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.

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.

Optimize with Texture

Curved Edges: Blocky Style

Circular Shapes: Cross Technique

Create Smooth Angled Lines

Break Down Objects

Need to Simplify?

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:

  1. Set the colours in the overlapping areas of each model to be the same.

  2. 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.

  3. 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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