Hello Fellow “Artists”,
I am working at the moment on a model which is a bit bigger and encounter an issue, which you might also face (maybe already did). If you have a larger model, you typically need more Voxels to design it. However, if you use a lot of Voxels, the final product does not look right anymore and might not fit to the art of Stonehearth.
Let me use my actual model, a boat, as a showcase. This model I have developed to fit in size to the model of a standard dude:
Apart from the fact, that it does not yet look like a boat (^^), you might recognize that it does not feel right. It looks too detailed with all that Voxels and almost curves.
Our friends from Stonehearth seem to simply scale their models up, as you can see e.g. in the Trailer (minute 0:40), when the monster enters the scene. I guess that modders will be able to do the same once the game is out. However, if you do not want to wait and would like to arrange all your models in Qubicle (and not export it to another program where you can play around with the sizes), there is a feature in Qubicle which will be of help.
What we need is the function called “Stretch”. You can open the related dialog via the toolbar, once you have selected your model (otherwise it is grayed out):
Once you click on the icon, the following dialog will open up (for sure the numbers might look different ;-):
Here you see the size of all 3 dimensions related to your “workarea” in Voxel. Luckily, Qubicle is using a handy algorithm to resize models, which will help us to Voxelize the boat (or whatever you are working on). So, here we go…
Step 1: Downsize your model. I have decided that my boat should have half the amount of Voxels than my standard dude. So, where my boat has later 1 Voxel, my people should have 2x2 Voxels. So for me, it works to halfen the size in all 3 dimensions.
Step 2: Re-size your model. Here the algorithm helps us. If you select your (now shrinked) model and click again on “Stretch”, you might want to enter the old size, i.e. double all numbers in my case.
Qubicle will now “double” each Voxel and replace each single Voxel with a 2x2 Voxel-Matrix. The result will be that your model has the same size then before we started to adjust it, and might look like that:
As you can see, the boat is still made out of single Voxels, but they are now aligned to a 2x2 design. There is no single Voxel alone somewhere and overall the model is less detailed. From a distance, it just looks more like Stonehearth, from my point of view.
One additional comment… to have this working well, you have to use an even-size for the workarea. Otherwise Qubicle will re-size to the odd size and at one point will not be able to place a 2x2 Voxel-Matrix… so you have to adjust that later on.
I hope this small tutorial helps one or the other, who is encounting a similar challenge.
Enjoy!
P.S. The second boat is not the direct outcome from stretching. Although Qubicle will do its job, the result will require some manual work. I also continued working on the boat, so this picture is just to show the idea.
P.P.S. I hope it is not too difficult to follow my thoughts. It is quite late here already, so have mercy with me and just drop me a line if I should explain one or the other step in more detail.
Update: For sure the easiest way is to create a model “as small as possible” in Qubicle Constructor, export it into an .obj-file and load it into your favorite animation tool. There you can re-size it and add other, smaller models into the scene. However, this approach requires to have the Home- or Master-Edition of Qubicle (supporting the export-feature).