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!

This month’s group build event was called the “Townsquare Build.” This was a ridiculously ambitious build. Our previous builds were limited to small square or rectangular plots of land and were limited to about 1-2 hours. This build had no size limitations. All I did was rope off an area behind our first build. The rules were simple, build whatever you wanted and make it appear as if they were things in a town square that you would want in a town square. We’ve got everything from a wooden temple, library, park area,  a concrete courtyard, skyscrapers, and playable mini golf course. Photos from tonight’s build:

Video from July 30th’s Minecraft harbor build! Pictures below:

We just finished up a group build in Minecraft. Everyone was given a 10×10 plot of land. Theme: whatever you wanted to build. Photos below.

Naska’s watermelon house. It’s delicious looking. If only there were houses like that in real life.

This is SKody’s house inspired by “Up.” He even tamed a wolf and put it on the doorstep. Now that’s really clever. I also like that it’s floating off the ground.

Mccullom’s house. I like the roof work alot it’s a clever use for steps that I ought to try some day for myself. Also, the house is actually floating off the ground.

This is Hammerheart’s treehouse. I like the benches along the front good use of signs. Naska did the same thing in Spawn Point Station — which I have yet to post screenshots of. There’s a lot of glass, lava, and water on the inside of Hammer’s house. I’m glad someone choose to incorporate those since we had both scattered around the different lots.

GrimbySlayer’s House. Despite being on a 10×10 lot, his house looks incredibly spacious. It helps when you build the floor out of glass. There’s a tree on the top although you can’t see it from this angle.

And finally, the last house on the block. Kinda drab, don’t you think? It’s a plain suburban house circa 1980, the kind of house you would find somewhere in small town America. Blue sides, brick, and in actuality apart of a duplex. It is by all means an ugly house.

It’s also the house I grew up in.

We’ll try to have a build event every month and even in-between there’ll be a lot of building!

Gallery

Thanks Naska!

This is a time-lapse build of the hanging Creeper Skyscraper in the Geofront. Also, yes, the Geofront is inspired by Neon Genesis Evangelion. It’s not quite like the show, but there were certain characteristics that I brought forward into my version. Some details: The hole that I dug using a lot of cheated TNT and good old fashioned diamond pickaxe mining is 62x63x60. A friend helped me do the digging. The bottom 4 layers are bedrock and grass and I build a pyramid and an inverted one (at least part of an inverted one which I call a bowl). Hanging over “Nerv Headquarters” would be the hanging buildings of Tokyo-3. So far I have a 14×14 building that serves as a train station in and out of the geofront. This video is a time-lapse of the Creeperscaper’s construction.

How do you go about constructing something so giant as an upside down city and pyramid headquarters of one of the strongest military organizations in Anime history? Use graph paper. I was an ueber nerd and sat down with a ruler and graph paper and plotted out the positions of the pyramids and parts of the city, but if you intend to do something big, better to go in with some kind of plan than say, nothing at all, right?

Timelapse video from our Minecraft world. I’m doing this in anticipation of our Minecraft build event on Saturday. We’ll see if I can’t try and capture a timelapse of the build. This test was made using Fraps. I had it shoot one BMP per second — I’m using the free version. Then I used a program called VideoMach to stitch all of the BMPs into one MPEG file. iMovie refuses to read it and BMPs so, so much for editing movies with a Mac! It’s the most unfriendly user-friendly movie making tool. If you know how to use it to import BMPs for image sequences or MPEG files as clips, I’d love to know. It’s apparently not as simple as drag and drop.

These places live as nothing more than a bunch of bytes arranged into chunk files that live in a folder on my computer, but it’s a world that we’ve invested heavily in. Enough, that when on May 30th when the save file went corrupt, we did everything we could to save it. We had found a chunk behind Bacon Park had a corrupt set of data causing the server to throw a null pointer exception. Skody managed to use MCEdit and replace chunks beyond Bacon Park with a previous save game and in turn, saved the world. Not bad for a day’s work. And on Memorial Day no less.

It used to be that I enjoyed Minecraft for it’s Robinson Crusoe gameplay. You were thrown into a world without instruction or a priori knowledge and had to explore, build, and defend yourself from countless enemies. I built my scrappy little buildings out of anything I could dig up — dirt hovels, cobblestone castles, and lit caves. My philosophy was not to build man-made structures but to be one with nature and Minecraft let me explore that ideology.

Now, I enjoy Minecraft because all my friends play it. They log into my server and invest their precious time building countless marvels day by day. An amusement park, a giant pyramid, a mammoth tree house, roller coasters, an underwater arboretum, a skull bunny sculpture, and even a concerted civil engineering effort to build a network of train terminals connected to the spawn point to deliver guests and veteran players to the furthest reaches of our burgeoning world. I’ve found new ways to play Minecraft now: I’m a mayor setting rules and writing about the game world as if it existed, a cartographer, a civil engineer surveying land for train stations, an electrical engineer building circuitry to run the station switches, and a guide to new players when they enter our town. Sometimes I just sit game and chat with friends. It feels as legitimate as hanging out with them in real life, and as a bonus we get to do something we wouldn’t ever get to do if we actually hung out somewhere: we get to construct a world of our own image. You don’t need millions of dollars when you have a “give” command. We’ve gone from playing survivor to becoming a little civilization of our own. All in a place that doesn’t exist anywhere.

More pictures to come…

Pictures from our continuing adventures in Minecraft. Tonight we began exploring the Nether and establishing base camps at our two hellgates and connecting them together. Use cobblestone or smooth stone — apparently ghast fireballs can’t smash them to pieces. There are some great scenic images in here from our new spawn point, a place I dub Grand Central Station. It’s not completed yet but when it is new players can spawn there and either walk out of the station or take the tracks from major attraction to attraction. It should be a fairly safe area to be in as well.