The Hallelujah Chorus erupts from the glowing clouds as god rays pierce a stain-glassed window, anointing voxel artists in colorful shadows.

Ephtracy has a habit of hyping people up with screenshots and video clips for a couple weeks before releasing a new version of MagicaVoxel with no warning at 2:30 in the morning.

This new version lets you toggle the fancy new lighting effects on and off, and a good thing too... If your GPU struggled to keep a good frame rate on the program while tweaking render settings, having MIS-Cloud and other effects turned on will make it beg for mercy.





One thing I’ve noticed is missing is the good old GI button, which appears to be permanently “on” now. For those looking for the old “painterly” shading that leaving GI off provided, you can disable stochastic rendering in the sample settings. You’ll also notice on the sample menu that the bounce settings for diffuse, specular, and scatter can all be set separately as well, so lighting can be more fine-tuned.





An interesting feature not mentioned in the update log is the new Cell slider in the shape menu. This allows you to shrink sphere and cylinder shapes so gaps appear between voxels.





An even more interesting feature are new export options! You can now export slices, point clouds, and cubes. Slices creates a PNG image, like a top to bottom set of instructions for building an object. This could be useful for creating pixel art, or making Building instructions for LEGO or PIXIO .





Point clouds are another way of representing 3D data, sort of like voxels, but not bound to a grid. These can be useful for simulation programs like Houdini, and are often created with 3D scanning equipment.





Cubes exports a PLY mesh of each cube, instead of combining the mesh like the default PLY or OBJ exports. This is also useful for simulating things like building destruction.





There’s a lot to learn in the new features, with the word “phase” coming into play a lot on cloud material and fog settings. It definitely does something when I change them, but what exactly it’s doing I haven’t figured out yet. In a week or two I’ll release a video trying to explain these new features.





Speaking of video, check out my new YouTube channel: Voxelize. I’ve been doing tutorials on using VoxEdit and I’ll have a complete breakdown of the rigging and animation features coming out later this week. I’ll be uploading new videos every week about various voxel programs and anything else voxel. Be sure to subscribe and click the bell icon so you can be notified when I have a new tutorial video released. Here's the first video:



