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How did you develop Qubicle?

I started developing Qubicle during my design study 6 years ago. The original idea was to animate color panels of a disco floor. I invented some nice effects and was unhappy about the fact that I wouldn't be able to reuse them. So I was looking for a more flexible solution and maybe even in 3d. After some days of thinking I had the idea of using cubes arranged in a matrix. That idea struck me in such an intense way that ever since my heart is filled with joy when working on Qubicle. It was a very long way to the first public version coming out at the end of last year. The user interface changed a couple of times. I wanted to make it as easy and familiar as possible but still highly flexible. It's still not perfect but that's the fun about coding: you can always make it better.

What's the current state of development?

In February this year I opened the shop for Qubicle Constructor. So the software is still brandnew. I currently focus on making Qubicle atractive for casual designers who just want to have some fun, as well as for professional designers who want to include a voxel engine into their production pipeline.
For the casual designers it's important to showcase what they have done. A minecraft exporter and a turntable renderer is already available. The Qubicle 3D viewer that can be embeded into web pages will come with the release of the next flash player generation.
The professional designers on the other hand need an easy way to get their models out of Qubicle into their favorite application. Besides the OBJ and XML exporter already included in Qubicle I currently develop bridges to Maya and Unity3D. The Maya plugin which is already in a working prototype state, supports sprite animation, dynamics, mesh voxelization and includes little helpers like automated texture creation with baked light and ambient occlusion. The planned Unity3D plugin will support 3d sprite animation.

How would you describe the concept of Qubicle Constructor?

The basic concept of Qubicle is that you exclusively use color cubes to build 3d models. The arrangement of cubes is bound to one simple rule: all cubes of a model are aligned on the same 3d grid. That means all cubes have the same size and orientation in space. This rule makes Qubicle a simple yet fast and efficent tool to create models that look quite different but familiar as well. You don't have to know anything about edges, faces, uv-mapping, normals or all the other typical terms you are confronted with in common 3d applications. With Qubicle it's just cubes. It's simple and fun.

What is the most unique/special feature of Qubicle Constructor?

Qubicle is the first professional voxel editor on the market making creation of complex models cosisting of millions of cubes simple and effective. In contrast to other voxel editors Qubicle enables you to devide a big model into smaller sub parts called matrices. A matrix can be sculpted in 3d and in little slices on a 2d canvas. Familiar tools like pencil and eraser make it easy to edit your models in a similar way as in common image-editors. Qubicle provides more than 20 modifiers like rotate, mirror, stretch and extrude that work on whole matrices or a selection of cubes making voxel modeling very fast. Qubicle is made by a media designer for media designers so bridges to other 3d applications play a major role in the product strategy.

What do you think is the best way of using this software?

This of course depends on what you are about to do. If you use Qubicle in your sparetime because you like the blocky style and enjoy modeling it's most likely that you use Qubicle standalone without other third party applications. If you want to create assets for video games, print or animation you can use Qubicle as a content creation tool, and use the exported models for processing in your favorite 3d application. I personally use Photoshop for 2d pixel art like side views or textures, Qubicle for creating 3d models out of the 2d pixel art and finally Maya for rendering and animation or Unity3D for game development.

Let me know your plans for the future. Is there any plan to make some other software?

Besides the fact that I've got enough ideas for two more major releases of Qubicle Constructor, I'm currently developing plugins for Maya and Unity3D and the Qubicle 3D Viewer based on Flash. Like said before my goal is to make Qubicle integrable in production pipelines as smooth as possible and still not to forget about the casual designers.