NOTE: The Qubicle voxel editor is now Deprecated. This post is provided for legacy information. We highly recommend that you build your voxel art using Mega Voxels.
If you are new to Qubicle you may see a lot of terms and terminology that you’ve never heard before. In this post we will provide a list of common words that you will be coming across when creating your models in Qubicle. It’s important to learn these terms or at least have them handy that way if you ever need to ask a more experienced voxel artist for help they understand what you’re asking.
Now these words are pretty standard, however some of these words only apply to the Qubicle Voxel Editor. If you look them up in MagicaVoxel for instance you might actually get an entirely different definition. So now that we got all the preliminaries out of the way lets do some vocab!
Voxel
A voxel (which stands for volumetric pixel) is a single cube with a color attached to it. A voxel can be thought of as a 3D pixel. Having said that all voxels are the same size and have the same orientation. They cannot be rotated. One other important thing to note is that in Qubicle a voxel can only exist inside of a Matrix.
Matrix
A matrix is the container that all voxels are stored in. Basically, its a 3D grid and a voxel go inside of one the cells in the grid. Matrices in Qubicle can be have a max size of 1024x512x1024. However the official Qubicle documentation recommends keeping it at 128x128x128 for performance reasons. Keep in mind that a scene in Qubicle can contain multiple matrices to create larger models.
Model
The model is the root object for a file in Qubicle. This can be thought of as the “scene” where all your matrices are stored. Technically you never have to even worry about this because it has no size or transform. According to the official documentation the root model supports 16,000,000 matrices.
Compound
Compounds give you the ability to organize the matrices in your model. They are similar to grouping in Photoshop. The nice thing about compounds is that they also speed up performance of Qubicle when matrices are combined into one.
