Yo guys and gals. I found a voxel program that exports to .qb files
and the positive thing? its completely free. you can basically do anything that qubicle does.
did I mention its free?
http://voxel.codeplex.com/ grab it here, this doesnt count as advertising. because its free.
but if you don’t have $11 this is a great substitute.
I hope I dont get in trouble for showing a program other than QC 
It’s missing a lot of functionality apparently that is somewhat necessary if you want to animate things, such as “sub models” (matrices), true color (it seems to be palette based) and maybe the size - although 126^3 should be more than enough I suppose.
But its free., we cant complain when somethings free, because its free.
well you can choose different colors from sliders, which is useful, it also does have some nice capabilities for filling objects and mirroring
oh also, there is no save dialog box stuff, so it can speed up workflow like mad.
Well, not really a good argument in my opinion. Of course, no right to complain because it’s free, but I’m merely pointing out that it does not support all functionality that is required for a “smooth” experience. I’m sure that Qubicle, deep down, is actually a decent product that does these things too (and maybe even better). It looks more polished at least - but then again, Minddesk certainly had more time (and a bigger budget) to deal with these things.
The thing is, people that want to actually animate the models properly (not a stupid 360 rotate gif for preview) has to pay so they can export it to an OBJ for import into a 3D application that has animation.
there are major flaws with it, like how they export out the diffuse map. but none the less. people that dont have the money can at least get down and dirty and try to animate.
not to mention it even has some functionality that qubicle doesnt.
Unless you’re somewhat experienced in programming and reverse engineering (although this isn’t even required with both .qb and .obj being very well documented) at which point you can just write your own little converter. People that want to get their hands onto animating might find a way to do this soon enough in a different way.
I don’t doubt that it has some functionality that Qubicle doesn’t have, but if it really does not support matrices, then it’s worthless for animation. Stonehearth’s animation system relies on these matrices; unless you want to move everything around at the same time. It’s not a replacement for animations at all. I’m not sure if it’s merely unable to import it properly (the docs are horrible), but it sounds like the program itself was not capable of the concept.
Oh yeah. those… forgot about them, woops.
It looks good, but just like @RepeatPan said, it’s Lacking many Features that would make it just as useful as QC. Of course it is Free, but
as this has been all over my twitter feed, it seemed appropriate to resurface… perhaps there have been some improvements in the areas mentioned here, since this time last year?
From the few minutes I just spent playing around with it, it definitely seems like a huge improvement over the old magicavoxel, which I also used. However, one problem seems to persist. I can’t find any functionality for matrices, which means that, as @RepeatPan said above, it is worthless for animating. Stonehearth still requires matrices to compound voxels into groups for animating, so that’s out. 
’
It does have an exporter for .qb files, so at least that’s something. There’s also a cool in-program renderer!
All in all, really nice! A bit complex, but that’s probably because I’m used to Qubicle. if anyone finds a matrices option, do tell! This could be a cool alternative!
EDIT: It also accepts .vox imports, so I tested it out with some of my own models, and lookie!
I think I know what I’m using for my pictures from now on, at least. (It looks better if you click on it!)
EDIT THE SECOND: Still doing more snooping, I am DETERMINED to find this program has this feature. (because I have nothing better to do ATM) Not looking good though. Did find this, though:
Isometric pixel art exporter! Anyway, I’ll keep digging.
-Spoolicus
hmm… i will play around with it later and see what i can find.
Alright. I have scoured the interface and played around with the editor perhaps a bit too much, and I have come to the conclusion that there is no matrices option. This is mostly supported by the fact that it seems to only allow matrix at a time, as I cannot edit outside the bounds of the model’s box. The box can, however, be enlarged, but you still can’t edit outside of that. Any new model you try to create overwrites the old one. You can, however, export to .qb, which is useful for adding anything that doesn’t move. Furthurmore, importing any .vox file to Qubicle (exported from Qubicle or made with Magicavoxel) renders the file as only one matrix, at least in Qubicle 2. I’ll need someone to test multi-matrix exporting in Qubicle and importing back to Qubicle, though.
…but hey! It has a cool render function, so… 
-Spoolicus
