Lighting and materials

The voxel editor is not just a shape editor: colours carry material properties, and the scene carries lights. Some of that is exported and some is preview-only, which is the part worth knowing before you ship.

Baked ambient occlusion

Ambient occlusion darkens the creases where voxels meet, which is what stops a blocky model reading as a flat mass of colour. It is baked into the model, so it costs nothing at runtime and travels with the export.

Emissive and metallic colours

Any palette colour can be flagged as emissive - it glows instead of being lit - or metallic, with a per-colour strength slider for both. Emissive colours drive a true selective bloom pass in the viewport, so only the colours you flagged glow, rather than the whole image blooming.

Both are real glTF material properties, so they survive into GLB - but only under two conditions. The Palette texture colour mode has to be active, because it carries the strip UVs the emissive and metallic-roughness maps are sampled through; and Unlit material has to be off, because an unlit material ignores lighting by definition and glTF treats the two as mutually exclusive. Break either one and the model exports flat - the export summary tells you which one did it.

Dynamic lights and fog

Scene lights export as KHR_lights_punctual, the standard glTF lighting extension, so point and spot lights come across into engines that support it. The cone-light and fog effects are viewport-only - they make the editor preview look right, but they are not part of the exported file. Recreate them in your engine.

Per-colour emissive in 2D too

The same emissive toggle and strength control exist in the 2D editor, so a flat pixel sprite can have glowing colours in its previews and exports without moving to voxels at all.