Here's one irritating limitation in slab6 that I believe shouldn't be that hard to address. Look at the picture above. What do you see? the mid section of the "cube" disappearing. Basically everything that becomes non-visible when enclosed, will be replaced by a generic magenta, making it impossible to create anything but "casings" of stuff.
There's literally thousands of amazing MRI scans and similar slice-based images that can be freely downloaded form the internet. I was experimenting with this about a year ago (I believe ape did too and posted an image) but after spending quite a deal of time altering the slices to make them suitable for pasting into slab6, I realized I was going nowhere because the mid sections kept turning magenta. Sure the outer layer looked nice, but as soon as you slice it, boom! the magic is gone.
Could you pretty please with cherry on top add an option to keep the internal voxels intact? :)
Much appreciated, Cheers.
ConsistentCallsign at
Re: SLAB6 suggestion
I don't see much use for a feature like that.. What we do, in voxelstein, is to use separate sprites, one for body and one for skeleton, brain etc..
one of the great things with slab6, is that only surface voxels are stored, saving huge amounts of memory. .kv6 format is so tiny and simple it's genius <3
I think .vox format store interior voxels too, but I'm not sure.. http://i225.photobucket.com/albums/dd202/highwingx3/Jeff.jpg
Maren at
SLAB6 is like a toy to me, and being able to ensemble these scans and carve into them jut to see how they look on the inside would be absolute fun.
Now imagine you use it for something small, like a brain. Wouldn't that open the door for a more realistic gore experience? ;)
but yeah.. slab6 + MRI head with interior skull, brain and eyes dataset + fluid physics + ballistics physics would be nice :P imagine shooting a bullet into Jeff's head in slab6..
Edited by ConsistentCallsign at
Maren at
That's probably the ugliest and most boring example I can think of :D, I like the classic cube-slicing better, but yes, internal voxels would be great. You don't have to do them to death and slow everything down to a crawl, but when used wisely, you can definitely add an interesting touch to your models :)
Awesoken at
Storing colors for interior voxels would make high resolution models impractical due to memory requirements. That's a bad tradeoff IMO.
Maren at
I perfectly understand that and I wouldn't like to sound pushy, but what about normal-sized models in low-res modes? (e.g. 320x200, my mode of choice for nearly everything) and let's not forget computers are increasing their memory capacity by the day, so having this option there (you choice to use it or not) for people to experiment with would only expand the versatility and useful life of the application.
Scott_AW at
Well if you want interiors to be retained, you pretty much have to stay with the raw VOX file. Its huge because it has all the data where the other formats are surface only. Now in Ken's Voxlap you can make an entire world of fixed objects that can have interiors, as I did with an space ship building experiment.
I think that's your only options unless you want to buy a voxel modeling program. I'm not sure if they retain interiors or not since I haven't used them before.
Otherwise you can do CC's method which would be faster.
But if you're just having fun with Slab6, then you just need raw data to be converted into the vox format from the MRI scans. The vox format is pretty simple and has been documented by ken in the readme, I think.
The problem isn't just memory, its reading the memory and the larger the detail, the more memory to read. It could be possible to create a format that retains interior voxels and pairs up like colors and maybe even similar symmetry, but then again the more detail you have color wise, and the less consistent the model, the harder it would be to reduce.
Technically you can make a really large detailed model with Voxlap, retain all the interior voxels for fun destruction like I did with my space ship experiment.
Maren at
Scott_AW said at
But if you're just having fun with Slab6, then you just need raw data to be converted into the vox format from the MRI scans. The vox format is pretty simple and has been documented by ken in the readme, I think
Hmm, I think that would probably be even more complicated given that the stack sizes, dimensions, formats, containers and colour depth of said images vary considerably, so IMHO it's a job best done manually.
So basically what slab would need is full real-time vox support (rather than mere loading/saving vox capabilities) so I can just paste the slices without worrying about slab killing the internal voxels?
Scott_AW at
Maren said at
Scott_AW said at
But if you're just having fun with Slab6, then you just need raw data to be converted into the vox format from the MRI scans. The vox format is pretty simple and has been documented by ken in the readme, I think
Hmm, I think that would probably be even more complicated given that the stack sizes, dimensions, formats, containers and colour depth of said images vary considerably, so IMHO it's a job best done manually.
So basically what slab would need is full real-time vox support (rather than mere loading/saving vox capabilities) so I can just paste the slices without worrying about slab killing the internal voxels?
Actually if you open a vox, save as a vox, it stays with all the detail. Once you save it to another format then the model space gets cropped, internal voxels are treated as a specific color. But if you carve at it, then it should take the nearest neighbor's color.
Those formats are actually for finalizing, if you want to have full control, you should just work with the VOX format. The others are more for displaying in games, optimized for speed. Evaldraw and the Build can handle a ton of these things, although I think Build is actually better due to the way it was made.
I made a program that converts a series of frames in a image strip into a VOX object
Its just filling an array with color data, one color being transparent. I'm not sure of what data MRI contains, or how much is relevant to the actual rendering of the model. Its in a post a few pages back.
Maren at
If you're suggesting that what I'm asking for is already possible in slab6, it definitely isn't working for me. VOX or not, internal voxels keep getting repainted here :P
Scott_AW at
So what file are you loading?
I know it works, as I've been messing with Slab for awhile now and have only seen loss of interiors if its converted from a model with poly2vox, doesn't have an interior and you fill it, or use a different format.
Can you provide the file? Maybe even a raw version?
Maren at
I've attached the same voxel model shown in the picture except this one was saved as *.VOX. Uniformly fill in the remaining space on the top with whatever you want, save it/load it again (optionally) then slice it (or use the slice editor) and see for yourself.
Scott_AW at
Ah, now I see whats going on, it is wiping out the old data when you fill. Although if the model is premade outside of slab, it should retain.
I've attached a model I made using my strip2vox program, it retains all the interiors, you can see them in each slice.
I'm not sure if you can manually add them then, they might have to be set outside of slab6 to retain their color.