Tool For Designing Builds Minecraft

Minecraft as a 3D design tool

Minecraft can be used to create visualizations and interactive experiences for many different fields.

A rendered image of a big hall in Minecraft. It's built out of grey Basalt with a turquoise ceiling and a glass floor. — A big fantasy/medieval-style hall in Minecraft, image by author.

Minecraft is one of the most popular video games in the world with more than 100 million players. But it is so much more than just a video game. It has become part of pop culture and has found many use cases outside of gaming.

One of the areas where Minecraft shines the most is as a 3D design tool. It's a game where you build structures in a virtual environment, which makes it perfect for creating many different types of 3D visualizations. It may have started with simple dirt huts, but modern Minecraft builds have evolved into incredible fidelity and scale.

Normal CAD or 3D modeling programs are very complex, hard to learn, and very overwhelming as a beginner. Minecraft, on the other hand, is very intuitive to use and even children can use it to design their own worlds.

Design in Minecraft

When you start to play the game, you have to build some kind of shelter to protect you from the monsters at night. At first, it's probably just a dirt hut or a simple cave. After a while, when you have outgrown your primitive survival shelter, you probably want a bigger house, then a mansion, a castle, and a whole city.

Just like traditional design, building in Minecraft is an iterative process. Your first buildings will probably not look great, but the more buildings you create, the more improvements you will see. Minecraft is also the most popular game on YouTube with more than 200 billion views in 2020, which means you will likely see videos of other Minecraft players and you start to copy and steal some of their designs. As we all know, great designers steal (Pablo Picasso).

One of the best aspects of Minecraft is the incredible freedom you have as a player. It's not like a traditional story-driven game, where you finish quests to progress. When you start a new Minecraft world, it's a big empty canvas just waiting to be filled. You decide which architecture style you want to build in, what materials you want to use, or how big your houses are going to be.

Architecture

Minecraft is a great tool for architecture visualizations. When you want to construct a new building, it's always great to get a feeling for how it looks before you pour the concrete. Minecraft can be used as an easy and intuitive tool to create preview images of a project before starting.

Like normal architecture visualizations, you can import the Minecraft build into 3D rendering programs like Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D, etc. (with tools like Mineways) and create high-quality photorealistic renders. However, Minecraft builds have the additional benefit of being able to walk through them in the game and experience them from a first-person perspective.

"Whilst the architects of today grew up playing with LEGO, I have no doubt the next generation will have played Minecraft" — James Delaney, blockworks.uk

Many of us have probably played LEGO when we were kids, I certainly enjoyed it a lot. However, there was always the very limiting factor of not having enough bricks to finish the projects. Minecraft doesn't share this problem. You have basically infinite space and blocks, so the only limit is your imagination.

A rendered image of a modern house built in Minecraft. It has a garden with a pool and some plants around it. — A modern house architecture visualization, image by author.

Landscape Design

It doesn't matter how beautiful a building is, if it just sits on an empty field of grass or concrete, it will look out of place and rather boring. A well-designed garden or landscape around it will highlight the building. Many Minecraft builders know this and spend as much time on the landscapes as they do on the buildings.

Minecraft provides many different types of greenery and plants and therefore is a great tool for landscape designers. Similar to architectural renderings, Minecraft can be used by landscape architects to create a preview for clients to show how the final garden may end up looking like.

City Planning

Once you have completed your first building in Minecraft, you probably want to create more houses and eventually expand to a full city. To design a realistic-looking city in Minecraft players may read up on real-world city planning principles or discover them for themselves through trial and error.

In fact, Minecraft is used for city planning projects in developing countries. A project that has been featured on Minecon, the annual Minecraft convention, was the transformation of an urban area in Nairobi. Technical models and architectural drawings were inaccessible and unengaging. The Minecraft concepts, on the other hand, were more effective and included more people from the local community.

Another aspect of city planning that is being explored in Minecraft is city planning with artificial intelligence. An annual competition is hosted where the competitors have to create an AI that can design a city anywhere on the random Minecraft terrain. Creating a city that fits in the environment and makes use of local materials is relatively easy for a human, but a massive challenge for AIs.

An image of 17th century London in Minecraft with a big cathedral in the middle and a lot of houses. — 17th century London in Minecraft, image by blockworks.uk.

Level Design

When video game companies or animation film studios create big 3D environments, they start with concept art and grey boxing (placing grey or colored boxes where buildings and other big objects are supposed to be) before committing to the final design.

Minecraft is a great tool especially for grey boxing because it is a video game itself. The field of view and controls are similar to those of the final product, so you can walk around in an early concept of an environment and get a feeling for the layout and sightlines.

With tools like WorldEdit or WorldPainter, you can significantly speed up the creation process in Minecraft, which makes it possible to go through different iterations very quickly.

Many Minecraft players are great level designers or environment artists without realizing it. Just by playing the game normally and building beautiful and interactive worlds, they collect a lot of knowledge and experience that can be useful in other fields.

An intricate and detailed medieval castle in Minecraft built ouf of Diorite (white stone) with Granite roofs (red stone). — A castle in Minecraft, castle by BdoubleO100, render by author.

Minecraft is a very intuitive to use 3D design program. Its tremendous popularity means that a lot of people know how to play the game. There will always be situations where a real CAD program is required, but especially for quick visualizations, Minecraft is a very valuable tool.

Children can learn about 3D design principles just by playing the game. Through iterating over many buildings they will improve and develop a sense of 3D space. Many future architects and designers will have played Minecraft when they were kids and they will probably never stop playing. It is an amazing game after all.

The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article published on our platform. This story contributed to Bay Area Black Designers: a professional development community for Black people who are digital designers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area. By joining together in community, members share inspiration, connection, peer mentorship, professional development, resources, feedback, support, and resilience. Silence against systemic racism is not an option. Build the design community you believe in.