Voxels from code
I am not an artist, so my models are built by code: a shared voxel library, a kit of parts, and the first sawmills on the grid.
An editor is one thing. Filling it is another, and I’m not an artist. So every model in Cinderdeep is built from small blocks, 16 to a tile, placed by code. A small kit of parts, walls, posts, roofs, wheels and crates, and one fixed palette keep them looking like one set.
Before building anything new I wanted to know the pipeline worked. So I loaded models from an older game of mine into the 3D test from two days ago and watched.
They moved, so the idea held. That older project already had a voxel model format, animations and a mesh builder, and today all of it moved into a shared library that both games use. Every improvement now lands in both.
By the evening the first generated buildings stood on the grid, real models instead of pink boxes, with a saw blade that spins on its own layer, the way I described yesterday.
Then I caught myself starting the whole game just to look at one model, again and again. That got old fast. So I made a model gallery, where you fly around freely and see every model with its animations running.