Voxel Art - Mage Character

Search for references.

I have always liked worlds with magic, so I decided to look for the necessary references to make a magician who is learning new powers.

Reference poses.

Once I had the references, the next thing was to make the reference poses for the animation, these worked as a non-strict guide for the animation.

Character prototype.

It was time to make a prototype without color of the character, the important thing is the shape of the character that has charisma, is easy to identify.

After that, add color to the character, details and correct or add things if it seems necessary, for example I added a box where I would keep magic objects.

The other 3D models.

Once the character is finished, rig tests must be done to see that everything works well as intended.

Once the tests are finished and the corrections are made, the other objects begin to be made, objects such as a book and a skull that will appear in the animation.

It is also good to make more heads for the character with different faces, background objects, the ground and some objects that will only be for decoration. In my case I made different types of books as decoration and a shelf where to put them.

The animation.

For this step I used Blender because Maya started to give me problems and I didn't want to get too complicated, also my Maya license is about to expire in a few months and since Blender is free I preferred to learn how to use it.

Before the animation process I had to do many things, the program I use to create the models is MagicaVoxel because it is the best free option, I don't have money to buy another one like Qubicle and the others do not offer so many tools and they are not very intuitive or friendly with the user, but the MagicaVoxel export system is very bad and gave me many problems. The solution to the export of MagicaVoxel was to use Goxel (another free program) as an intermediary, with Goxel opening the MagicaVoxel files and exporting them as gltf2 which are supported by Blender and they gave me no problems.

After following the steps of the videos applied to Blender, the next thing was to export the animations and the other objects in FBX format to import them into Unity.

Frame animation.

After importing the exported files to Unity, configuring the textures and materials, it's time to modify the animations made in Blender by adding new frames.

Extra objects such as the heads of the character with different faces will be the key, by modifying some frames of the animation we can make the character seem concentrated or surprised and her movements look more real.

Effects for animation.

In order to make the animation look better I added some effects like particles and simple lighting.

Lighting and post processing.

After the animation and effects are complete, it's time to adjust the lighting and post-processing effects.

For this step what I did was change the Skybox for a custom one using a Shader, change the lighting manually to adjust it to something that looked good and with the post-processing effects adjust the final details.

The power of Cinemachine in Unity.

In order to record the final clip of the animation, what I did was use the Cinemachine package that can be downloaded from the Package Manager panel.

But Cinemachine only allows me to make camera adjustments and movements for cinematics, so what I did was download the Unity Recorder package that allows me to create a clip with Cinemachine.

Final result of the project.

After this process that I really enjoyed, here is the final result, my first 3D Voxel Art animation.