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Mineways Main Documentation

To get started, read this quick step by step or watch this video (and watch this one for some pro tips). For problems, see the Windows troubleshooting guide; let me know if you're still stuck. Check the quick reference page for a brief rundown of mouse and keyboard controls, menu and export options, and what the files included with Mineways each do. Read this for the process I go through when exporting for 3D printing.

Normally you can just hit "OK" on the export dialog and things will work fine. Key tip: hover the mouse over any option in the Export dialog for more information on it.

Read on if you want to understand how to make your models less expensive, use different texture packs, and otherwise tailor you want to see printed out. What follows is extensive documentation about each part of the export and print process. If you don't want to wade through it all, at least search this page for the phrase "Key tip", as these bits are particularly useful.

Subscribe to the Mineways mailing list - it's for only important announcements, such as new version releases.

Installation

Installation is trivial: download and unzip (using 7-Zip or other decompressor) to some directory, like the desktop.

Uninstall: just delete the directory. If you created color schemes, there will be a few small entries in the registry, If you are fanatical and want to clean these out, delete the ColorSchemes directory at "Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\<your name here>\Mineways", or delete the Mineways directory there altogether.

Double-click the mineways.exe to run the program.

Opening Worlds and Schematics

There are many ways to open a Minecraft world or old-style schematic file in Mineways. If one doesn't work for you, try the next.

File | Open World: In the "File" menu header there is "Open World". Click (or hover) and move to the right to select your world. These are the worlds in your "%appdata%\.minecraft\saves" directory. You can see in this video the process of downloading a Minecraft map and putting it in the right place. The worlds are listed by their (not necessarily unique) given names on the left, their folder on the right, and arranged alphabetically by these folders. If you want to specify a different directory for where your world saves are located, use the "-s" option on the command line on startup; see the command line options.

If you want to export some particular block, use File | Open and select the "[Block Test World]" - this is an internally-generated "world" of blocks, with each block type listed from west to east in block ID order (for 1.12 and earlier; for 1.13 on I've assigned values greater than 255 in a somewhat sensible fashion), and with variants shown from north to south by their data values. To select a single block, find it, right-click it, then hit "[" to move the bottom level up by one, thus selecting only the block itself and not the surrounding grass.

Here's a view of a small portion of [Block Test World] exported to OBJ and rendered with Cinema 4D:

If you can't find your world in the list, you can select "Find your world..." at the bottom, which is the same as doing...

File | Open...: This option is for opening old-style schematic files and worlds. Navigate to wherever your schematic or world is stored and select the level.dat file. On Windows, the default folder for world save files is "%appdata%\.minecraft\saves"; for Mac it's "~/Library/Application Support/minecraft/saves/". Worth saying again: you can also load a world by dragging and dropping its level.dat file on to Mineways. Another pro tip: if you save or rename your schematic file to have the world "repeat" in it, e.g., rename "eiffel.schematic" to "eiffelRepeat.schematic", the schematic will load and be repeated across the map, with a minimum one block gap between each model. This can be useful if you want to create a single 3D print file that has multiple copies of the model. Also, for schematics, only, Control-A will select the whole schematic model.

NOTE: the new schematic file format introduced by FAWE for 1.13 data is currently not supported in Mineways. See this issue report for more information; short version: save you schematic to a world using WorldEdit, Litematica, FAWE, or similar, since Mineways can read worlds.

File | Import Settings: If you've previously exported a model from your world or schematic, you can select this data file (.OBJ, .WRL, or for STL export, the .TXT file generated) with Import Settings. Doing so will not only open your world, but will also set all the previous export settings you used to make this export file, including the color scheme and the terrain file chosen. Alternately, you can simply drag and drop one of these files on to Mineways to load it.

When you import a file's settings, the settings affect only the particular file type. For example, if you read in a WRL file for 3D printing, its settings will not affect OBJ rendering export (or even OBJ 3D printing export, for export settings specific to OBJ files, such as material output). This feature is backward compatible to Mineways 2.0, though features added since then will be given default values. The two exceptions are that the "Create a ZIP" and "create files themselves" export settings are not changed when settings are imported.

One other useful type of file that Import Settings can read in is a script file. You can create script files to automatically perform all sorts of operations, including special ways of modifying blocks during export. See the scripting documentation for more information.

The first image is a schematic pikachu7795240.schematic loaded via "File | Open..." In the second the schematic is renamed pikachu7795240repeat.schematic and loaded. The word "repeat" in the file name tips off Mineways to repeat the object. Also, I typed Control-A to select a single copy of the schematic.

Here is a 3x3 set of objects output and viewed with G3D:

Mapping

Here's basic map use:

Selecting a Region

To create a 3D file for viewing or printing you first select a 3D box in your world. Whatever is in this box is exported. Hold down the right mouse button (or left mouse and Control key) and drag to define a selection area. If you also hold down the Shift key, the selection region will be square. Key tip: once a region is defined, you can then use the right mouse button to select an edge or corner and drag to fine-tune the rectangle. Hit the space bar to automatically adjust the depth to something reasonable, if need be. Pro users: Using the mouse wheel with the Control key down changes the depth; using it with Shift down changes the visible height (this second mode can be slow, since the map is regenerated).

Once you make a selection, you may get a dialog as shown below. Mineways will detect when what you see is not what you'll get. It will ask if you want to set the depth so that everything you can see from above that you have selected will be exported.

Example Region Selection:
At first, the selected area excludes some terrain visible from above, as the current depth is too high.

Choosing "yes" lowers this depth and adjusts the slider

Note that sometimes the adjusted depth becomes too low, for example when the selection includes a deep hole. In photo above, the depth has been increased to the point where some terrain is now unselected. Bright pink shows terrain exactly at this depth.

By default, the heights used for the rectangular block are from y=63 (sea level) to y=255. The upper slider determines the visibility height, but usually you'll leave this one alone. You'll normally use it for viewing or selecting areas fully underground or in the Nether (or poking around your map to look for diamonds and other hidden treasures).

The selected export depth can be changed in a number of ways, even when no area is selected. The Depth slider is the simplest way to modify this value. If you click the middle mouse button on a location, the depth is set to its height. The [ and ] keys shift the depth by one, and so are useful for tuning. The spacebar will also select a reasonable depth for your selection volume, based on visibility (water is considered invisible, so that the bottom of lakes will be solid). Holding shift while tapping the spacebar will treat water and glass as opaque, useful for 3D printing. To micro-adjust the Height, use the < and > keys (with or without holding Shift). See the full shortcut key list for more options.

Key tip: to see what you're doing, export the model and view with a viewer. I usually work by adjusting the box size and export options in Mineways, export, then viewing the file in G3D (which reloads the viewed file when you tap the "r" key) or, for .WRL files, MeshLab (unfortunately, their Alt-R reload doesn't clear out the previously-loaded file) to see the results.

Exporting Models and Maps

If you want to render the model, select "Export for Rendering" from the File menu, or use Control-R, and save your file. The resulting file(s) can then be imported into a huge variety of 3D modelers and viewers, e.g., Blender. See this section for instructions for various popular modelers.

