I’ve created a program called Mineways, a free, open source program to export 3D models from Minecraft worlds. Watch the video on that page for an intro (I’d include the link, but the forum software says I’m including too many URLs). The disadvantage of Mineways compared to Mineblend is no direct import via .blend - OBJ import works, but the data’s not nicely structured. Mineways’ advantages include: easy and precise interactive selection of parts of your world to export, solid color or textured output, and control over color and block export (any block can be removed using color schemes in the program).
The program’s focused on 3D printing, but I’ve got a separate dialog for export to renderers. Blender is, in fact, my target renderer, since it’s free. But, my knowledge of Blender’s ins and outs is pretty low, so I hope you guys can help give me feedback on how I can improve the Wavefront OBJ output. Or, possibly, I might add a .blend output option, if the .blend file format is well-documented somewhere (please point me at it). I see a fair bit of info on the Blender Wikipedia page, but am not sure what’s best: really, C or C++ code to write out .blend files would be ideal.
Anyway, so far I’ve figured out the following:
- The basic OBJ exporter from Mineways works OK with Blender.
- It fails on a few things, though: “billboard” torches, flowers, etc. (Turn off the option “export all block types”)
- The billboard problems seem to stem from Blender apparently not using the alpha channel in the texture PNG. There is also some material multiplied-by texture color problem.
- The “no materials preview” variant of OBJ output doesn’t work well with Blender, e.g. trees look bad when using it.
- Blender’s WRL importer doesn’t work on this file for some reason (a texture path problem, maybe?).
Here’s my weaksauce first rendering. You guys can do a lot better, I’m sure:
