The MCprep addon makes it easy to import your custom Minecraft world into blender. Using specially crafted tools and menus, you are a few clicks away from rendering with your amazing creations with great results.
Features include
- Quick button for opening jmc2obj or Mineways
- Shortcut for importing obj files
- Material prepping to improve materials with a single press, supported for both blender internal and cycles
- Improve UI button to adjust blender’s interface for viewing minecraft worlds and textures
- Combine images and materials, so that subsequent world imports don’t litter your file with duplicate image and material datablocks (a real pain!)
- Mesh wapping, used to bring in improved and pre-animated 3D assets to your scenes. Replaces basic 2D plans and simple cubes with this more intricate items, such as torches with particle systems, wind-swaying grass, light-emitting redstone lamps, and more.
Learn how to import Minecraft Worlds into your blender scenes using Mineways or jmc2obj, and the MCprep addon.
How to import Minecraft Worlds- Video tutorial
Text tutorial
Not into videos? See the tutorial in text-form here.
1. Create your Minecraft structure
First create your world in Minecraft. One thing to think about is – how much area do you want to export? To make it easier for yourself, mark the bounds of what you want to export with a bright colored wool or other block not matching the ground colors. This allows you to easily pick it out from a top-level view of the world to export exactly what you need.
2. Export the world to an OBJ format
For this, you can use either Mineways or jmc2obj, two separate independent programs used for taking parts of your Minecraft world, and exproting selections of it into a portbale 3d object file which we can import to blender, as well as many other programs. Use the tabs to select specific instructions for each.
You can download jmc2obj from this link, make sure that you have a working modern version of Java installed on your machine. On Mac OSX? See this if running into java issues.
First, you want to do a one-time setup by exporting the jmc2obj textures to a folder on your machine. Click on the export button, and then under the material section, click to export materials. You won’t have to do this for future imports unless you want to use other texture packs for example.
Next, open your world by going to the filebrowser at the top of the screen. Navigate to your world’s save folder and then close the dialogue and click the load button.
Using your mouse, select the area you want to export (this will highlight in pink). Remember the colored wool we placed earlier? This should be visible from the interface now. After making your selection, adjust the ceiling and floor to desirable heights. This is particularly important to improve render times – raise the floor up until you see black spots in the overview. This indicates where the floor is clipping out, so place the level just below there so you don’t export any unnecessary world layers.
Now, press the export button. Be sure to use the following settings with your export for best results.
You can download Mineways from this link. Then, using the tool, load your Minecraft world. Using your mouse, select the area you want to export (this will highlight in pink). Remember the colored wool we placed earlier? This should be visible from the interface now. After making your selection, adjust the ceiling and floor to desirable heights. This is particularly important to improve render times – raise the floor up until you see black spots in the overview. This indicates where the floor is clipping out, so place the level just below there so you don’t export any unnecessary world layers.
Be sure to use the following settings with your export for best results.
3. Install MCprep if you don’t already have it
Full video instructions available here, download MCprep from this link directly.
4. Use the quick import OBJ button to import your world
Using the import world button in the MCprep panel, you can navigate to copy in your exported world. Note that this is just a shortcut function for the import OBJ button, which if you don’t have MCprep is available from File > import > Wavefront (.obj). In the file navigator, select your exported obj (or drag and drop it into the path field) and select import. Note that you didn’t have to specifically select the material (.mat) file, but the importer automatically knows to use that file to generate the necessary materials.
5. Prep materials
Select all objects of the newly imported world, and press prep materials. This will fix materials based on the active render engine, so if you want cycles materials ensure you have cycles enabled first. You may also find it beneficial at this time to press the “Improve UI” button so you can view these textures properly even in solid mode.
5. Optional: Swap objects
If you have grass elements, saplings, flowers, doors, fire, torches.. and a whole slew of other types of objects in your import, you may benefit from using the meshswap function. It is recommended to only meshswap one type of object at a time for stability reasons, particularly for grass swapping. Consider also only swapping a section of your world import by separating out just the faces that will be in the view of the camera.