Are there any free utilities for rotating a KVX?

[Gamer With Dignity]

Are there any free utilities that will allow you to rotate a KVX voxel model? Not just in increments of 90 degrees either.

[Rachael]

What you're asking for will not work except for extremely hi-res voxels.

A KVX is a 3-dimensional raster image. 90-degree rotations work because of the nature of the image format, how it is essentially a stack of 3D pixels.

If Voxels were normally rendered at very high resolutions (which they're not), something like this might become feasible.

As-is, if you rotate it now, you will cause the image to break in so many ways. That is why the voxel must be rotated inside the game, or only at 90 degree increments. Otherwise, it will cause horrible puncture/bleeding effects not to mention things will not appear on the right axis.

If you're wondering why it works with other models, it's because they are 3-dimensional vector images and vector can be scaled, rotated, or pretty much anything else without harming the quality of the original work. Vector is lines and vertices, raster is literally nothing more than pixels.

Think of a perfect cube made in KVX. This is what the top of it may look like at an arbitrary rotation:

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It gets even worse with thin walls. Rotate one 45-degrees:

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.. and suddenly you start being able to see right through it.

If you're having trouble understanding this - think of legos. When you use a lego board to build on top of, you cannot create diagonal structures unless you build it using a stair-step method. Essentially Voxels are like legos.

[Gamer With Dignity]

I mean a program that will allow me to import a KVX, rotate it upwards 30 degrees, and then export it back to a KVX.

Otherwise I'm going to have to write a script to do it for me and I don't want to have to do that.

[Rachael]

Unless I misunderstand you, what you want is not possible because of the weaknesses inherent in the KVX format that I explained.

If I did misunderstand you what exactly is it you're trying to accomplish? Can you post some examples? What do you want rotated?

[Graf Zahl]

You won't be able to find such a tool. Image rotation as it is is a non-trivial task already, and voxels do not even need to be solid, their inside can be hollow. On top of that their resolution is extremely low, essentially not giving you enough data to create something that's either looking good or even usable. And last but not least - Voxel technology has always been a niche. They were superseded by real models before their state of usefulness reached a point where tools were existing.

[YukiHerz]

Long and boring but only possible solution: Convert it to a model somehow, i don't now if magicavoxel can read kvx directly but using that program in conjunction with slab6 you should be able to do it.

Then, with a 3d editor you export that model to md3, you can also take this time to remove any voxel faces that wont be seen (i hope your voxel is hollow).