Mineways: 3D Prints of Minecraft Objects
Well, now's your chance.
Eric Haines from Autodesk (the makers of 3D rendering software, no less) has just released his Mineways program to the world. Mineways allows you to select various blocks from within the game, trim them up, and send them to 3D printing service, Shapeways.
The process is extremely simple, and after a quick turn around, you can have any Minecraft scene, object, or mob rendered into a real life object of your very own.
Bug fixes: half slabs of wood, sandstone, etc. were all showing up as stone. Stronghold bricks were never cracked or mossy. Enhancements: "true specification" OBJ files are now output by default, since I figured out how to turn on previewing in Blender (see the tutorial). Blocks are now 1 meter in size when output for rendering, a scale that most rendering systems prefer.
Here is a quick render that I've made. I can now gon on with the timelapse project!
realistic water and ice shading, lava glows and cast lighting.
Other upcoming features : volumetric clouds, day/night cycle, possibly some grass and waterfall fx
These Arnold renderings are really cool, when you're done please do post some to the Flickr pool (and point to your video from them). I'd consider toning down the depth-of-field effect, as it makes things look tilt-shift miniatures (a cool effect, but things then look tiny instead of grand). Given that you're doing atmospherics and so on, I'd aim for making it look real-life-sized. Your choice, of course.
In-depth summary: Improvements: you can reload your world by hitting the "R" key now. Loading a different world will recenter at spawn and unzoom the view. Bug fixes: Major fix is that wide characters are now supported on file read and write, which means characters like ÅåÄäÖö can be used in file names. These get simplified for material and texture file names, since those need to be UTF8 (really, more UTF7) for OBJ and WRL files. Fixed bugs with spaces in file paths. Resolved color mismatches for solid color output. Fixed a color problem with slabs when using solid colors (appeared in v1.12). Redstone torches were always flattened, now they appear properly in rendering output. Flames are now exported to be at the edge of blocks. OBJ export always has Y as up, for easier print preview with G3D. When exporting Magics STL without colors the header is made simpler, so the object does not preview as black.
Cool castles for the week:
Sebastian and Alexander's castle printout
Mauricio's printout of his castle
Ten of my fifteen minutes of fame were used up in an interview with Curse.com:
Did you try the latest version (1.13)? I fixed some path problems, which might help the Mac version. The other thing to try: keep it simple. Try to send the export files to a "simple" directory, one with a short name and no spaces, punctuation, or non-English characters (accents, umlauts, etc.). This shouldn't matter with the latest version, but I don't know the Mac well, so you might give it a try. Other than that, try emailing Psp4804 about the problem - his email's next to the Mac download link on the Mineways page.
This forum slaps together my successive posts, so here's my next post.
Interesting contest:
That's a huge 3D print they're offering, $630 maximum (and $50 gift certificates for the five runners up isn't too shabby).
Note: though it says in the video description you must be a Premium Curse member, that's not true. Their rules clarify that you can enter without paying anything. That said, it's not clear how you actually send them submissions - I've asked for clarification.
Some HCI (human-computer interaction) love in this release, making it easier (I hope) for new users to understand how selection works and for all users to have a quick sense of what models will cost.
Summary:
Minor bug fix: extremely large chunks (those with say 100 chests full of objects) would not decode; fixed by increasing CHUNK_INFLATE_MAX. Improve selection highlighting: the selected area is always shown, and if some blocks are not selected the user is warned and corrective action applied (moving Bottom depth down). Note that when the depth is moved down, it is conservative, including the deepest location visible in a deep hole, for example. Improve texture pack import: avoid using bad water, lava, and file tiles in custom terrain.png files - see notes on terrain.png. Statistics about the print's cost are now optionally displayed at the end of export.
Hah, I'd be absolutely shocked and amazed if they had any problems with these sales. I can't even list all the reasons that come to mind in one minute: the two million YouTube videos made of Minecraft (using their textures and engine); the fact that Notch and Mojang are all about the community and not into suing people, not even those clear offenders like ; the "wow" tweet from Notch; the fact that CAD programs do not charge their users for models made, just to name a few.
