Blender 4.2+ add-on · v1.0
Build voxel models inside Blender — then keep going. Rig them, animate them, and export straight to Godot, Unity or Unreal without ever leaving the file.
A free build with the core modelling tools is coming to extensions.blender.org.
Why this exists
The modelling happens in one place and everything that actually ships happens somewhere else: the rig, the walk cycle, the atlas, the engine import. So the model crosses a file boundary early, and every change after that means crossing it again.
Voxel Mode puts the grid inside Blender as a real object in Blender's own Edit Mode. The armatures, the actions, the NLA and the exporters are already there and already know about it — which is why rigging and animating voxels stops being a separate project.
What it does
Six tools, five brush shapes, thirty-two generators — and everything downstream of them, up to the FBX your engine opens.
Attach, erase and paint on a live grid, with a hover cursor that shows
what the click will do before you make it. The brush shape is on
1–5: a single voxel, a whole face at once, a
dragged box, a line, or a library shape used as the brush tip.
A screen-space marquee, a magic wand for the connected piece, every voxel of one colour across the whole model, or a whole named part. Then move, rotate, scale, mirror or duplicate the selection — with a ghost of where it is going, and each landing as one undo step.
Every one of the 256 palette entries is its own material, not just a colour — roughness, metal, glow, glass and water all live on the swatch. Change an entry and the whole model recolours at once.
Name the parts a model splits into and that list becomes the bone hierarchy. For a character, Prepare Rig walks you through it one body region at a time and fits the joints for you.
Finalise To Mesh turns the grid into one finished mesh with a single atlas texture instead of 256 materials. And it runs backwards — a finished mesh reads back into an editable voxel model, exactly.
Export presets that already know each engine's axis and scale conventions, with the animation included. Nothing here is a one-way door — a finished model still reads back into an editable grid.
.vox in and outCharacters
Prepare Rig takes you through a biped one body part at a time. Drag over the head, the chest, one arm and one leg; the other side mirrors itself. It fits the joints, lets you check an elbow and a knee bend, and builds the rig. Four-legged animals get the same guided rig, with the body parts suggested for you. Thirty-six sample animations get you started, keyed sparsely so you can still edit them.
Each body part moves with its bone as a solid piece, so a run never stretches a cube. You can also switch to Strict Grid, which rebuilds every frame on the voxel grid. That suits a game where everything has to stay aligned to the grid.
Pick Quadruped and the wizard turns the animal to face forward, then suggests every body part from its four legs up: hooves, knees, hips, neck, head and tail. You check each part and fix the odd voxel, preview a leg lift and a lowered head, and create the rig.
Set Update Every N Frames and each pose is held for that
many frames: the stepped look of animation on twos and threes,
and of classic pixel-art sprites. Your keys stay as they are. The
preview, the bake, the FBX export and the sprite sheets all follow
the setting, and animation.json records it.
Export Sprite Sheets renders the selected animation from
eight directions, at a frame size from 64 to 512 px and a camera
angle from level (true front, back and side views, for
side-scrollers) to top-down. It writes one PNG sheet per direction,
plus an
animation.json with the frame size, fps, loop flag and
each frame's rectangle. It also gives the ground point under the
character's feet for every view. The player below reads those files
as they were exported, without changes.
Run · SE · 30° · 256 px · 16 frames · 24 fps
Character
Animation
Camera
Direction
S faces you, N faces away, E and W are the side views.
Generators
Ground, plants, buildings, whole worlds - and one that builds an entire scene in a single press. Open any of them to see what it makes.
Ground and water
Growing things
Things people built
Whole worlds
Paint on what is there
From a picture
Made with it
Not concept art, and not a mesh that used to be voxels — these are live grids, rendered in Blender with the add-on's own per-index materials doing the water, the glass and the glow.
Into the engine
Five floating arenas joined by walkways, modelled in Voxel Mode and imported into Unreal as static meshes. This is the claim the whole pitch rests on, so here are the numbers rather than an adjective.
| In the engine | What ships | |
|---|---|---|
| Triangles, whole level | 68.5 k | Greedy-merged faces, nine pieces |
| Voxel scale | 25 cm | Walkways 3 m wide, cover 1–2 m tall |
| Collision | UCX hulls | Per piece, in the same FBX |
| Textures | 3 maps | One atlas: base colour, ORM, emissive |
| Materials per mesh | 1 | Instead of one per palette index |
The library
19 categories across 85 pages, browsable as a real Blender asset library docked in the viewport. 68 of them are double-resolution hero pieces at 64³ — creatures, structures, dungeon set-pieces. Any of them can be a brush tip, or scattered over a surface by the generator.
Real shape files, drawn in the browser as real cubes — drag sideways to spin, up and down to tilt.
Loading
Open a shipped shape as an editable model, fix what you do not like, and save it back over the original. Nothing in the library is read-only.
Shape packs import and export as a .zip that keeps the
whole category tree, so a studio library travels between machines in
one file.
A .blend with every shipped shape as its own model, and a
water scene with the palette entries that make water look like water.
The round trip
.vox file, voxelize a mesh, generate a terrain, or start from an empty grid.
And every step runs backwards. A finalised mesh reads into a model again,
and a model writes back out as .vox — so finishing is not a
decision you have to get right first time.
Speed
A drag on a big model costs what a drag on a small one costs. These numbers come from the add-on's own performance suite.
| Operation | Time | At what size |
|---|---|---|
| Ray cast — what is under the cursor | 0.02 ms | 1024³, through air |
| Marquee rectangle, per mouse move | 0.72 ms | 256³ |
| Flush the chunks a stroke touched | 4.6 ms | 1024³ |
| Shape-brush preview over a 200-voxel drag | 9.8 ms | 256³ |
| Rebuild the dirty chunks | 26 ms | 1024³, after a 1M-voxel edit |
| Connected select across a whole shell | 79 ms | 256³, 130,816 voxels |
| Apply a 1,000,000-voxel stamp | 354 ms | 1024³ |
| Generate terrain over the whole grid | 1.1 s | 1024³, 4.19M voxels |
Speed is where an interactive voxel editor usually falls over, so the numbers are on the page rather than in a footnote. There is a Benchmark button in the sidebar; run it on your own model.
Pricing
No feature tiers among the paid builds, no add-on packs, no subscription. The only thing that scales is how many people are using it.
The core modelling tools, on Blender's own extensions platform.
.vox importEverything, for one person.
Identical, for a team of five.
Questions
4.2 and newer. It is developed and tested against 5.1.
The core of the modelling tools, free on extensions.blender.org. The exact split is still being decided, so rather than promise a list that might change: the paid build is the one with the generators, the rigging and animation flow, the engine export presets and the shape library.
Yes, three ways. Open a .vox file; voxelize any mesh,
including a marching-cubes path for smooth input; or point the batch
converter at a folder of FBX and leave it running.
Yes, and with Blender's own armatures and actions rather than a parallel system. Split a model into parts, build a rig from them, and the export presets carry the takes out to your engine. For characters there is a guided flow that fits the joints for you, 22 sample animations to start from, and a sprite-sheet export for 2D games. There is a recording of the whole thing above.
GPL-3.0-or-later, because anything built on bpy is a
derivative work. The add-on's source ships inside the download — there
is no obfuscation and no licence key. What you are paying for is the
build, the shape library, and the updates.
Up to 1024³ — 64 times the volume of a 256³ grid. The grid is chunked, so only what you touched is rebuilt; see the numbers above.
Yes, on both paid tiers, and that includes everything you make with the shape library. The GPL covers the add-on's code, not your models.
One Blender add-on, from the first voxel to the engine import.