I personally do not have the time to exlore this game, wich is addictive to my students. They spend hours carefully tweaking their minecraft worlds, and sharing them on game servers. Today in class a group of students asked me to play with their minecrafts for a while... and i acquiesced, while looking for a way to export minecraft objects to conventional formats ans asking for some of their saved games. This Minecraft Wiki gave a few links to exporters and converters. Tested JMC2OBJ, a java based app that converts to OBJ. Gave me a huge file, wich crashed Vivaty and Meshlab (well, Meshlab is crash-prone...). Mineways looked promising, and delivered. A windows app to convert minecraft worlds and objects to 3D printers, gave me the pleasant surprise of exporting natively to VRML. Just load a saved game, select an area and export it. Instant vrml file! With optional texture map, if the option is selected, and a cost estimate in 3D printing.
So... i guess i shall have to add minecraft to the list of child-friendly 3D modellers for vrml worlds...
Update: played around a bit more with higher areas of capture in mineways. Generated some huge vrml files (larger than 100 mb) and some smaller ones. A quick edit in Vivaty for background and viewpoints gave me this (wich is a 1,5 mb compressed x3d file):
And, why not, test it online? Minecraft test
The world was created by my students. Some notes: the large expanse of minecraft maps means very large vrml files on conversion; since mineways was developed with 3d printing in mind, animated content (i.e. doors, torches, etc) is not correctly exported. Still... this looks very promising, as another tool for web3D worlds.
The Mineways documentation is a must read (and a funny one too, never a technical document made me laugh...)
The culprit to the creative addiction of today's wired children: Minecraft.
Can minecraft be a powerful educational tool?
Mixing Minecraft with Augmented Reality: Minecraft Reality. IOS only, alas. And Bruce Sterling saw it first.
I don't play minecraft. Yet. I'll have to ask my students to teach me.
Nice contribution Artur!
Indeed minecraft worlds are great. Block mania has always been around since I remember, Lego, tetris, .... Even has analogies to pixel paint art and classical arcade games. We could say that minecraft is the "de facto" digital Lego. Minecraft worlds could be very appealing fo kids in both ways: to build them and to navigate them. By the way babelx3d server could need some block based avatars
Lately, remembering so many worlds poorly illuminated by the standard vrml headlight, put some thinking about a basic "ideal" lighting (better than standard headlight) that could show more adequate contrast and shades in worlds and could be applied routinely to any world with acceptable/good results.
It is not finished yet (I will make a blog post about when is done) but show it here applied to this minecraft model shared by Artur.
Minecraft conversion with better light. Showing nicer shades and contrast.
The world can be visited here: minecraft2
Enjoy,
vcard
Cool lighting! Really cool! VRML and 8bit aesthetic mix very well. I can't wait to see the the look on my student's face when they see this (only next week, or maybe tomorrow if they keep their promise about new minecraft worlds and fighter jets).
Did a test with another model from a student, and used a copy of the new lighting system. Check it here. To test... two things that minecraft worlds have that do not export to vrml are sensors to open doors and easy ways to ascend stairs. I'm tweanking the avatar size in search of a more workable solution.
To get smaller filesizes, raising the depth of the capture area in mineways is a good idea. the lower the threshold the deeper the model, but since we only need stuff that's built above ground everything else is excess polygons.