You can select "Export Model for 3D Printing", Control-P, to create a model suitable for sending to a 3D printer. Even if you don't have a 3D printer, you can still get it printed, usually for a reasonable price. See the next section for how to get going.

The big difference between rendering and printing is that 3D print models must be solid and well-formed. Currently Mineways treats all blocks as solid, full blocks: half-steps or stairs are treated as blocks, as is every other block. There is also no transparency for the materials, since printers do not currently support this type of creation. Models for rendering can, when full texturing is on, include billboard models for flowers, saplings, crops, and other elements. Note that the billboard locations are added in comments to the output .OBJ and .WRL files. In this way, a dedicated modeler could substitute his own elaborate grass, flower, or other models in place of the simple billboards Minecraft provides.

To make your model immediately viewable on the web in 3D, choose the third option "Publish to Sketchfab." Mineways directly uploads your model to the Sketchfab site and makes it displayable to everyone. It's fun and easy, honestly. Go here for detailed instructions.

The next option is "Export Schematic", which allows you to then import your model to another world by using Amulet, WorldEdit, Litematica, or FAWE. Note that Mineways can read any old-style schematic file by using "File | Open...".

Schematic files are commonly used to share constructions among builders. You can upload and share these files on sites such as Planet Minecraft. Signs will not have text, chests will lose their contents, objects such as paintings are not exported, and heads are turned into pumpkins. Currently no export options beyond the dimensions and the rotation angle affect schematic export in Mineways, and the rotation angle only partially works, mostly for full blocks that do not have any orientation. In other words, the orientation angle will rotate the model as a whole, but each individual block will not be rotated: stair steps and signs will still go the old direction, rails get "interesting," and so on. I'd avoid it... Also, 1.13 and newer elements will export as grass blocks and a warning is issued, since the standard schematic format does not support these. Mineways does not support the new schematic format, sorry.

"Export Map" is simple: whatever area you have selected is exported to a PNG-format image file, named as you wish. The zoom level affects the result, though will differ slightly from what you see on the screen for boring reasons. While you can manually export any portion of the map manually, the real power is from using scripting. You can make a simple text file to specify more than one map. Each map can be set to display a different part of your world, or even a different layer, by adjusting the maximum Y height. See (and run) the sample file "scripting/make_map_tiles.mwscript" for an example that creates four adjacent 1000x1000 maps centered around location 0,0.

If you want to edit these maps, consider using ImageMagick, which lets you perform all sorts of annotations and much more. See the file mineways_annotate_map.bat, which shows how to create a PNG map file, then run annotate_map.py to create a .bat file that then calls ImageMagick to annotate the map with coordinates and map file areas.

See the file "scripting/make_slice_maps.mwscript" for making a series of layers that you can turn into an animation. You can then make animations like this (and at a slower speed):

slice animation slice animation slowed

Out of memory?

Under "Help", the "give more export memory" frees memory as possible while exporting. This option can allow you to export a large model you normally couldn't, at the cost of slower map update and export. What it does is unloads all stored world chunks (the 16x16x256 high pieces of your world) when exporting, reloading these after export. Also, the chunks loaded get reduced in size, which can help showing large maps on extremely limited machines (such as Windows 32). If that fails, you can use scripting to export your world as separate "hunks."

Displaying with G3D

Once you have a model for rendering, you might want to preview it before importing it to 3D modeler. If you are using Wavefront OBJ files (the default), I recommend the free G3D viewer (pro tip: hold the Alt key down and use WASD to move fast in G3D). This viewer now recognizes a special tag in the OBJ's material description that makes Mineways models display with the classic blocky Minecraft look. If you use VRML or STL files, MeshLab is a fine free viewer for these other formats for 3D printing (however, it does not handle transparency and cutouts well, so is poor for viewing renderings).

Download this special version of G3D here. Unzip and run, then drop your .OBJ file on to the window to view it. Simpler yet, you can set up your Windows system to view .OBJ files with G3D when double-clicked. Just run register-G3D-viewer64-run-as-administrator.bat one time as administrator (see these instructions to learn how).

Camera controls: WASD for normal movement, ZC for up and down, QE for swivel. Hold down Shift to go more slowly, Alt to go fast. Escape to quit.

Aside from being a lovely renderer, G3D has additional features such as making a screenshot (F4) and recording a video (F6). Press F11 to see various developer features. The master G3D site is here.

Here's an example, side to side, of a lot of the blocks in Minecraft.

G3D displaying an OBJ rendering file:

OBJ render with G3D

Color Schemes

Color schemes allows you to change the color for many blocks, and - useful for 3D printing and some rendering applications - remove any blocks you want from view. One tip: you can eliminate all glass from your model by setting its alpha to 0 in a color scheme. This part of this video shows how to use color schemes to do this.

Note: with the new file format introduced with Minecraft 1.13, the whole "blocks from 0-255" way of listing block types is not valid for newer blocks. Mineways still uses a form of this internally, so the feature is still in place. Also, Mineways has evolved to provide colors for different colored blocks of the same type. For example, the various wool blocks will display using their colors. Changing the color of the wool block using a color scheme will change only the white wool version of the block. Color schemes still have their uses, such as for removing some blocks from view and from export. Color schemes use my internal block type numbering system for blocks from 1.13 on. If you get flaky problems with older color schemes, at worst you can always run REGEDIT and delete the ColorSchemes directory at "Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\<your name here>\Mineways".

How to use a color scheme: From the menu, Add a new color scheme, then Edit it. Change the name "Color Scheme" at the top of the dialog that pops up to something useful, then select any block type to edit it. Color is given in hexadecimal color format. You can use MWSnap (old but free), FastStone Capture (new but costs $20), or other programs to find the hexadecimal (e.g., #787878) color value of any pixel on your screen. 'Alpha' says how opaque a block will appear on the screen, with 255 meaning fully opaque and 0 meaning fully transparent (invisible). Blocks with an alpha of 0 will be deleted when exporting. You can turn off export of all blocks by using the "Hide All Blocks" button. This feature allows you to create separate parts, e.g., a glass roof could be created by then turning on just glass export. The "Hide Tree Blocks" hides all log and leaf blocks, making printing of 3D terrain simpler (trees are sometimes hard to print well).

Changing the color will affect the 3D print model's color for only the "solid material colors" and "richer color textures" export modes; "full color texture patterns" (the default on the export dialog) will not be affected (except water, a little bit). To change full color textures' colors, you need to edit the input terrainExt.png itself. See Creating Your Own Terrain Files.

"My Model's Too Expensive!"

If you export to 3D print and upload to a 3D print service, you might be surprised to find that the price is sometimes just shy of a used car. Expensive models happen because either the model is too large, or too small.

The most common problem is the exported blocks are not small enough. This happens with larger models, those 100+ hour darlings you sweated over in Minecraft. The cause is that, by default, Mineways exports the model to print at a safe size. For example, colored sandstone has a thin wall dimension of 2 millimeters. This means if some wall in your model is less than 2 mm thick, it is in danger of breaking into pieces if printed in color.

Models with only a few blocks in them can also be expensive. The problem is that you'll scale it up to see it. Each block itself is then massive. You have to pay for each block's volume. Mineways can't help you much there, you'll need to use a CAD program to hollow out your object manually.

There are some solutions to the price problem:

By the way, I hear "it would be cheaper using LEGOs" a fair bit. LEGO blocks cost around 4-5 cents a block, 2 mm colored sandstone 3D printed blocks run about 6/10th of a cent. There are advantages to LEGOs (larger, reusable, fun to make) and disadvantages (no textures, not perfect cubes), but LEGO cost is not an advantage.

By default, Wavefront OBJ *.obj (and *.mtl) files are exported for rendering, VRML97 (aka VRML2) for 3D printing. Here's the rundown of the various file types you can select, including some subtleties about each. If you want to export to the glTF format, one indirect way is to upload to Sketchfab, make the model downloadable, then download from there.

OBJ, absolute: Wavefront OBJ is an old format, so is commonly supported as an import format for a huge range of applications. If you export materials, a corresponding *.mtl file is output; if you export textures, one or more *.png files are also created. The .obj and .mtl files are text files, so can be edited or processed further. By selecting "absolute" for the OBJ file, indices are absolute (positive), the norm. This is the format to use for export for upload to Sculpteo. See other export choices in the OBJ file export options documentation.

OBJ, relative: relative indices are used on faces. These allow you to concatenate two or more OBJ files into a single OBJ file.

Binary STL: This file format is commonly used by 3D printers. It normally is used for single-color materials, but the exporter will use either the Materialise Magics or VisCAM format to attach colors to triangles - see this article. I recommend using VisCAM's variant, as MeshLab will then display the proper model colors. When STL files, binary or ASCII, are exported a corresponding *.txt file is generated with information about the model. This same data is included in the beginning of the *.obj and *.wrl files themselves. This text file can be read back into Mineways using "Import Settings" to set everything back the way it was set before.

ASCII text STL: A variant for 3D printers, the file generated is considerably larger than the binary form and cannot include color. The main advantage is that this file type is a simple text file and so can be easily edited. The format is trivial and so can provide a raw set of triangles for a model.

VRML97: Also known as VRML2 or VRML 2.0. While this format has been superseded by X3D, it is commonly supported by a wide range of packages. That said, its main reason for existence here is that it's the only file format that Shapeways used for colored models. Given that Shapeways went bankrupt in July 2024, don't expect much further support for this format.

Export Options

There is a bewildering dialog that pops up on export, with a ton of options. You can blithely ignore this dialog and just click OK (or hit the Enter key). But, there are lots of variations possible: you may want to animate individual blocks, need special options for your rendering program, want to resize or reposition your model, on and on.

When this dialog is up in the program, you can hover over most of the options to get a bit more information on what each is about; some you have to hover over the box itself.

If you find you always want certain options set, you can easily do so using mineways.bat to start the program and edit the script file scripting/startup.mwscript. See those files and scripting for more on doing so.

Click on the image below to be taken to the relevant documentation (yes, old-school image map!):

export dialog coordinates zip and files materials textures grouping custom material lighting global options up and size 3D print and fill debug

World coordinates selection: you can see and change the 3D volume of space to export from your world. If you want to know the location of a place in your world, use the F3 key when playing Minecraft. Note that negative values like -5.239 will round down to -6. Also note that your Y-value altitude is one higher than where your feet are located, and so two higher than the ground beneath you.

Key tip: If you exported a model in an earlier session and want to use the same settings for another export, read the model file (.OBJ, .WRL, or for STL the .TXT file) with the "Import Settings" command from the "File" Menu. Simpler still, just drag and drop the model file on to Mineways!

Create a ZIP: like it says, when exporting for 3D printing a ZIP file of the exported files is created, ready for upload for 3D printing by an online 3D print service.

Create files themselves: the exported files themselves are also made available for previewing. By default, this option is off for VRML 3D printing, on for everything else. This is done because too often the .wrl file was uploaded to Shapeways (now defunct).

Material Export

Remember that for any format you can turn off a block from being output (and being visible) by setting its alpha to zero in your own color scheme.

On the left of the dialog are texture options:

The "Export individual textures" option creates many more (smaller) textures, but can be considerably faster since not all textures are exported. These textures are similar to Minecraft's block textures, though possibly modified to improve how alpha cutouts look. This mode allows you to later modify and swap individual textures in other applications such as Blender. It also is a better option for exporting high resolution texture resource packs (where the block faces are 256x256 or larger), as having a single, large texture (as generated by the other options above) can be too large for systems such as Blender. Since each texture is separate, mipmapping works correctly for distant blocks. Various options are ignored in this mode, such as the various OBJ grouping and material options and the composite overlay faces checkbox. Note that if you want to manually upload an OBJ or USD file with separate image textures, Sketchfab has a 100 texture image upload limit (and you may need to uncomment "map_d" in the OBJ materials file). Finally, if you make a zip and do not check "create files themselves," the PNG texture files will not be deleted, since they may be shared by other exports.

Content is shown on the left exported with "all textures to three large images" and on the right with "individual textures." Mipmapping works properly with individual textures.

mip bleeding vs. not bleeding

Texture Output

 These options were originally for the "three larger, mosaic images" export option, but can also be used with the default "Export individual textures" option. For this second option, unchecking all three checkboxes means no texture images themselves get exported. The output model file(s) will still reference the textures. Used properly, turning off texture output can save you time each time you export a model. For example, say you export a model, then realize you want to export it again, but with a smaller volume. In that case, the model will use the same or fewer textures, so you could turn off texture output. Another use is when you want a model to use a directory of customized textures and do not want to overwrite it.

If you "Export all textures to three large images", by default there are three types of files that can be output to PNG files, as needed. "RGB" is a colors-only file, "RGBA" is colors and transparency, "A" is just the transparency values. For 3D printing, only the RGB file is exported. For rendering export, if any blocks needing transparency are found in your model, then the "RGBA" and "A" files are also exported. Some rendering systems need only one or two of these file types, not all three. If you know this in advance, turn off the export textures you don't need.

The "texture output" export option can save you much time if you are exporting the same model a few times (e.g., you're editing its bounds), especially while using a large custom terrainExt file (see the next paragraph for what that is). You can export your model once with textures on, then modify your export and, by exporting to the same file name, you don't need to export the textures again.

Custom Terrain

The one file you may want to change is the terrainExt.png file that comes with Mineways. To select a different terrainExt.png file, use the "Choose Terrain File" under the File menu. You can also simply drag and drop a terrainExt*.PNG file on to Mineways. In either case, at the very top of the Mineways program you'll see what terrain file is active, right after the name of the world you've opened. Mineways supports a number of premade terrainExt.png files for you to try. Visit the Textures page for previews and download links for terrain files not included in the Mineways distribution.

If you have a terrain PNG file you would always like to use by default, copy it into the directory where mineways.exe is located and call it terrainExt.png, replacing the one that is there. For example, if you always want to use terrainExt_Smoolistic.png, delete (or, better, rename) terrainExt.png, then copy terrainExt_Smoolistic.png to terrainExt.png. If you know how to use the command line, a better way is to use a command line option to specify the terrain file to use on startup, e.g., "mineways.exe -t terrainExt_Smoolistic.png". Better still, you could make a batch file called, say, "my_mineways.bat" that contains the single line "mineways.exe -t terrainExt_Smoolistic.png" and double-click that to start up using your preferred terrain file.

Mineways in fact comes with "mineways.bat", which resizes the startup window and calls the scripting/startup.mwscript script (which does nothing, but can be edited to perform various startup commands). Yet another way is to use File->Import Settings and read in a Mineways script to change the terrain file. This is handy for exporting the same model multiple times, each time with a different terrain file applied.

For a more thorough explanation of textures and how they're used in Mineways, read the Textures page. To make terrainExt.png files yourself, see Creating Your Own Terrain Files.

3D Printing: The effective 3D print resolution of textures appears to be around maybe 10x10 for the default output block size of 2 mm/block. Fine details are unlikely to be visible, though sometimes I'm surprised to see them.

Click on an image for higher resolution versions.
small grillwork This model was made using Glimmar's Steampunk terrainExt.png and printed at 2 mm/block. It appears that the glass cube grillwork texture has some synchronization problem with the printer, causing the pattern to sometimes print out incorrectly.
3 mm chain

This model is printed at 3 mm/block and shows the original 16x16 TNT texture; however, at both ends the fidelity becomes poor.

5 mm chest

This model, from Alexander Boden, is a 5 mm/block print which clearly shows details such as cobblestone and tree bark.

Blurry Textures

If your rendering software doesn't show the distinctive blocky style of Minecraft, you can fix this in two ways. The first is to set texture sampling in your renderer to be "closest" or "nearest neighbor." This is the easiest solution, though can make mipmapping unavailable. See the instructions for the various renderers for more information. The other option is to use higher-resolution textures, which will simulate turning bilinear interpolation off.

On the left, the basic 256 x 544 terrainExt.png file is used; on the right, the input terrainExt.png image is resized (without filtering) to 1024 texels wide. You can download high-resolution versions of terrainExt.png: 1024 wide and 8192 wide. In Mineways do "File | Choose Terrain File" and select either; the higher-resolution version gives sharper results, at the cost of memory.

low resolution high resolution

You can also interactively compare these sampling methods here vs. here.

These textures are for the default Minecraft appearance. To avoid blur for your own terrainExt.png file, resize it to be say 4x larger in both directions. You can use the TileMaker program included with Mineways (use the "-t tileSize" option), or any other image manipulation program (I'd use "nearest neighbor", if possible - IrfanView has this option when resizing a texture by doing "Size method: Resize"). Note: from experimentation, this higher resolution does not improve the clarity of 3D texture printing.

There is a case where you'll want your textures to be blurry: when they're far in the distance. Usually, mipmapping is done by a renderer to make this happen. The Minecraft block textures are normally put in one large texture and each is given a border 1 pixel wide. This border avoids bilinear interpolation artifacts. However, mipmapping for extremely far blocks will not work well, since block textures are next to each other in this big texture. The solution is to either "Export individual textures" (where each block face is exported to its own texture), or disable mipmapping for rendering and live with the artifacts (other sampling techniques should work fine).

Wavefront OBJ Export Group Options

 If you find you want your model data to be arranged a bit differently for your rendering system, there are a bunch of options. These vary how Minecraft blocks are grouped and how materials are shared among different block types. Every rendering system imports OBJ files differently, so try different combinations and see what you prefer. Most of these options do not affect display. These options are mostly for determining how much control you have over modifying materials and moving blocks around.

Wavefront OBJ has two concepts when it comes to polygon faces: named objects and named groups. In Mineways there can be one or more objects in a scene, each object can have zero, one, or more groups inside of it. Normally there is just one object exported; the "Make groups objects" creates a separate object which then contains a corresponding group.

Mineways has (rough) "block families." For example, the Stone family has stone, granite, polished granite, diorite, and so on. Each block in this family has a separate "type." Materials can be output by one per family or one per type.

Any number of polygons can be in an object or group. There is also a set of materials (defined in the .mtl file). One and only one material is applied to each polygon.

Confused yet? There are non-obvious interactions among the various settings. A table follows, describing the results when using this 2x3 set of blocks - two grass blocks, two stone, two diorite - as the exported volume, and when using the large mosaic texture option. Recall that diorite is part of the stone family. This table fully applies when using the "three mosaic image" material output option. For individual texture output, the "Material per family" option is grayed out, since it has no effect. Results are described as "For mosaics" when materials are output using "three large, mosaic images" mode and "For individuals" when using "individual textures" mode. Note that for individual texture output, it is always the case that different textures will need different materials.

Export separate types Export individual blocks Material per family Split by block type Effect on objects Material library produced for mosaics (only!)
SELECTED unchecked SELECTED unchecked Polygons are grouped by block family. For individual textures, one group is made for Grass, one for Stone that includes both the stone and granite blocks. Similarly, for mosaics, result is one Grass_Block group using the Grass_Block material applied to 8 block faces (the visible faces of the two grass blocks) and one Stone group using the Stone material applied to 14 faces (the visible faces of the four stone-related blocks, Stone and Diorite). Each block family has a separate material. Result is two materials for mosaics, Grass_Block and Stone.
SELECTED unchecked SELECTED SELECTED Default for rendering: Polygons are grouped by block type. For individual textures, there are three groups: Grass_Block, Stone, and Diorite. For mosaics, result is one Grass_Block group using the Grass_Block material applied to the 8 visible block faces, one Stone group using the Stone material applied to the 6 visible faces, and one Diorite group using the Diorite material applied to its 8 visible block faces. Each block type has a separate material for mosaics. Result is three materials: Grass_Block, Stone, and Diorite.
SELECTED unchecked unchecked unchecked Polygons are grouped by block family. For individuals, since "Material per family" does not affect export in this mode, the result is the same as two rows above: one group is made for Grass, one for Stone that includes both the stone and granite blocks. For mosaics, result is one Grass_Block group with 8 visible block faces and one Stone group with 14 visible faces. Single material for mosaics. A default MC_material is created and applied to all polygons.
SELECTED unchecked unchecked SELECTED Polygons are grouped by block type. For individuals, since "Material per family" does not affect export in this mode, the result is the same as two lines above: three groups, Grass_Block, Stone, and Diorite. For mosaics, the result is one Grass_Block group with 8 visible block faces, one Stone group with 6 visible faces, and one Diorite group with 8 visible block faces. Single material for mosaics. A default MC_material is created and applied to all polygons.
unchecked unchecked (grayed out) (grayed out) Default for 3D printing: No groups are created at all. Result is 22 visible block faces. Single material for mosaics. A default MC_material is created and applied to all polygons.
unchecked SELECTED SELECTED unchecked Each individual block is in its own group. Result is 6 block faces in each of six groups (the six blocks): block_00001, block_00002, etc. For mosaics, the related material family, Grass_Block or Stone, is assigned to each block in turn. For mosaics, each block family has a separate material. Result is two materials, Grass_Block and Stone.
unchecked SELECTED SELECTED SELECTED Each individual block is in its own group. Result is 6 block faces in each of six (block) groups: block_00001, block_00002, etc. For mosaics, the related material type, Grass_Block, Stone, or Diorite, is assigned to each block in turn. For mosaics, each block type has a separate material. Result is three materials, Grass_Block, Stone, and Diorite.
unchecked SELECTED unchecked unchecked Individual blocks are output, but grouped by block family. Result is one Grass_Block group and one Stone group. For mosaics, the Grass_Block material is applied to two blocks' 12 block faces and the Stone material is applied to four blocks' 24 faces. For mosaics, each block family has a separate material. Result is two materials, Grass_Block and Stone.
unchecked SELECTED unchecked SELECTED Individual blocks are output, but grouped by block type. The result is three groups: Grass_Block, Stone, and Diorite. Mosaics have the Grass_Block material applied to two blocks' 12 block faces, the Stone material applied to two blocks' 12 faces, and the Diorite material applied to two blocks' 12 block faces. For mosaics, each block type has a separate material. Result is three materials, Grass_Block, Stone, and Diorite.

When exporting individual textures these settings have slightly different meanings, because separate materials are created depending on the texture needed, not the Minecraft block family or type. "Export individual blocks" then means that "Split by block type" has no effect, since materials are set as needed. Similarly, if neither "Export separate types" nor "Export individual blocks" is on, materials are output as needed, since there can be no "single material for all" with "individual textures." Long and short: try various options out and see what they do.

Make groups objects: By default, the OBJ file produced has just one object, consisting of everything exported. If you want to make each group into its own separate object, which can be useful if you are trying to export individual blocks and animate them in the scene, check this box. This is useful in Blender, for example.

Custom material

Checking this box causes a more elaborate illumination model to be output for OBJ (see the USD documentation for its effect with that format). By default it is checked, so that a more elaborate material model is used. Specifically, the parameters Ns, Ka, map_Ka, illum, and Tf are set. Also, a special mode is exported for use by G3D: "interpolateMode NEAREST_MAGNIFICATION_TRILINEAR_MIPMAP_MINIFICATION". This hints to G3D to make the textures look blocky, giving the classic Minecraft look. This line should not hurt OBJ readers, which should simply ignore it (or possibly flag a warning).

If you are using a physically based terrain set, the custom material will also include additional channels of information, such as textures for normal maps, shininess power, metallic, and emission textures. These attempt to follow this proposed specification, also documented here. An example:

If you want to use the custom material description for OBJ export but do not want these additional textures to be output, simply delete or rename the images in the set that you want to remove. For example, with the terrainExt_JGRTX64*.png set of terrain files, removing terrainExt_JGRTX64_e.png means no grayscale intensity emissive textures will be output. You may also find that the corresponding color texture is a better choice for the emissive texture in particular, if supported - this is true for the G3D viewer. Currently Mineways has no switch to use these colored textures instead. However, you can edit the MTL file produced and simply search for "_e.png" and replace with ".png" to point to the colored textures instead.

Special note: in terrain files, the one ending in "_r.png" is a roughness texture. When exported for OBJ, this texture is inverted and the exported files are named "_s.png", for "specular". This is all a bit confusing, I know, but my advice is to export using terrainExt_JGRTX64.png, for example, and see what gets created for you, with "Custom material" set or not. If you want the "r" version, you can either manually invert the _s.png images (ugh), or just do a separate USDA export, which will produce the _r.png versions.

Pixar USD File Export Options

Pixar's USD format is getting uptake in many popular digital content creation (DCC) applications, including Cinema 4D, Houdini, Unreal Editor, and Blender. It is more full-featured than the ancient Wavefront OBJ format, including direct support for physically based materials, emitters, and more. If your package of choice supports it, consider using it! And if you don't like Mineways' exported USD, or even if you do, you should also give MiEx a look, as it can support mod export and more!

In Mineways there are a few changes to how the export dialog works. Some export options are not supported, as the focus has been the highest-quality and more flexible export option: Export individual textures. This form lets you replace and edit individual texture files. USD export works particularly nicely with the JG-RTX terrain files.

What follows are how various options apply to USD export. Also, Mineways' "View | Light" can be toggled on to give nighttime lighting. Turning "View | Elevation shading" on will give a light fog to the USD scene exported.

Export individual blocks: With USD export, two additional USD files are produced, "*_BlockLibrary.usda" and "*_MaterialLibrary.usda". USD structures its data in different forms. These additional files contain the individual blocks and materials, in case these are of use as-is.

Export MDL: Applies only to USD export. MDL material descriptions are exported. These generally give higher-quality looks to glass objects, for example. Omniverse USD Composer is the main user of MDL at this point, with other applications coming up to speed. Turning this off will export only UsdPreviewSurface material descriptions. Note that UsdPreviewSurface descriptions are always exported.

Custom material: This option is ignored if Export MDL is off. For USDA export, the Custom material setting mainly has the effects of making the texture's texels appear blocky, in Minecraft fashion, and present stripped down materials in Omniverse USD Composer. I uncheck this box for higher-resolution resource packs (basically 64x64 or larger tiles) so that the textures interpolate more smoothly. This option is also discussed in this video.

Light scale: Used only by USD. This has a value of 30 by default. You can change the intensity of the lights exported to USD - the sun and dome light - by changing this value. The sun is normally at 30, the surrounding dome light is 6. Nighttime lighting of 2 and 2 respectively, is used if you toggle on the View | Lighting option before export. If you set the light scale to 0, the two lights will not be exported to the USD file and the default camera will also not be exported.

As of August 2023 lighting in the USD specification is not well defined, meaning programs will be (sometimes radically) different in their interpretation of intensity values. Currently "30" means a value of 1560 for the sun and 312 for the dome light. These work well with Omniverse's USD Composer and the upcoming Blender 4.0.0 release. For the UsdView viewer, I have found that 40,000 and 0.5 are better values, respectively. Since light scale is one control for two intensities, you will likely need to hand-edit the resulting USDA file to such values. Alternately, set the scale to 0 and no lights are output.

Surface emit scale: Used only by USD. This has a value of 1000 by default. It's more or less a nit value for emitting surfaces. Omniverse USD Composer looks good with the default, though realistically the emitters are then quite bright (but look good for interior scenes or when the sun is turned off). Adjusting the camera exposure is another way to deal with this situation.

The default of 1000 converts to an internal value of 20.0 for inputs:scale. For UsdView this can give a washed out look; a value of 50 may be more appropriate.

Global Model Options

A few options change how blocks' coordinates and textures are output. If you want to change the overall scale of the model, use the "Make each block" option in the upper right of the dialog.

Simplify mesh

 This option merges neighboring squares to create larger rectangles. This can significantly reduce the model's size. However, it has the drawback of turning off randomized texture rotation. Normally grass and other blocks are rotated randomly by Mineways (and Minecraft) to break up the patterned look of a single texture being repeated over a large area. Simplify mesh is only available when exporting individual textures (but not individual blocks) for OBJ and USD export, and only for rendering. It is not available for 3D printing, as doing so can cause T-junctions, which can in turn cause 3D printers to fail. It is also currently not available for untextured model export, since there are better simplification systems available (some of which do work better for 3D prints), such as Meshmixer, MeshLab, and inside Blender.

Here is a side by side comparison of a mesh's look normally and simplified, without and with wireframe for the grass. This (admittedly near-optimal for simplification) export from the built-in "[Block Test World]" went from 142,428 to 15,726 triangles when simplified. Note the pattern repetition on the grass in the upper right.

Create composite overlay faces

For 3D printing there cannot be "floating" cutout textures such as vines, ladders, rails, torches, and so on. These block types are overlaid atop the underlying block and a new "composite" texture is saved and used. This process must be done for 3D printing. For rendering with mosaics it is an option. The advantage of leaving this option off is that the result more closely matches Minecraft itself, and that each object has its own material. It also means that all render files exported could use single set of PNG textures, since no composite textures are created. The main drawback of having this option off is that you may encounter z-fighting problems, stray shadows, or other artifacts in your renderings.

This option was on by default for rendering up to version 5.00 of Mineways (in truth, it could not be turned off); as of 5.01 this option is off by default.

composite off Create composite option off (the default). The ladders, rails, and lily pad float a bit above the surface.
composite on Create composite option on. Note how the ladders, rails, and lily pad are attached to the surface.

Center model around the origin

 When checked, the center of the bottom of the model is put at the origin, location (0,0,0). This helps for import into some renderers, and can improve the floating-point resolution of the data. If you want to instead have the same coordinate values as in your world, uncheck this box (you might also want to set the "Make each block" size to whatever you like). Unchecking this option is useful if you do multiple exports from the same world for rendering and want them to use the same coordinate space. Multiple exports are a way to get around the export size limits for the 32-bit version of Mineways, which is what runs on the Mac.

Use biome in center of export area

 Instead of the default colors (seen on the Plains biome), use the grass, tree, and water colors computed by the biome in the export. Currently the biome at the center of the export is used for the whole export. It would be nice to export multiple biomes someday, but this is a complex export, as it can require many different color variants of grass and tree blocks. Show biomes (F8) to display the biomes in the map itself.

Create block faces at the borders

 This option is only available for rendering, to reduce polygon count. When on, the edges of the export the model are sealed off with whatever blocks were at the borders. For 3D printing this is necessary, as the model must be a solid object. For rendering these side and bottom polygons often are not needed, as the camera is usually positioned to never view these areas of the model. Turning this option off for rendering also allows better "tiling", where you export a world piece by piece and read all the pieces in (see center model, above), as it pays more attention to neighboring blocks just outside the borders. Note: the various 3D print "fill air bubbles" methods will turn off this method (it's a bug).

In the scene below, the camera is dollied out to see the borders. The model with borders off, on the right, has about 15% less polygons in it.

Tree leaves solid

 This option is only available for rendering, to reduce polygon count. Tree leaves are "cutout" textures, which means that by default each leaf block is exported, along with the trunks. In forested scenes this can make for a lot of extra polygons. By checking this box, leaves are made solid with a black background, which then allows many less polygons to be generated. For example, in the scene below, rendered with G3D, the transparent leaf model has 986k triangles, the solid leaf model just 369k triangles.

Rotate model clockwise

 Can be useful for choosing a default view angle for other programs reading in the model produced. For example, the view of the model was rendered by Shapeways (now defunct) from the south-south-east. So if your model faces west, you might rotate it 270 degrees to have it face south and so display better on your models page.

The rest of the options mostly have to do with 3D printing, which follows. The main exception is "Make each block 1000 mm high", which can be used to change the size of the model output, for other uses.

Exporting to 3D print

As background, view the Shapeways 3D color printing process video. Shapeways itself is defunct, but the process remains the same. Layers of material are laid down and solidified at the appropriate spots. Unsolidified "sand" is vacuumed away. You pay by volume, not by complexity. What this means to you is: avoid making enclosed spaces with tiny entrances. Unfortunately, most buildings are just that: large rooms with small doors. Your job is to make sure your model has either no openings at all, in which case the Hollow option can clear out the inside, leaving just a shell. Alternately, make escape holes yourself using snow blocks, which you then melt after all processing of your model. I'll explain these options below.

There are other potential pitfalls with 3D printing, such as thin wall problems (more here), and too many polygons (rare for a Minecraft model), to name just two. They're now bankrupt, but Shapeways' tutorial pages and materials pages give you a lot to chew on, Sculpteo also has a help section. The Mineways program tries to guide you past the major pitfalls, but it's always possible to generate something that's essentially unprintable: too weak, holes too small to clear out the dust, or some other problem. Browsing the tutorials there should help you understand what is possible. This post might help you with 3D printer settings. Options follow.

Make Z the up direction instead of Y

Z up is the norm for 3D printing. Some graphics applications consider the Y direction to be "up", some Z. If your model imports sideways into your application, check (or uncheck) this box.

Model Size

There are four major ways to set your model's size.

Physical material: choosing a material here from among some of the Shapeways material options sets the default wall thickness and constrains the "Aim for a cost" option. It also ensures that the price is computed for that material and output in the top of the model file (or associated *.txt file, for STL output). This all admittedly is moot, since Shapeways is bankrupt, but may still be useful in other ways so has been left in. Key tip: if you look at the export file Mineways creates for you (the .OBJ, .WRL, or for STL the .TXT file) in a text editor, at the top you'll find all sorts of useful information about the model and how you generated it.

The "White & Flexible" material has a smaller minimum wall thickness compared to "Colored Sandstone" (0.7 mm vs. 2.0 mm), so much smaller (and cheaper) models can be created in it. White & flexible is plastic and durable, colored sandstone is heavier, fairly strong, but brittle. There is a tutorial on how to paint this white plastic material, which can be fun in itself.

The "Custom Printer" material is used for STL export. By default, it is set to show the approximate cost of a print for 1.75 mm PLA priced at $24 for a 1 kilogram spool. The cost numbers are modifiable by using a script. See the scripting commands for "Custom printer" for how to set new cost values.

Model's units: when a model is saved, the values stored in the file are not in any particular units, like meters or inches. However, 3D printers need this scale for printing the model. Millimeters are assumed. For other services and printers, other units are used. Here's a brief rundown:

Filling and Hollowing Options

By default, the model is heavily processed to clear up a number of potential 3D printing problems:

Fill air bubbles: any hollow volume is filled with solid material (specifically, glass, which can sometimes be seen when doing base hollowing, below). This option can also potentially reduce the polygon count when exporting for rendering - YMMV. There are two sub-options:

Example: in the first image, the inside of the building is not filled in. In the second, the "Seal off entrances" export box is checked. Since the model has window and door gaps that are only a block wide, these will be detected and the interior will be filled in with glass to cover these openings, as shown on the right.

Wide door example: in the first image, the inside of this simple building is visible. In the second, the "Seal off entrances" export box is checked. The torches are then considered as blocking the entrance; since the entrance is fully sealed off, the room is filled with glass. This example is trivial, but by placing torches you can seal rooms off so that they fill up with glass, then get hollowed by the "hollow" option, described further on, thus saving on printing areas difficult or impossible to see from outside.

