Voxel Cubes by Anenome on DeviantArt (original) (raw)
This is a voxel-like scene I rendered in Blender 3D for the header of /r/VOXEL, which I was recently added to as a mod. Actually I only used a small section of this for that header, this is the full image.
This looks like it might've been extremely laborious to make if one were trying to set each cube by hand, but actually it was quite easy.
To make this I began by putting a sphere into the scene, subdividing it to give it more surfaces, then turning it into an emitter. As an emitter I could make it shoot out shapes from each of its surfaces. This done I then set it to emits cubes, and setup a physics simulation so the cubes would bounce off the floor and collect there. Then, over the course of 100 frames, I had it spray out 25,000 cubes! In the center top of the image you see just a knot of cubes--it is from there that they are being emitted, then collecting on the floor below.
Then I set the textures for the cubes, and the lighting and background. I played around with semi-transparent cubes for a bit, and different lighting, and settled on this more minimalistic one.
I froze the simulation at about the 2/3 mark, at a pleasing frame, and that is what you see here.