Visual Quality
Colour
Colour in The Sandbox is a powerful tool to add complexity to simple blocky surfaces through texturing techniques. It can be used to create a sense of depth on flat surfaces with light and shadow.
It can even create a sense of light when the emissive light mode is toggled on for any colour in the palette.
Emissive Colour Differences
TEST ASSETS IN GAME MAKER
Colour and emissive glow may appear different between VoxEdit, the Marketplace, and in the game world of Game Maker and the Game Client. The game world is where emissive colour appearance matters most.
Below is a comparison of how some colours and emissive glow will appear in different software of The Sandbox ecosystem.
Example:
New Light Behaviour in the Game Engine
Game Maker has new Light behaviour that affects the way assets appear depending on color, intensity, and other settings of the behaviour.
Example:
The image below exemplifies how some light colours in an Experience may impact the appearance of an asset.
Since the emissive colours in an asset do not shine light on the blocks or assets around it in the game engine, Experience builders may use light behaviour to create a point or spot light to enhance your asset to feel like a more natural part of the scene.
3D Design
The shape of your models has significant impact on the performance and quality of your assets, whether they are simple, compound, or animated.
Voxel art in The Sandbox is a combination of blocky shape and texture, optimised to create attractive and efficient assets that offer greater flexibility to Experience creators.
Below are recommended techniques to not only keep your assets within Quality Guidelines, but design them well within maximum recommendations with a more attractive, recognisable result.
Recommended Techniques
Clipping
Clipping
Problem:
In some animations where the movement of a model overlaps another, some models may temporarily "clip" through others, which looks unnatural.
Solution:
It is better to make the colors and textures of the overlapping parts as similar as possible to reduce the clipping effect.
Z-fighting
Z-fighting
Problem:
A visual defect called Z-fighting occurs when the faces of two models in an entity have different colours overlapping in the same location. See the image below.
Z-fighting can appear in static and animated entities, so it's best to inspect every animation's poses and motion carefully to check for this defect.
Solutions:
Set the colours in the overlapping areas of each model to be the same.
Add or delete voxels from one of the models so the faces don't overlap. Note: This does not always look good and can leave unnatural gaps in animations.
Move one of the models about 0.2 voxels in any direction, so there is no longer overlap at the same exact location.
Experiment with these solutions and pick the most suitable option depending on the unique entity you're fixing.
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