I've used OneDrive as a centralized place to keep all of my work for a while now, and it's great. Everything I do gets uploaded immediately, and it makes syncing up devices (and refreshing my computers) easy. I got rid of my old backup CD's a long time ago, instead opting to keep all my old projects in the cloud.
OneDrive surfaces my old work occasionally, and I low-key love it. Each day it creates a new "on this day" album, which will contain all of the visual stuff I made that day - photos, renders, etc. - on the same day throughout time. It can be a real blast from the past!
Yesterday was one such day, with the render above, which I created in trueSpace more than 20 years ago. My intent was to use it as a backdrop for an adventure game I was planning to make, but I had no idea how to actually make games back then, and so, like many projects back then, it was over before it even got started.
Still, I got a kick out of seeing this. My skill as a 3D artist has come a long way since then!
One of the things I've been doing in the time since my last major blog post was dabbling with rendering some of my Minecraft exploits.
One of my biggest projects in the game (before I started "cheating" with INVedit and MCEdit) was Skull Island. Across a wide expanse of water from my original spawn and home base, I found an island with a large mountain near the water. It could be seen faintly from the water's edge near my spawn, and I thought it'd be a cool project to carve a large skull into the cliff face. After a few weeks of work (not always consistent play, but it did take a while), I was finished. It wasn't the best thing I'd ever seen made in Minecraft, but I liked the result, was proud of my work, and have decided to post the results here, for the curious.
In order to render my Minecraft levels, I first output them to OBJ format using mcobj, which is a great little tool. I used my old 3D standby, trueSpace, to do the actual rendering, and did a little work in Photoshop afterwards for some of them as well.
Here's the final render I did of Skull Island. The depth of field effect, which was part of the original render, gives it a nice little tilt-shift photography effect that I feel is very appropriate for Minecraft. I also did some post-process color work in Photoshop.
That line coming out of the water and going into the skull's mouth is actually my mine cart track that leads back and forth between the two land masses. On the way over to Skull Island, you come flying up a long incline and immediately see the giant skull looking ahead before your cart goes sailing between the front teeth!
I also did an alternate view from my home base area on the other side of the water. There's no sky output when you export maps from Minecraft using mcobj (and I don't see how there could ever be, really), so I had to make my own. The following two images show the render with and without my faux-Minecraft sky.
I also did a render of a small lake, to test water transparency / reflectivity and depth of field.
And finally, just for kicks, here's an image of my poor computer trudging through a rendering... the phrase "firing on all cylinders" comes to mind!
If you play Minecraft and you don't mind getting your hands dirty with some simple 3D work, rendering your worlds is a pretty fun way to make the whole experience a little more artful. There's a good sub-reddit for mcobj at r/mcobj, and people have also written up some decent tutorials for creating renders with Blender too, so there are lots of resources out there to help get you started if you're interested in all of this.
Thanks for reading, and if you have any tips, tricks, or other things to share about creating Minecraft renders, be sure to add them in the comments below! And of course, if I create any more interesting renders, I'll be sure to post 'em here on the blog!
I checked my email this morning and found a nice little nugget of goodness deep within: a message from Caligari informing me that the newest version of TrueSpace has now been made available for free!
You can use this link to register at Caligari.com, after which you'll be able to download the program, the manual, and some quick start videos. Make sure you've got your downloadin' gloves on; in total you'll be grabbing about 313Mb of stuff.
There are a good collection of free video courses available here as well.
I've not even used version 7.6 yet, but from what I have read so far, it seems to be a huge upgrade from 5, which is what I currently use for everything.
I finally had a chance to play around with version 7.6 this morning, and though it is very different from 5, it's also much more powerful. The editor features a realtime rendering engine that can do shadows, reflections, and a lot of other neat effects as you work in the editor... which opens up some great opportunities for fine tuning scenes to look just right before doing a final rendering. I've not been able to get the included offline rendering engine to load up in TS7 yet, but when I get home from work later today I'll play around with it some more and see if I can get it to work.
You'll probably need a pretty decent computer to run everything in real-time, but I've been running the program on the laptop we have here at work, and it seems to run reasonably on that, so most near-modern desktops should be fine.
All in all, this is very exciting for fans of TrueSpace, newcomers looking for a powerful, free 3D package, or anyone who's just yearning for a new design experience. If I wore hats, my hat would be off to Caligari for making such a wonderful tool, and then making it free. Hopefully this is the start of something big (and good) for the company.
