Acropora 1.0: New Kid on The Voxel Block
Originally published in 3D World 131
F illing the niche between the lightweight apps like EveryGraphs’ Voxel 3D and Pilgway’s heavier 3D-Coat, Danish one-man company Voxelogic recently released Acropora 1.0, a voxelbased mesh-generator. Whereas a polygon-based modeler uses a coordinate-on-mesh based approach like points and polys for defining the mesh and subdetailing, Acropra works from a defined volume, created via a basic shape in the form of a primitive or an imported mesh. You then use procedural modifiers to tranform the voxel values in order to create your shape. Working on a mesh like this means you generally see and modify the whole shape at once, as opposed to sub-d modeling and detailing.
Currently shipping as a modeler only, Acropora contains no texturing, uv-mapping or rendering tools. However, what it lacks as an all-in-one package, it more than compensates for it by providing two things in abundance: Speed and tools.
The speed is particularly noticeable when generating complex and detailed terrains and landscape props like rocks and i.e stone walls – creating a crumbled, detailed stone wall took under a minute by defining an area, bumping up the resolution, adding a primitive and two volumetric noise modifiers. Sliding the volumetric noise sliders generated instant permutations, allowing a range of walls, or other shapes, to be generated in a matter of seconds.
Acropora’s terrain generator is somewhat similar to Vue’s with predefined terrain types – and yields equally detailed results.
Toolwise, wrapped in a very sequential, no frills interface, Acropora has a pretty robust selection of modifiers: The noise modifiers alone range from straight up Perlin to 15-octave noises, with each octave separately configurable, primitive, geometric and terrain modifiers including crater and cave generators (a boon for anyone working with landscapes), and a voxel-sculpting toolset containing loft, groove, bore and extrude tools, enabling one to create anything from greebles to racetracks on the mesh.
You can finetune and edit all splinepoints in Acropora’s voxel-tools.
As with all first releases, there are a few things, primarily in the interface, which would have benefitted from some more work.
The lack of rightclick functionality in the meshview means one has to click around in the UI for basic functions (move, scale, focus). The zoom function is currently mouse only, and as freeform sculpting and detailing involves using a tablet for many, its at times a hassle zooming and panning. This could easily have been incorporated in the UI as a magnifying glass or a generic zoom hotkey.
The biggest annoyance, however, is working with the voxel tools: When defining voxel tool parameters, the voxel tool itself loses focus, which means clicking back and forth between sculpting, settings, and reacivating the tool, instead of the tool just adapting to the settings its been given on the fly. It would also be very useful to have customiseable paintbrushes for the voxeltools, currently they are square, circle and triangle only.
o Voxelising and tweaking noise on imported meshes can give many interesting results
However, as a debut release for Voxelogic, Acropora is a very handy complementary package for anyone interested in extending their landscaping or freeform modeling toolkit. The ease and speed in which it can generate anything from terrains, caves and asteroids in no-time for use in other applications by far outweigh any UI hassle.
Verdict Box:
Pros |
Cons |
|||
| Fast mesh-generation | No customisable brushes | |||
| Good help files | Objects import overtriangulated | |||
| Extensive toolset. | UI navigation issues | |||
Full Disclosure:
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