How To Use Qubicle To Get The 3D Dot Game Heroes Look
Tutorials
By Tim Wesoly, developer of Qubicle Constructor
What you need: Qubicle Constructor v1.0.13.0+ Master or Education Edition
In this brief tutorial you will learn how to use Qubicle’s OBJ exporter to get the blocky outlined look of 3D Dot Game Heroes.
Setting up the OBJ exporter
All you need for this tutorial is a rather small model with few cubes. Got one? Then you are ready to go. Just Click on the “Export as *.OBJ” speed button (or use File > Export and select OBJ Wavefront as file type). After entering the filename the OBJ settings form pops up. Change the settings as follows:
By using the SimpleTex material type every color used in the model you want to export gets a corresponding color square in the texture that is exported. By activating Draw outlines to texture these squares are outlined with the given Outline color and Outline opacity. The smaller you choose the value for Pixels per color the smaller the squares in the texture will be and thus the thicker the outlines on the rendered model. But of course smaller square sizes will result in blurrier outlines. So I found that 16×16 Pixels is a fair compromise.
The resulting model will look like the pet on the right:
Adding more details
The workflow described so far is a fast, quick and dirty way. But being fast doesn’t always mean to be precise. So if you want to get really crisp good looking results, I recommend to choose a large color rect size, at least 64×64 and modify the texture manually in post process. To do this open the texture (named *.png) in an image editor thicken the outlines and while you are at it draw some nice bevels (if you look closer at 3D Dot Game Heroes images you will notice a light bevel effect). You can draw anything you like into the textures, experiment with it. And if you like to add a different texture to all 6 sides of the cubes change “Faces per color” from 1 to 6
The modified object and texture could look something like this:
A final tip
If you updated your texture manually, you should check Don’t overwrite existing texture map in the OBJ settings if you want to export your model again with the same filename. Otherwise your work is overwritten.