What are the possibilities when one of the world’s biggest games combines with next-generation ray-tracing technology? Here’s what Nvidia has prepared for us.

Nvidia has been working with some of the world’s most talented creators in the Minecraft community. The first results of that collaboration are displayed today in a series of screenshots that show off their amazing work. The screenshots feature worlds created by Razzleberries, BlockWorks, and GeminiTay, just a few of the creators who were selected due to their imaginations and fantastic track record of making captivating contributions in the Minecraft community.

The worlds include:

Of Temples and Totems RTX by Razzleberries – An adventure world focusing players on exploring and completing challenges in mysterious temples. Each temple showcases per-pixel emissivity and real-time shadows and leverages global illumination to create an immersive experience for players.

Imagination Island RTX by BlockWorks – A fully explorable theme park, filled with Easter eggs, that hosts four distinct lands, each dedicated to an element of real-time ray tracing. In this scene, we see the visitor center of the park, highlighted by god rays cast in real-time through the windows, shining down onto the floor.

Crystal Palace RTX by GeminiTay – A survival map with a whimsical fantasy theme that features a masterfully built castle. Ray-traced shadows and beautiful atmospherics create realism in this world built on a 1:1 scale.

Nvidia also unveiled a series of tools and guides that Minecrafters can use to make immersive, life-like worlds. Originally scheduled for our GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley, these online tutorials are being released as part of GTC Digital and include:

For creating physically based rendering textures – A presentation and how-to guide that dives into the particulars behind Minecraft with RTX’s path tracing and PBR textures and how they work together to create incredible sights. It includes a step-by-step workflow for creating your own PBR textures and texture packs.

For converting Java worlds to RTX worlds – NVIDIA has partnered with Minecraft creators to craft a guide of the unofficial best-practices to convert your world to Bedrock Windows 10 Edition, which is the basis for the upcoming Minecraft with RTX.

NVIDIA teams have been hard at work, hand-in-hand with Microsoft, to bring worlds that are fully path-traced, with reflections, shadows, caustics, global illumination, and other realistic lighting effects that interact naturally with physically based textures applied to Minecraft’s blocks. These PBR textures enable per-pixel emissives, volumetric effects, and other never-before-seen sights, that together with the path-traced effects usher in the next evolution of Minecraft.

Related links:

NVIDIA has updated our press extranet at www.nvidia-press.com with the new screenshots.

GeForce.com story on the new worlds, tools, and tutorials:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/minecraft-with-rtx-coming-soon-screenshots-and-guides

Creating Physically Based Materials for Minecraft with RTX presentation:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/gtc/session-catalog-details/?search=S22677

Creating Physically Based Materials for Minecraft with RTX video:

https://youtu.be/zhJ0hNJ3hkA

Minecraft with RTX: Crafting a Real-Time Path-Tracer for Gaming video:

https://youtu.be/mDlmQYHApBU

Creating PBR textures how-to guide:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/minecraft-rtx-texturing-guide/

Best practices for converting Java worlds to RTX worlds:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/guides/minecraft-rtx-world-conversion-guide/