Early Access heist adventure Teardown is currently one of the most popular games on Steam, and for good reason. Not only does it let you successfully pull off a heist by just smashing every obstacle in your way, it looks like you can also chuck in maps built from 3D scans of real places.
Voxel artist mode_vis, who has made several shaders for the voxel art editor MagicaVoxel, notes that you may not even need to be much of a voxel artist to make your own Teardown levels—as long as you have a 3D map of a place, you can convert it into a vox file for MagicaVoxel using a tool called FileToVox.
#teardown maps from 3d scans of real places? It's possible! With FileToVox by @Zarbuz you can get a terrain in #MagicaVoxel it only remains to add a hard floor and change the color palette for materials. [WIP] I'm working on it or playing it more :) next week i guess! #modding pic.twitter.com/xSqAAHqYsSNovember 26, 2020
Another twitter user has pointed out that a 3D map's resolution has to be reasonably good to be picked up properly by MagicaVoxel, so keep that in mind when choosing a map. Real places are nice, of course, but made-up places are often even better—enter Minecraft, the number one game of choice for everyone who wants to build either entire fantasy landscapes or real places out of blocks. The only downside is that according to its creator, FileToVox only supports Minecraft schematics made in versions up to 1.13—Minecraft is currently in version 1.16, with 1.17 due in summer 2021.
Still, it is a cool idea to tinker with, and I immediately got lost on the MagicaVoxel Community twitter feed, showcasing beautifully intricate voxel art that would be fun to play in (and er, destroy.)