That said, there are plenty of interesting legal issues with people using each others' creations in different ways. I blogged about this here.
BTW, I found out how non-subscribers enter the . It does not quite involve carrier pigeons, but it's close. You need to enter by March 4th. This from Will Boyer at curse.com:
Premium members hit a single button ('Enter Now') on the contest page (http://www.curse.com/sweeps/minecraft-3d-print-giveaway). Super easy.
Non-premium members, mail us a piece of paper, postcard, whatever, with the following information:
Full name
Address
Daytime Phone number
Email address
Date of birth
Curse.com account name (just the free registration - same as your Minecraft forum ID)
We take all the mail-in entries and add them to the pool of entries we receive online. Therefore, mail-in entries and online entries have the same chance of winning.
Whether you are a premium member or not, you don't submit your Minecraft creation to us until you have won. After winners are picked we will contact them and work with them to get their creations printed.
I guess the good news is that the drawing is random, and you don't actually have to have anything built in advance. So it's worth a stamp and 5 minutes of effort, in my opinion, to have a shot at the $630 first place prize or the five $50 runner-up prizes. Oh, send the entry to:
Curse, Inc.,
Minecraft 3D Print Giveaway,
351 California Street, Suite 1450,
San Francisco, CA 94104
It feels like a contest that won't have a lot of entries, since it sounds like work and that you'd need skill, from their writeup. So, go for it.
The minutia: bug fix: scale error on warning of "too small" model for colored sandstone; Shapeways doesn't appear to enforce this rule, though. Fixed vines to export in a more reasonable fashion: composited with underlying objects and underneath trees, changed color, made background grass. However, vines still extend out beyond trees (see bug list). Removed right-mouse click for assigning "Bottom" height, as it's confusing and redundant; just use middle-mouse instead. Change "Z is up" to be default for i.materialise STL models. Add Show size in inches and centimeters in printout dialog. Fixed dragon egg tile location. Added beta jungle tile support in optional terrain_jungle.png: 9,9 wood, 4-5,12 leaves, 14,1 saplings. Replaced terrain.png with the game's default terrain.png plus flames, as it's better for printing. Added other terrain.png options. Removed alpha cleanup for print export, as it's unnecessary.
For Valentine's Day (details here):
Will this work with the new 'anvil' file format coming in 1.2?
Good, and if you make anything cool, please do toss some pictures into the Mineways Flickr pool. Tip to all: a weird Flickr limitation makes it that you have to upload at least 5 pictures before it recognizes you. Less than that and the pictures you put in the pool are visible only to pool subscribers, not everyone.
It will support Anvil, eventually. Mineways is based on the minutor code. Sean Kasun, the person who wrote minutor, is planning on updating his program to read Anvil files. It doesn't look like a huge change, happily. Once he's got it folded into his code, I'll move his updates to Mineways.
As it is, it looks like the old format will be around for a bit and the data will be accessible, since the announcement says: This snapshot will convert the maps you load to the new file format. If you want to revert to the old format, you need to replace the "level.dat" file with the file called "level.dat_mcr". The new format will write world regions to files called "*.mca", so your original regions will remain as "*.mcr".
Eric
So, it would be bigger, monochromatic, plastic prints for less money. Is this of interest to anyone?
If so -- would anyone be willing to lend me a Minecraft creation? I would like a random test to see how well it prints -- if so I will happily ship you whatever I come up with!
Let me know if so! Either here, or personal messages to 3Dideas ('at' symbol) carrythewhat.com
Thanks!
Chris
Minecraft's world saving format has been completely overhauled to allow for the extended build height. I highly doubt any world editing or world viewing program that can read MCRegion files will be able to read Anvil files. Just be patient for an update.
Here's the in-depth summary of changes for Version 2.0 (a major release change):