Making Sprites with MagicaVoxel

[stormydays]

Hey all,
I'm new to the forum (as a poster), and starting to get into NewGRF development. Specifically, I'm making an industry set, with some other modifications.

A couple of questions...

1. Does anyone know of a good resource on how to make multi-tile buildings using MagicaVoxel? Or an easy way split up images made in the program into multiple building sprites?

2. Where can I find and implement the official lighting setup into MagicaVoxel? I can only seem to find the lighting setup in a .blend file, and my laptop is too old to use blender effectively.

If there's an easier way to make industry sprites (or sprites in general), I'm open to suggestions. I'd much rather deal with lines of code than spend hours working on graphics.

Additionally, here's a .png palette file that MagicaVoxel recognizes, if you are using MagicaVoxel and want to use the original OpenTTD palette. (I couldn't find one online, so I made one, and figured I'd share it in case others find it useful.)

OpenTTD-palette-magicavoxel.png (1019 Bytes) Viewed 2918 times

Thanks so much for any input!

[ahyangyi]

Hi,

There are a few existing projects that have working pipelines with MagicaVoxel, mostly involving Timberwolf's gorender and other utilities such as the cargopositor. Gorender is designed with OpenTTD usage in mind, so it comes with company colour support, 8bpp/32bpp modes, and its default configuration contains the standard lighting angles as well.

Timberwolf's projects all make use of his tools, including his British Station Set that features multi-tile stations.

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Also, the whole China Set project, where I am part of the team, uses MagicaVoxel+gorender in all its sub-projects.

In particular, the China Set: Stations - Wuhu set, also under the China Set project and its documentation page linked in my signature, provides a very modular multi-tile railway station building. You might want to look at it, though I coded it in grf-py and there's a lot of complexities in it.

The China Set: Stations project and its (archived) predecessor, also have tiling stations, and are written in NML so might be a better example to look at.

There are other open source projects using similar processes, but the above-mentioned are most familiar to me and probably most useful to your use case (industry set).

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There might be other renderers, such as the one in grf-py, or the built-in renderer in MagicaVoxel. I am not familiar with any big project using those though.