Blender Landscape to Minecraft Workflow

November 25 2020

Blender Landscape to Minecraft Workflow

In this tutorial, I will walk you through the complete process of bringing terrain created in Blender into Minecraft.

Minecraft version: 1.16.4
Blender version: 2.90.1

First we need to make some settings to enable landscape creation. With blender fired up and a fresh new scene ready we open the preferences menu (Edit > Preferences).

1. Open the 'Add-ons' tab
2. Type 'landscape' into the search bar
3. Enable 'Add Mesh: A.N.T.Landscape'

Get rid of the Default Cube! Select it with left mouse click (or right - depends on your blender settings) and type x on your keyboard to delete it. Easy!

Now we need to create a new landscape mesh. We do this by opening the Add Menu with (Shift+A) and selecting landscape.

This is what we get by default. A new landscape object is now added to the scene.

Now we can change the landscape mesh parameters for our needs. By opening the Another Noise Tool Settings in the lower left corner of the editor. Click the arrow on the left to expand the Settings Menu.

With the Settings Menu open we have now a lot of possibilities to modify our landscape. But lets go on with the default for now.

Export the landscape as .obj (File > Export > Wavefront.obj)

Now you can voxelize the mesh with the tool of your choice. The online voxelizer of drububu is a good way to go. But you can choose any tool that fits your preferences As long as it is able to voxelize .obj files and save it to a schematic (.schem).

Here is a list of suitable tools:

• Online Voxelizer - By Drububu https://drububu.com/miscellaneous/voxelizer/?out=sch

• Tinkercad - By Autodesk (Account needed) https://www.tinkercad.com

• Binvox - By Patrick Min https://www.patrickmin.com/binvox/

For this tutorial we keep on with the mentioned online voxelizer. Open your obj file with the voxelizer tool. Choose a size that fits your needs and export as schematic.

Save the .schem file into the schematics folder of your Minecraft Server:

<YourServer> > plugins > (FastAsyncWorldEdit or WorldEdit) > schematics

For larger projects I recommend to use Fast Async World Edit or FAWE for short.

Now the ingame part.

Load the schematic into your clipboard:

//schematic load <filename>.schematic or //schematic load <filename>.schem

and paste it without air.

//paste -a

The terrain ingame.

The same terrain from another angle.

In contrast to the result of height brushes the created structure is hollow inside. A hollow terrain is not ideal for further building purposes. So we have to make some adjustments with fill or drain commands for example.

We will use the drain command. First we need to build a 'bounding box' of water around our terrain. Make a cuboid selection that completely encloses your terrain and then replace the air blocks with water.

//replace air water

Now fly around above your terrain and use //drain with a suitable radius. In this case I used a radius of 100.

//drain 100

Repeat this step as long as the water above the terrain is completely gone. This step might take a while depending on the size of your project.

After this step we should have only water blocks left 'inside' the terrain structure, cause drain only removes blocks connected to the starting position. You can check this in spectator mode.

Select your complete terrain area again (cuboid selection) and replace the water with the block type of your choice. Voilà!

As you might have guessed this works not only for terrain. You can apply this workflow to other kinds of meshes as well. Your imagination is the limit. Happy voxelizing!

This is just my current solution. Maybe there are easier ways out there. Combined commands, Voxelizers with flood fill,... ?! So, if you know any easier methods, besides //br height, then let me know.

Cheers!