I was just thinking, a Voxel based model maker app would be awesome. Way better than polys in my opinion. It'd be like sculpture, or clay modelling.
You'd essentially just have little blocks, which you'd set the colour of, and begin to make your model. You could have an import function that would convert a texture image to voxel mesh. For example, you get a picture of a brick, 100 pixels long, 40 pixels high. It converts it to a block of 100x40x1 voxels. You then extrude/duplicate it backwards, making it 40 voxels deep, 100x40x40. You then have a brick prefab. You can hand paint any pixel/voxel in that prefab, or remove voxels from the outside surfaces to give it texture, or use a tool which detects depth and does that for you.
Building a person, you'd have a load of shape prefabs, just like 3D tools now, with spheres etc. except there would be no resolution, they'd be as perfect as the grid resolution allows. You'd drag and drop them in, rescale etc, and give them base colours, or 'material algorithms' which would paint them through all their volume layers with the correct algorithm.
For a face, you'd drag a drop a sphere, then begin deleting voxels to sculpt the features, adding some here and there. The sphere would use a skin algorithm as its base, and you'd then spray/paint on facial hair etc perhaps using an image sprayer tool. You could drag and drop a brain prefab inside the head, swapping the voxels inside the solid skin coloured head for brain voxels. Later when his head gets blown apart in your violent FPS, there are brain voxels inside to expose.
I can see the sculpting side of things far more intuitive than 3D modelling today, and giving masses of freedom, and no fear of how triangles connect, or poly counts, but the process of colouring the voxels would require lot of cool tools, and a lot of thought would have to be given to the inside of models, if you intend them to be destructible. But that is cool though. You could make your 3D characters have full skeletons, internal organs, etc. all ready to be exposed upon getting blasted by buckshot.