Another wide door example: Another way to seal off large doors or windows is to add snow blocks. Here a two-block-wide door will not automatically be sealed off by the "seal off entrances" option. By adding snow blocks and then also enabling the melt option (and turning off the hollow option), the building interior will be sealed off and then the snow blocks will be removed before output.

Connect parts sharing an edge: certain non-manifold edges (where two blocks are diagonal and share an edge) are eliminated by a welding process in which more blocks are added. This welding process normally occurs only when it joins pieces that otherwise would be separated and fall apart.

Example:
With all connect parts options off the strings of the balloons do not connect. These will probably print as separate bits.

Blocks sharing an edge are connected. Some parts of the strings touch only at corner tips, so are still not connected. Note that for these examples the "delete floating objects" option was turned off, as otherwise the disconnected string bits would have been removed.

Corner tips are connected, and now each balloon will print correctly.

Debug mode, showing edge connecting blocks as lava and tip connecting blocks as pink wool.

Delete floating objects: if objects hang in space, these are eliminated if they're small (less than 16 blocks in size) or are entirely tree logs and leaves. This step eliminates parts of trees hanging along the edge because of where the selection box is located. If you get a warning about there being more than one part in a model exported, crank the block number up to 1000 or more to get rid of larger chunks (once you know what those chunks are - see the debug display parts mode below). If you're sure you want just the one connected group in the scene, set this value to 999999 and only the largest object in the scene will be saved.

This option can help tidy up a model for rendering or Sketchfab, too, by deleting tree foliage poking into an exported volume. In these export modes, any adjacent blocks are joined up (for 3D printing, only blocks that fill the cell are joined together). This difference means that, for example, a roof supported by fence posts won't be considered floating when rendering, but will when using detailed 3D printing (as the fence supports would likely be too thin to hold the roof).

Example:
Exporting without deletion of floating objects results in a hunk of foliage hanging in space.

The "debug showing groups" option shows the disconnected group (the black columns are support columns created when hollowing).

Turning on deletion of floating objects, the floating foliage is deleted. Note the clump of leaves from a chopped-off tree stuck to the house is not deleted: get out the shears in Minecraft, if you want to chop it clear.

Hollow out bottom of model: models are typically resting on an uneven ground layer, and building interiors are typically filled in. Hollowing clears out blocks inside the model, making it less expensive and faster to print. The "super hollow" option is more aggressive, searching hollow areas found to see if more can be carved out.

This option, used in conjunction with seal off entrances, can make detailed models stronger. If the interior of a model is entirely filled in by the "fill air bubbles" process, it can then be hollowed out and the walls left thick. For example, say you want to print your cathedral model with 1 mm wide blocks. The printer you want to use needs walls at least 2 mm thick. Instead of manually adding blocks to the interior of your entire model, by using the seal off the entrances option you fill the interiors in with solid blocks. When you hollow, you set the hollow width to 2 mm, or even 3 mm, and now the exterior walls will be made a few blocks thick, automatically.

Technical note: superhollow can sometimes create little separate objects at the bottom layer unconnected to the rest of the model, pieces of tunnel not cleaned out. You'll need to also turn on the "fill in isolated tunnels" box to have these removed ("delete floating objects" should do this, but currently does not).

Example:
Hollowing is off and tunnels are not sealed.

Tunnels are sealed (the glass blocks). While this briefly increases the block count, hollowing will cut it considerably.

Basic hollowing is performed; the cutaway shows how far it penetrates into the teapot. Block count is reduced from 26.8k blocks to 14.7k blocks.

Superhollowing is performed, reducing the count further, to 8.3k blocks. The escape hole between teapot and ground looks to be large enough to clear the sand (and indeed it was, see this photo)

Melt snow blocks: The seal off entrances option automatically looks for one-block-wide entrances and windows and seals them off. If you have wider entrances, off-axis windows (such as in a dome), holes in the roof, or other features, instead of adding torches or ladders to help seal these off, you can use snow blocks to do so. The melt option then removes these snow blocks from your model just before output. See the seal off entrances option description for an example of its use.

Export lesser, detailed blocks: when 3D printing, this option is off by default; for rendering it is on. When not checked, smaller objects, such as signs, fences, and torches are removed - only nearly-block-sized or important blocks are exported. This option is on by default when exporting full color textures for rendering; turn it off to remove the "billboard" objects and other smaller geometry objects. Remember you can also turn off output of any block type by setting its alpha to zero in your own custom color scheme. I've given you the ability to shoot yourself in the foot for 3D printing; I leave it to you to turn off any block types you think are likely to break off. As such, if you use this option you should probably turn off the "Connect parts sharing an edge" and "Delete floating objects" options further down, as these are likely to not work well - only full blocks are tracked when using these features. When exporting lesser blocks it's better to add and delete blocks by hand and not have the program clean up the data. If you do want to check for floating objects, I recommend exporting full blocks first (which will perform the check properly if the option is checked), then export lesser blocks with the option off.

Checking this box for 3D printing is risky, but will allow you to export slabs, stairs, and many other smaller elements as true geometry. The table gives specifics about what is printable, under the "Lesser" column. The model produced with this option on can have some geometry that's tough for some 3D print slicers to process. The risk is that the service bureau or printer software cannot properly interpret your files. Commercial programs such as netfabb are likely needed to preprocess your model. If you know of a good cheap/free mesh cleanup tool, let me know.

You may still have problems with features being too thin to reliably print. If you truly want to print some geometry that Mineways won't output for 3D printing, e.g., you want to make a large banner model, you can always export via rendering and perform cleanup yourself (such as removing billboards).

If you use another service bureau such as Sculpteo, look over your uploaded model for any missing block or texturing errors (well, as of 2021, Sculpteo does not support textured, colored output). Secret Sculpteo trick: you can see a large view of your model by using the URL https://www.sculpteo.com/en/embed/design/<xxx>, where you put the 8 character identifier for your model in place of <xxx>. For example, if your URL is https://www.sculpteo.com/en/print/sand-castle-1/hfM9BZw2?uuid=4OmRAVteIsyb9BYa10KM3b the 8 characters in the URL are "hfM9BZw2", so use https://www.sculpteo.com/en/embed/design/hfM9BZw2 to see it large. (Sadly, I can't figure out how to make these URLs public for anyone to view; Sculpteo seems to have locked that down.)

Shapeways (now defunct) merged most of the "lesser blocks" geometry properly but fails with some textures.

Sculpteo does the texture merge properly, but is missing a stair step on the right part of the roof.

Sculpteo's solidity check feature showing how fences along the top of this palace model are likely to break off.

Currently some thin objects, such as sign posts and single fence posts, are exported. These are likely to break off, especially at small block sizes. You might want to "shore up" thin features by placing blocks below them (such as for roofs made of stair steps) and next to them (such as for doors). Alternately, turn off export of signs altogether by setting the alpha for the sign block types to 0 in a color scheme.

