3D Pixel Fun with voxels : Q-BLOCK and Cube Kingdom

Q-BLOCK screen snap

A voxel (volumetric pixel) is a volume element, representing a value on a regular grid in three dimensional space. This is analogous to a pixel, which represents 2D image data in a bitmap (which is sometimes referred to as a pixmap).

Q-BLOCK

Q-BLOCK, created by Okuyama Kazuya, is a Flash-based application that can be used to create and share 3D models made out of coloured square blocks. Wallpapers and icons are easily generated at the press of a button, and models can be shared using permalinks or through a Twitter account.

The drawing tool is extremely simple to use, yet offers enough diversity for pixel art veterans to quickly design something in just a couple of minutes. You can even draw a model layer by layer with the handy canvas feature, which comes with editing options like copy, paste, and an extrude button to automatically apply one layout to every other layer of the block.

Cube Kingdom

Cube Kingdom is a free Japanese desktop application, created in 2009 by Ramza3D, that can be used to create 3D models out of blocks with the same size and dimension. Squares can be placed, erased or coloured over with just a click or two, and there are sixteen different colours that you can choose from to apply to your building blocks.

Hold the middle mouse button to move your construction around the window. The scroll wheel can be used to zoom in or out, and models can be saved or retrieved by selecting the first menu bar option. You can also edit Cube Kingdom’s text configuration file to change background colour and other settings.