Minecraft as a 3D design tool
By: Christian Behler
Tags: Design, Games, Minecraft, 3d, UI

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.