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.
It would be cool if you could buy a Minecraft thats 1 meter long!
Well, the program's free; it's those pesky atoms that cost money.
By the way, I've added a whole section to the Mineways page about keeping it cheap, since the models can definitely get pricey.
Great minds think alike, and I already did: see this page. However, like it says in the description there, if you actually printed this thing out you'd be $419.34 poorer and end up with 66 separate parts: a lot of the bits are not physically connected to the main assembly, even after doing "weld" and "corner tip" tests in Mineways. Still, fun to show here.
Yes, it's a Windows program, but I know that it works on Linux using Wine. Mac OSX also supports Wine, so I'm hoping it works there, too: please give it a try and let us know. Finally, I suspect Mineways would also run under Parallels or similar programs. Mineways is not graphics intensive - just 2D bitmaps, no real 3D - so I'm hoping it'll run under the Mac somehow just fine.
Alternately, port it, if you're really feeling frisky; it's open-source, and the original minutor program runs on the Mac and Linux, so it just takes some front-end work on someone's part. The original minutor Linux & Mac files are included in the source download, I haven't messed with those.
Update: someone verified that Mineways works fine on a Mac using Wine. If someone wants to try it under VirtualBox, great, and please let me know what you find.