#dokucraft TSC

[starraseeker]

Minecraft Build Dive-In: European Palace, V2

So, earlier I posted a few screenshots of various Minecraft build projects I've done over the years. Let's explore the build shown in the first screenshot I shared: a sprawling palace in the style of late 17th-century/early 18th-century Europe, particularly inspired by Versailles and the Louvre!

First off, this build is huge. Like, I used WorldEdit's block-count tool on it as it was in the screenshots above (with interior only in a very few places), added together all the blocks that were the same material, and made some cubes of the top three materials that roughly matched the number of blocks. Here's what that looked like:

Like, just those three types of material alone is a staggering volume @.@

Now, on to the juicy details (and more screenshots)!

Like many of my builds, this actually wasn't my first attempt at this concept. That would be this:

While small, less planned-out, and not done quite as well in my own opinion, this first draft definitely helped solidify a few decisions and techniques, such as on-evens symmetry, the use of diorite as building material, andesite as a contrasting material, and green mansard-style roofs.

The build itself had a long and winding road, with a number of things changing and spontaneous decisions made. The gardens, especially, were a tricky concept; eventually I settled on single-height color-banded flower beds with azalea hedges, after experimenting with various other options and patterns (including hedge labyrinths!). The front radiating hedges were a concept from the beginning, but implementing them actually required me to pull out my calculator and do trigonometry to convert angles to block patterns :P

Unfortunately, as with most of my build projects, this one never got finished. In this case, I found that some fundamental design decisions I'd made at the very start were hamstringing me, and if I wanted to fix them I'd essentially have to start from scratch. So, I started prototyping some concepts for version 3 of this build concept:

Hopefully I'll be able to get a proper third version going sometime!

[starraseeker]

Oh hey how about some Minecraft build screenshots

Been a bit since I last really dove into a project (and a very long time since I ever actually properly finished one), but here's an assortment of screenshots of various different Minecraft build projects I've done over the years! In left-right-top-bottom order, we have:

A large palace inspired by Versailles and the Louvre, taking advantage of the then-recently-added copper blocks and azalea bushes

A series of modular cyberpunk-style buildings, with various floor sections that can be copied, stacked, and palette-swapped (using Worldedit) to create a wide array of different buildings using a relatively small number of templates

A large Gothic-style cathedral, surrounded by some (admittedly kinda shit) town buildings using the same material palette

A big art-deco skyscraper, inspired by both the Chrysler Building and the main building of Moscow State University

(Further commentary, and resourcepack links, below the cut!)

Honestly, Minecraft ends up being like, the ideal artistic medium for me. The basic creative act - placing or removing blocks - is incredibly simple, and doesn't take too much fine motor control or delicate touch to pull off. The palette of blocks available is both limited (with each block representing a specific "thing", rather than being abstract like most Legos) and diverse (with a wide array of different "things" being represented, and with a variety of different shapes), allowing for a stimulating mix of creative freedom and creative constraints. There's definitely things that can be frustrating - a 1-meter grid means that a 1-meter-thick wall (gigantic by real-world standards) can only have one appearance on all sides, and the lack of blocks like vertical slabs precludes a number of possibilities for things like slopes - but overall it's nice to dive in and lose myself in the throes of creation.

Now, as you might've noticed, I don't just use straight-vanilla MC. Resourcepacks are super useful for giving a thematic makeover to builds (sometimes to an extreme degree), and there's two I use a lot for various builds. For medieval and generally pre-industrial builds, Dokucraft TSC is my go-to pack: it's got three different flavors, as well as a wide array of mod-support addons and a huge library of community-provided assets free to use for mixing up custom packs (a handful of which I provided myself :3). For sci-fi (particularly cyberpunk) builds, Star Odyssey is my preferred pack - it's got a very visually pleasing style, and has a huge array of custom block & item models as well as robust connected-texture support. Fair warning though, a number of models and textures are a bit broken, and you may need to manually repair configuration files throughout the pack to get some things to work properly.

And of course, can't go without mention the extreme timesaver that is WorldEdit - copy, paste, and fill commands are a builder's best friend :P