Minecraft creates a lot of really interesting features when it generates landscapes, and I like the idea of being able to load up the program and have it make a whole region that I can poke around in and find interesting shots. In a way, it challenges me to become a sort of photographer, as I look around for good views of the scenery and try to frame it properly for a render.

A few years ago I played around with rendering Minecraft worlds in trueSpace, and now I’ve finally gotten the chance to try out some renders using Blender, in the Cycles rendering engine. The images above have had a little bit of post-render manipulation in Photoshop, to adjust tone and color. Some renders have speckles of noise in them – this is an artifact of light bouncing around in Cycles, and can be remedied by taking more samples of the render, but I didn’t feel like these renders warranted the sort of render times that can impose.

The following gallery shows some of my older attempts at rendering Minecraft landscapes, done without textures in trueSpace.