MagicaVoxel

Magica Voxel is a free, lightweight voxel art editor and interactive path tracing renderer created by the independent developer ephtracy. It works well for artists, game developers and hobbyists who build 3D models out of small cubes (voxels). 

Create your own voxel scenes and render them with functions such as the GPU path tracing renderer.

Give your work realistic lighting with materials such as metal, glass, plastic and emissive surfaces, and export it as images or 3D meshes.

MagicaVoxel lets artists build voxel models and scenes and render them with realistic lighting in a single free program.

Features:

• Model editor- Allows you to build and paint models of up to 256x256x256 voxels with brushes for attaching, erasing and painting voxels, a 256-color palette and mirror tools.
• Image-Based Lighting- Lights the scene from an HDR environment image, together with sun, sky and fog settings. Intel Open Image Denoise can be used to clean up rendered images.
• World Editor- Allows the user to arrange multiple models into one scene and organize them with groups and layers, which is useful for larger buildings and landscapes.

Now let's get into a little bit more of the advanced functions that intermediate to advanced level users will find useful:

• Voxel Shaders- GLSL-based shaders that generate or modify voxels procedurally; the program also includes a selection tool and marching cube export.
• Pause Rendering and Instant Feedback Loop- Ability to pause rendering at any time; the render view updates as soon as the model or the lighting settings change.
• Frame-Based Animation- Models can contain several animation frames, which can be played back and rendered. Also includes the following:
• Export of models to formats such as OBJ and PLY
• Rendering of still images and animated image sequences

Worried that your device might not be compatible with this package?

MagicaVoxel runs on Windows and macOS; current builds are 64-bit, while older releases were also offered as 32-bit Windows builds.  

It needs no installation: the program is unzipped and run from its folder, and it requires a graphics card capable of GPU path tracing. Sample models such as a castle, a knight and a Menger sponge are included in the vox folder.

So give MagicaVoxel software package editor a try. It is free to use for any project, although selling or redistributing the program itself is not allowed, and it lets you take creative control of your voxel models and scenes.