Qubicle: Tips & Tricks for beginners

wow, 40 minute beginner video… thanks for putting that together! :+1:

i’m sure i have some extra internet points floating around here somewhere…

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In the last week working with Qubicle I came across some additional “lessons learned” I want to offer to share. In case someone is interested…

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as always, i love the accent… i realize that’s not the selling point of the video, but i find im forced to pay attention! :smile:

importing that text was very slick, and seeing those shortcuts in action makes me want to fire up qubicle again (only to be disappointed in my efforts, most likely)… still, thanks for putting this together…

very helpful indeed! :+1:

nice, I just learned that there is a texture set button. I saw it earlier but never knew what it did. :+1:

So it was already worth it to upload the video :wink:.

Excellent work!
I’m Going to be making a video tutorial fregarding the same topic tonight on youtube. If it’s alright with you, can i add this as the “written” tutorial?

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You mean this thread here? Honestly, I see it more as a “Tips and Tricks”. If you want to refere to a real “written tutorial” you might want to link to the official one from Minddesk. That might more deserve this title. But feel free to link also to this place here… no problem at all.

My bad :stuck_out_tongue: i should add your post as the “tricks and tips” and use minddesk for the “written tutorial”. Thanks

A trick could cut render times by over 75% for blender, it gets more useful the voxels you have.

Give all the objects the decimate modifier and set it to planar. Pics below to help if you don’t know what they are.
The modifier menu is just a few spots left of render. Also observe that the objects are a grid of closely packed vertices, edges, and faces.


Set the angle to whatever you want as long as it’s bigger than 0, 15 is the default and works fine.


Tada, Now all those grids are gone (Note: I used duplicate and apply, you can’t see this otherwise) cutting the amount of faces by about 85%, edges by 80% and vertices by 75% presumably this decreases render time but I haven’t done proper testing yet as I don’t have any good models test with.

PROBLEM FOUND! Apparently it can screw up textures, be careful people. You should still be able to pull it off though it just might take a bit more work, I’ll have a play around and see if I can get past the problem.

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Regarding “Tip 4”… Tim has included a complete overview of the available hotkeys in the new Wiki.

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Have been playing in Qubicle a bit and was wondering if someone could post the standard size of characters in Stonehearth. Devs have mentioned that the game engine considers 10x10x10 voxels in QC to be an in-game voxel and that 3 of these in-game voxels tall is close to the standard size character.

I’ve seen the thread with the replica voxel models of what we’ve seen from Stonehearth devs so far but just wondered if someone has advice for what size to start with when trying to replicate or create something from scratch that will scale well into the game. (I know you can use the stretch tool, but I end up too big or too small and then have to do a lot of adjusting after stretching.

Thanks gang.
-Splice

@splicepoint The above models are pretty all replications from screenshots and live streams conducted by the devs. So if you e.g. download the standard worker model, you can simply count the size.

I do not remember that the devs have mentioned that 10x10x10 voxels in QC are equal to 1 voxel in Stonehearth. Can you refer to the stream / comment where you have this information from?

In the last stream it was mentioned that the icon-version of larger items in the game will be sized 10x10x10 voxels, to allow for easier animations. In the past it was shown / mentioned that buildings are up-scaled by 1:10, i.e. 10 voxels of the standard worder will be the size of 1 voxel of a building. But this are the only reference to numbers I have in my mind.

… which doesn’t automatically mean that I am right :wink:.

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Hey @voxel_pirate it was definitely one of the twitch streams showing off modeling. I believe it was the one where there was work being done on icons. At the moment I’m not going to be able to track down when I thought I heard the comment about 10x10x10 = 1 in-game voxel.

I could definitely have heard or understood that incorrectly.

Sound advice on loading up the unofficial character models and checking the voxel count. Just hard for me to translate that into new creatures/animals that aren’t humanoids sometimes!

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… that’s where the repository of unofficial models might come handy. You will find models for a bat, bird, boar, bunny, sheep, etc. in there. As long as we do not have access to the game I guess the best we can try is to size our own stuff based on this models. E.g. I have tried to create a cow which does not feel too wrong from a size point of view (for me)… you can also find it under the mentioned link.

Btw. the male might be something like 19x33x14 and the female 17x31x13 voxels in size.

Appreciate the help! I suppose for now having the starting point of a sheep, cow or mammoth is certainly better than trying to dial one up manually with no guidance!

Continuing the discussion from Newb wants to model an Ulfberht:

[quote=“voxel_pirate, post:20, topic:2956”]
@robbx213 & @Lele99 Regarding your .gif-files. In Qubicle’s “Render Settings” you can change the “Frames Per Rotation” and “Animation Delay”. By changing this values you can influence the resulting .gif-file. Try something like 100 frames and 10 as delay. [/quote]

I tried a few different settings of different # of frames (50, 60, 100), delay, and clockwise vs. other. Same result every time, only about 90 degrees rotation.

When I tried 30 frames and 25 ms it spun all the way around, but very quickly. Below is success: 30 frames and 1 ms. Slower, kind of the opposite of what I thought the delay would do, but whatever now it’s working.

It did help to just sit there and play with the numbers and keep pasting it into the draft post on the left, then looking at the preview on the right and keep fiddling with numbers until it worked.

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just seemed more fitting having your solution here, where others might benefit as well… :+1:

merged

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@BorBor it’s actually been rotating fine for me each time you posted it? I don’t know why only for me?

I’m back to silly questions again, but there is one kind of important thing I need to know: when taking colour samples, which side should I take it from? So say I was replicating existing models (which I am)…which of the sides should I take the colour from, top, right or front? As it matters, with Tom having shadows on. Would it be the top?

Yes, I would go for the top. The sides most of the time are a bit darker due to the shadow.

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