Saw a very interesting article in PC Gamer about rendering Minecraft worlds via Blender while I was waiting at the airport for my flight to Las Vegas (and Minecon) to board. When I got home, I decided I wanted to give this a go, so here are some renders of our Minecraft world done with Blender. Some are better than others, but I’m not a professional 3D modeler, lighter, rendering guy, or what have you. I dabble in it for fun. The quality of the renders vary from image to image as I tinkered with the settings trying to get the perfect render. Sometimes the AO sampling is poor. I monkeyed with water to give it a little oomph. So trial after trial, here’s what I got. If you have rendering tips to make the world look cool, pass them along. I’ve love to know and implement them in newer renders.
This place is like a World Heritage site in our Minecraft World. Except Endermen don’t really abide by laws and I hear they’re picking this place apart block by block.
Trying to do something nice with the water surrounding bacon park, but I don’t think it really works out to well.
This is my second attempt at rendering Bacon Park, this time without the waves. The waves were done with two layers of noise textures at different scales used as a displacement map. It looks like melted plastic in some places. Other places I feel it works, but the effect just seems like too much. It’s like Bacon Park is in the middle of a hurricane. Sometimes simpler is best. This is the park with flat water. I kept reflections for both the ocean and ice. This one has upped sampling for AO and I think it looks the best of all my renders — it was the last one I did and I think I’ll stick with this until something better comes along.
TwistedArchitect’s spaceship — this is an earlier rendering. I tried to do something fancy with the water, but I’m thinking in the future, flat is just fine. It’s way to dark and ugly.
skody’s whale statue. It’s based on one he saw in Vancouver. Again, the water and lighting. I’ll probably redo this one at some point.
Minigolf and our town square:
Thomas Road and the Shinto Shrine:
The Great Pyramids:
And there you have it!
If you would like to make your own, the only thing it’ll cost you is time. I have some background since I dabbled with 3D from way back when and I’ve used past versions of Blender. So I’m no stranger to it, but I’m no 3D artist either. The last three images are simply done with a sun light set almost pointing straight down (skewed at a slight angle for shadows), AO with a high sample, shadows on, and some tweaked materials for ice, water, and glass. Otherwise, everything was rendered pretty much as is. For all my mucking with water materials, the truth is: simple is best (at least for me).
Link to a tutorial if you’d like to give it a hand.
Give it a try, it’s fun!
