2D to 3D Voxelizer: turning pixel art into voxel models without AI

Flat pixel art goes in. A voxel model comes out. No neural net is involved anywhere in the middle, because the 2D to 3D Voxelizer does the whole conversion with plain math, which means the art you drew stays the art in the model. The project lives at GazPrash's repo on GitHub and picked up about ninety stars in its first month.

The author built it because the usual sprite-to-3D pipeline annoyed him. Most conversion tools lean on generative models that redraw your character and drift from the original. This one extends the pixels you already made. It is written in Go with a Wails frontend, ships under the MIT license, and the release builds cover Windows and macOS.

There are five input modes. A single sprite extrudes into a rounded volume. Two views make a dual model, four make a full turn, and a six-sided sheet adds top and bottom. Each mode reads a horizontal sprite sheet, the kind Aseprite exports for animation frames. A depth scale controls thickness along the Z axis. A biased mode tunes the top, middle and bottom separately, and a roundness slider steers how curved or blocky the result is.

Version 1.0.4 added an editor. You can brush and erase voxels after generation, which matters because automatic depth guessing gets organic shapes wrong. The fix is manual, not magical. Models export as .obj with .mtl material files, so they open directly in Blender, Unity or Godot.

Voxel pipelines usually sit behind paid tools or cloud services. This one runs locally and keeps the pixel artist in control of the silhouette. The trade-off is real: complicated sprites with varied depth need the editor pass, and the roundness fine-tuning takes a few tries.

Source, releases and building instructions are on GitHub: GazPrash/2d-to-3d-voxelizer.

■ Filed from The Foundry: the Fern, Fire wing of the city.