MagicaVoxel vs SLAB6
When comparing MagicaVoxel vs SLAB6, the Slant community recommends MagicaVoxel for most people. In the question“What are the best voxel editors?” MagicaVoxel is ranked 1st while SLAB6 is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose MagicaVoxel is:
Has an isometric view mode for people who are doing isometric drawings.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Has isometric view mode
Has an isometric view mode for people who are doing isometric drawings.
Pro Excellent rendering mode
Raytracing, GI, AO, and configurable PBR, all GPU accelerated.
Pro Free
No cost, subscription, or license, even for commercial use.
Pro Very easy to use
MagicaVoxel has sane defaults and an intuitive interface. You add or remove voxels with the left-click and rotate the camera with the right-click. The interface does not overwhelm or get in the way, yet it keeps all functionality within easy reach.
Very helpful for beginners is the fact that hovering with the mouse over a tool shows hints on how to use the tool. The hints can be found at the bottom of the interface.
Pro Realtime render
The viewport renders the objects in real time. Changes made to lighting and materials (such as reflectivity, opacity, etc) are instantly shown on the screen with minimal to no delay. The renderer also allows adjusting things like FOV.
Pro Actively developed
MagicaVoxel is constantly being developed with new releases bringing bug fixes and new features being released on a constant basis.
Pro Great workflow
Bake possibility, easy to create a custom palette. Not even in version 1.0 and it's already great.
Pro Keyboard shortcut cheat sheet is available
A list of all keyboard shortcuts organized by category is available on the website.
Pro Imports and exports as .obj
Pro Large build size
Now supports up to 2048^3 voxels.
Pro Object Trees
Now has a “world” and “object” mode, objects can be grouped together and organized, multiple layers to organize, hide, and reveal, and objects can be copied as a “reference” so any changes to one will affect the others.
Pro Shader language to generate voxels
Pro idTech1 and Build engine voxel editor
While the idTech engine 1 (aka the "DooM Engine") does not support voxels, newer limit-breaking source ports have added the ability to render the .kvx voxel format designed for the Build Engine. Slab6 is currently the only well-known .kvx editor as it continues to pop up in DooM modding forums and tutorials. Even though it's not the most user-friendly editor, its support for .vox export enables the model to be edited in MagicaVoxel or voxels made in MagicaVoxel (which supports Slab6 (Slab) .vox export) to be converted to .kvx for use in-game.
Cons
Con No native Linux
It works in Linux, but Wine should be used.
Con Small sizes
The maximum dimensions for one voxel is 126 x 126 x 126 (since May 2020 it is 256 x 256 x 256). To put this into perspective, the kvx format (an older format by ken silverman used in games like blood, shadow warrior, and ZDooM-based ports) has maximum dimensions of 256x256x255. while newer versions of magicavoxel include a world editor (in which multiple voxels can be arranged into a set), each voxel is exported separately.
Con No support/help
There is no clear way to get help, though you might be able to reach out to the dev via Twitter, also github should be easy to manage.
Con No command line options
Without command line options, it's not possible to automate rendering at all. If you have hundreds of models (to make an animation for example), you have to render all of them manually. Plus, you cannot even open .vox file by doubleclicking it!
Con Bad model mesh exporting
For video game development, it's needed to rearrange some of the vertices, builds triangles per color, instead of one big mesh. It's tedious to solve but gives overall nice results.
Con Hard to change camera
The camera options don't have 2d view. Plus, the pers camera option is too hard to use when creating rooms.
Con Does not support intelligent palette merging when importing a model as a brush
Con Not very user friendly
If I asked most people to use this to draw something without reading anything about the program, a good percent would not be able to. with odd controls like 'Insert' to draw, 'L' to open, and no customization on these controls, its requires users to read how to use it. the help guide only gives you a basic understanding of how things work and requires you to search through files in order to fully understand how powerful this tool really is. If i were to rate this for how user friendly it is on a 1 -10 scale (with 1 being like binary switch panels, 3 being ms-dos, 5 being a minimal gui with a complex console command line for all functions, 8 being able to sit down and perform basic operations, and ten being no effort at all,) I would give this a 7(has a gui that is easier to navigate but even simple functions require a bit of reading).