World of Wonders is a Minecraft server that creates themeparks artistically and as realistic as possible. It’s a place where friends can hang out, and us, as volunteer creators, can try out things we would like to learn. To promote the server, we take pictures of rides inside the Minecraft server, but this doesn’t show much detail or emotion. Minecraft itself creates promotional art with rendered pictures, so we wanted to do that in our own way.
There weren’t any tutorials to follow to setup a scene in Blender the way I wanted it. The things that should be visible in the render are:
- The world consisting of blocks
- The custom model trains
- The players with any given pose
Luckily the program Blockbench is able to convert both custom train models and players from .json to .obj to be used in Blender. To create a model out of a part of the Minecraft world, I used Mineways. With everything ready as .obj files, I started to setup the scene in Blender, with my first prototypes:
After the first renders I started to get the hang of it. With inspiration of pictures from other artworks, I recognized patterns like a distinct subject with interesting things happening in the background. The pictures generally showed a lot of emotion and movement which I also wanted to contain in the images.
The following renders had a lot more thought about the composition:
Another feature the inspiration pictures had was some form of postprocessing. At first I couldn’t figure out what caused this and tried using bevels in Blender. It came close but wasn’t what I was going for. Someone suggested to manually add lines. A lot of work but the result was way better and with much higher quality. With all this knowledge together I worked on a new render, one of my best so far:
The combination of using light, composition and post processing made this into an artwork im proud of. This isn’t possible to achieve in Minecraft.