3dboxes [TOOL] box3d — Automatic 3D box art generator

[raffaelsilva]

Hey everyone,

 

Time to come clean about something.

Over the past few weeks I've been dropping box art images in various threads — Red Earth, a few other titles — without really explaining what I was doing. Some of them had weird issues: the spine would bleed slightly outside the box edge, logos weren't sitting right, the colors felt off. A few of you pointed things out and I was vague about where the images were coming from. Sorry about that.

Those were all test outputs. I was building a tool, and this community's sharp eyes were genuinely helping me catch things I stopped seeing after staring at the same pixels for too long. So thank you for that, even if you didn't know you were helping.

The tool is called box3d, and it's almost ready. Here's what it actually is.

 

What it does

box3d takes a flat piece of arcade or game cover art and automatically wraps it into a 3D box image — the kind you'd use in a frontend like ES-DE, LaunchBox, or just for display purposes. It handles the front face, the spine, logos, shading, everything. You drop your covers in a folder, run one command, and come back to a folder full of finished boxes.

No Photoshop. No manual layer work per game. The whole point is that once you've set it up for a system, you just feed it covers and it does the rest.

 

The three box shapes (profiles)

This is probably the most important thing to explain. Different arcade and retro systems had very different physical shapes. A Neo Geo MVS cartridge looks nothing like a generic arcade PCB box, which looks nothing like a DVD case. So the tool has a profile system — each profile is a different box shape, with its own 3D template and geometry.

Right now there are three:

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mvs — Neo Geo MVS cartridge

This is the one most of you have seen in my test posts. The MVS shell has that very distinctive look — the black plastic top tab, the side connector rails with the SNK text, the slightly tapered front face. It's immediately recognizable to anyone who's handled real MVS carts.

The geometry on this one was the trickiest to dial in because the front face isn't a clean rectangle in the template — it has a slight lean to it that had to be matched exactly in the perspective mapping. The Red Earth test was running on this profile.

Template dimensions: 703 × 1000 px

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arcade — Generic arcade PCB box

A thicker, squarer box — the kind you'd use for general arcade board art, PCB collections, or any game that doesn't have a natural home in the MVS or DVD shape. The spine on this one is slightly wider than the MVS, which gives you more room for logos and marquee art. The shading on the edges is subtler, which works well with bold flyer art that already has a lot going on.

This is probably the most versatile profile — I've been using it for anything that doesn't belong to a specific system.

Template dimensions: 665 × 907 px

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dvd — DVD/media case

A slimmer profile, closer to a standard DVD jewel case shape. The spine is noticeably narrower than the other two (about 30% thinner than the arcade profile), so the logo sizing is adjusted down automatically. Useful if you want a more "collection shelf" look rather than hardware-accurate arcade style. Also works surprisingly well for console game art.

Template dimensions: 633 × 907 px

 

How the spine works — the part I'm most proud of

Every box needs a spine, and painting one manually for each game in a collection of hundreds is not realistic. So box3d generates the spine automatically from the cover art itself.

It takes the left edge of your cover (about 20% of the width), blurs it heavily, darkens it, and uses that as the spine background. The result is a spine that always feels visually connected to the front — same color temperature, same mood — without you having to touch anything. Dark blue cover gives you a dark blue spine. Warm orange cover gives you a warm spine. It just works.

On top of that generated background, it places up to three logos on the spine:

• Top logo — a fixed image you put in data/inputs/logos/top/. One file, used on every box for that run. Perfect for a system badge, publisher mark, whatever you want anchoring the top of the spine.
• Game marquee — the game's own logo art, automatically matched by filename to the cover. If you have redearth.webp as your cover, it looks for redearth.png (or any image format) in the marquees folder.
• Bottom logo — same idea as the top, but for the rodapé. Studio seal, "Classics" badge, platform label — your call.

All three are completely optional. If the file isn't there, that slot is just empty. No errors, no placeholders.

Link the project on git: 

https://github.com/RtaSistemas/box3d

 

Edited Tuesday at 04:30 PM by raffaelsilva

[Zicc]

Can this only generate images at this angle? Like, would this be able to generate cover art similar to the reconstructed boxes found with some of the PS2 titles on Launchbox?

[raffaelsilva]

11 hours ago, Zicc said:

Can this only generate images at this angle? Like, would this be able to generate cover art similar to the reconstructed boxes found with some of the PS2 titles on Launchbox?

any angle this is only a parameter

[Gameon100]

12 hours ago, Zicc said:

 

Can this only generate images at this angle? Like, would this be able to generate cover art similar to the reconstructed boxes found with some of the PS2 titles on Launchbox?

hi you want your ps2 games be like this  3d box cover?

 

 

[raffaelsilva]

21 hours ago, Gameon100 said:

hi you want your ps2 games be like this  3d box cover?

 

 

The tool can create, like this

[Gameon100]

2 hours ago, raffaelsilva said:

The tool can create, like this

i know i made custom mortal kombat 3d boxes with that tool but i wich there was same tool but with cd 3d cover and also ps1 3d box cover that wold be cool

 

[raffaelsilva]

5 hours ago, Gameon100 said:

i know i made custom mortal kombat 3d boxes with that tool but i wich there was same tool but with cd 3d cover and also ps1 3d box cover that wold be cool

 

My updated tool accept new models template. Do you have this template?

[Gameon100]

19 hours ago, raffaelsilva said:

My updated tool accept new models template. Do you have this template?

yes i do.  The dvd tamplate i have its a atn file you download it and in photoshop you just add it then you can start make your dvd or ps2 covers 

 

tutorial how to make dvd ps2 tamplate watch this

 

and you can download here