This week I’ve been playing with High quality renders of my Minecraft server using Cinema4D.

I remember playing Minecraft during the very early alpha versions, when the game was still doing the secret Friday updates and people could comment in Notch blog. Then came the Minecraft crazyness and I stopped playing, but some months ago with the release of 1.8 version I thought it could be fun to create my own public Minecraft Server and leave it open to see what happens.

I was expecting random players entering and messing around but without publicizing the server in any website nobody entered. Meanwhile I started cleaning up the land, creating outpost and suddenly I was hooked again.

But because the server was public I decided to invite some of my friends, and together when end up building a huge fortress with many tematic rooms. I even created a google maps version of our world so we could plan carefuly our exploration trips. Minecraft is an amazing platform to mess around, there are so many mods and tools to adapt it that it never runs out of stuff to do.

This weekend was the birthday of Carlos, the hardest worker of the gang, and I decided to make a 3D render in Cinema4D of our base as a gift.

Creating the render was very easy, there is a tool called Mineways that allows to export an area of your world very easily, it has lots of options (even for 3D printing!), and the exported result is very friendly to be used in any software (an OBJ file with its MTL and texture that worked right away).

Once I had it in Cinema4D I started playing with the illumination, here are some early versions

In case you are wondering how I did the lights, I used a cloner per polygon with one light inside in the object of the torches, this meant for every polygon in the torches you get one light, which was 6 lights per torche, so I had to tweak a lot the values to avoid overlighting everything. I also tryed rendering using volumetric lights but that meant generating 6 shadowmaps per light and my RAM couldnt handle it.

I also tryed with interiors but they werent very impressive