Art I've Made In Hoxel Draw

Hoxel draw is a free program that allows you to create and edit 4D images. It's called hoxel draw because hoxel means hyper voxel. I've created some art in hoxel draw and I'll talk about it here! Click any screenshot to download it. You should change the file extension from .json to .hox, so that hoxel draw can find it easier.

Note: Before publishing this page I realized I used the wrong axis names!! So to make this clear: hoxel draw has Z as up and Y as forward, but this page will refer to Y as up and Z as forward. Why not just change it? Well if Y isn't up W should be, and I think most people understand Y as up intuitvely, so I don't want to change it just to make it slightly easier to rotate things correctly in hoxel draw. Most people aren't gonna download my files and look at them.

This is the first thing I made in hoxel draw. It's a rose, twisting in four dimensions.

This is a 4D creature I designed. It has human like intelligence. They're called the simplexians because they have a tetrahedral arrangement of feet and a triangular arrangement of arms. Thier hands have six fingers in a highly symmetrical octahedral claw arrangement. They speak a made up language I'm in the process of making. Might make more world building pages about these guys some day, or create something new.

This screenshot shows the XYW volume, showing their arms. I am using Y to be vertical and Z to be forward.

This is the XYZ volume, at the center. Here you can see their two eyes. They look unbalanced but their back legs that point ana and kata keep them balanced.

What about WYZ? Well here it is. One of their arms points perfectly ana so it's visible here, also you can see their back legs. I should probably move those back a bit more, it looks unbalanced. Anyway, their eyes are invisible as our slice goes right inbetween them. One hoxel ana or kata from here shows one eye at a time, perfectly in the center of their face. 2 eyes on a 4D creature looks strange, but I doubt more than 2 eyes would evolve, as you only need two for depth perception in any dimension.

Here you can see their tetrahedral arrangement of legs. This is a ground view (XZW) slice showing how their legs touch the ground.

By rotating precisely, we can find non axis aligned slices. This slice shows one of the faces of the tetrahedral foot arrangement, showing us 3 feet, the maximum number of feet a 3D slice can show.

In 4D, 3D things are flat so paintings would be 3 dimensional. Making 3D paintings in hoxel draw is really fun, and a great spatial reasoning exercise. I really struggle with perspective in normal 2D art, but wow 3D art is so much harder! This painting is of a tetrahedral prism monolith in the desert, with a 3D rune on its surface. What's really neat is that the projection of a slice is equivelant to the slice of a projection. Meaning, every 2D slice of a 3D painting looks like a 2D painting of a 3D slice of the 4D scene the 3D painting depicts.

This is the XYZ slice. It shows the painting as it really is, volumetric. But for our 2D screens, it's worthless to show it this way.

XYW, the main slice. The X axis is the axis the light is pointing, so the painting looks best on this slice. Here you can see a slice of that rune I was talking about. Painting on this rune was tricky as I had to respect perspective distortion, and fit it on the admittedly small surface of a triangular prism. It seems to have a nice amount of space, but it tapers off so it really feels like it doesn't. That's why it's awkwardly off center like that.

Here light is travelling perpendicular to the slice direction, so it looks unshaded. This is the ZYW slice. I've adjusted the slice position so that the rune is in view, and centered.

Same slice as last time, but now moved along the local W axis until the tetrahedron prism is almost out of view. I just wanted to show this because I think it looks interesting, the tetrahedron prism from out of view casts a triangular shadow on the floor.

That's all for now, thanks for reading! And if you think hoxel draw is cool definitely go download it!