have a playable diorama with established pathfinding. We will add things like elevator lifts, locked doors, ladders, decorations, and everything else that can not be represented by blocks.
Here you can see we have started laying out some basic decorations, and the plan is to push this to a fine detail without going overboard as still every voxel counts.
Continuum:
I hope you have all had a wonderful holiday season, and wish everyone a Happy New Years. If you follow us on Twitter, stay tuned, we will soon be announcing the winner of the 50 SAND prize (valued over $330 at the time of this writing). If you don’t follow us on Twitter, you can find our social media links below. We here at Sand Rush are looking forward to an exciting new year, and can’t wait to evolve with you all in the metaverse.
Thank you for reading, please stay tuned for future updates by following us here on Medium, and other Socials.
Chris | SR Co-Founder
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