Below are three prints done with fences, stair and slab roofs, and other small blocks. On the left, 1 mm/block, the fences and thin pillars have sheared right off. 2 mm/block, in the middle, survived intact for the most part - not surprisingly, a free-standing door at the rear broke off. With 3 mm/block, on the right, a part of the fence broke off when the superglue was applied. More photos can be found here. (Image courtesy of Alex Boden)

Fatten lesser blocks: If you do decide to export using the "lesser" option, by default some of the more delicate blocks are made fatter so that they are less likely to break off during printing. No guarantees! The blocks fattened are: fences, fence gates, doors, free-standing sign posts (which I suspect will still snap off), pressure plates (since they sometimes get used for table tops), bells, and a number of others - see the table.

Debugging Visualization

There are also two debug print options available. The "Debug: show floating parts" option does just that: the largest object is made semitransparent and smaller groups each given a unique color, so that you can see what pieces of the model are not connected. See images here. Either remove these smaller parts by kicking up the "delete floating objects" limit, or go into Minecraft itself and add blocks to attach them together. That said, separate parts are fine in a file if you know what you are doing: you could be making a chain of separate links, or could have a number of individual pieces (such as letters) you want to create in a single print run.

The "show weld blocks" option shows what blocks are added by the various "connect parts" options. See images here. If you don't like where the welds are put, you can go into your Minecraft world and edit the model yourself. Key tip: you can run Mineways and play Minecraft at the same time. So, you can edit your world in Minecraft, then reload the world into Mineways by pressing the "r" key. The selected area won't be cleared when you do so, so you can edit, reload, export, and view the model (in a separate viewer); lather, rinse, repeat. This is an efficient way to improve and view any model you're working on.

ChannelMixer and TileMaker

You can make your own sets of textures to use when exporting models with Mineways. This process is fairly straightforward, but is a more advanced topic. See the Textures page for how textures work in Mineways and how to use these tools, or watch the video.

Rendering Tips

There are lots of cool add-on shaders for Minecraft. But, for truly stunning stills and animations you'll want a standalone package. This section covers the basics on importing Mineways files into various renderers: Blender, Cinema 4D, Omniverse USD Composer, 3DS MAX, Maya, and Houdini. If you want better geometry for some blocks, you might also consider using jmc2obj. Honestly, they have a lot of features Mineways doesn't, so you should give it a try. Also consider MiEx, especially if you are using USD.

While I have your ear (eye?), you should also check out the shader mods BSL, Kappa, OptiFine, and Sonic Ether's Unbelievable Shaders (SEUS forum) for in-game play or viewing. They have lots of cool rendering options. What makes these systems shine (literally) is using a high-quality texture pack that support specular textures, bump maps, etc. Some nice texture packs: JG-RTX, UMSOEA and Sildur's Shaders, among many others (BSL search).

Also worth a shout-out, the Minecraft RTX beta. If you have an RTX card, this system accelerates ray tracing effects on the Bedrock Edition (sorry, no Java Edition version). However, conversion of a Java Edition world is fairly straightforward; they give a long guide, but really, just follow the MCC Tool Chest Conversion steps - it's all I needed (note that MCC Tool Chest has, sadly, disappeared, but can be found archived here). If you're really feeling frisky, you can design a texture pack.

Previewing:

To quickly check results before printing or importing into a rendering program, consider using an interactive previewer. The G3D viewer is great for OBJ files, with shadows and screenshot capture built in. Open 3D Model Viewer mostly works, though has transparency issues when you export individual textures. Microsoft's 3D Viewer also can work, though it does not treat semitransparent surfaces well. MeshLab is a usable previewer for models in any format Mineways produces, though handles transparency and cutouts incorrectly.

Below are steps for using various popular rendering software packages. There are always more; for example, this article talks in depth about using RenderMan for rendering.

Blender

These instructions assume Blender version 3.5 or newer. I've made a 13-minute video of different ways to import into Blender 3.5 and perform rendering, which covers most of the first nine steps below.

Alternative Minecraft exporters for Blender include jmc2obj, a general-purpose and full-featured exporter, MiEx, if you are using USD. There are tons of other Blender+Minecraft things out there. For example, the Replay Mod lets you create an animation path in Minecraft and export the camera moves. You can then import the .GLB animation file into Blender.

To move your Minecraft world's data into Blender, the first step is always the same, since it involves only Mineways:

1) Open your World in Mineways, then, select the area for exporting (hold right mouse button and drag the rectangle).

You can now go two routes: OBJ or USD file export. If you are using the standard or other low-resolution textures, without any normal maps (which the Blender importer does not seem to recognize), OBJ is perhaps enough. If you do use normal maps or want to avoid using MCprep, USD import may serve you better. It doesn't hurt to try both.

2a) OBJ export: Choose "File | Export Model for Rendering" and save the file as a Wavefront Object (.obj) to a folder of your choice. Let's call it myobject.obj or whatever you like. You can simply click "OK" in the dialog with the export settings.

If you like, watch this one-minute video for OBJ export and import. Things have changed a bit since that video was made. You don't need to select "Split by block type" at 0:44, as this is now the default.

If you are exporting individual blocks for animation, check the "Material per family" box. If you want to be able to select block types in the viewport for hand-editing, check the option "Make group objects". If you don't choose this groups objects option now, that's fine - step #11 below shows you how to do this in Blender.

2b) USD export: Choose "File | Export Model for Rendering", for "Save as type" at the bottom choose "Universal Scene Description (*.usda)", and save to a folder of your choice. You can simply click "OK" in the dialog with the export settings.

3) Open Blender 3.5 (or newer) and click anywhere on the screen to make the splash screen disappear. Then press the "Delete" key to remove the default cube model. If you're importing a USD file, you will also want to select the default Light in list in the upper right and delete it, too.

4) Import the model: select "File | Import | Wavefront (.obj)" or "File | Import | Universal Scene Description (.usd*)" from the menu (Note there are two OBJ importers - pick the one closer to the top, not the one at the bottom that says "legacy" after it). Put the directory name of your Mineways export file (the .obj or .usda file) on the first line and hit "Enter". You can then double-click the .obj/.usda file name itself in the listing below. Alternately, you can type the file name itself on the line below the directory name and then click the blue "Import OBJ/USD" button to the lower right.

On the right side of the import dialog you will see import options. I never touch these, but they're worth knowing about, e.g., you might want to scale the model size down on import.

Once imported, you can hit the "Home" key to reposition the camera to be well outside the model.

5) Display in Look Dev mode: in the upper right of the viewport are a series of icons. Rightmost are four sphere icons. Click on the rightmost:

You should now see a textured view of your model.

6) Adjust camera: Use the mouse wheel to dolly the camera in or out. As noted before, the "Home" key can also dolly the camera out to view the whole scene. Middle mouse down and drag lets you rotate the camera. Middle mouse drag with the Shift key lets you pan the camera. Middle mouse with Control is another way to dolly, but why do that? Middle mouse drag with Alt changes to different orthogonal views in a funky way - just use middle mouse drag to recover.

For USD, a camera comes with the file. Nothing great, but it can be used, and sometimes will work when the model disappears due to Blender weirdness. You can pick it in the upper right, "Camera.001", then in the second row of menus in the upper left pick View -> Cameras -> Set Active Object as Camera.

Another way to move around the scene is to turn on Walk or Fly navigation. Hit F3 and type "walk" and pick the "View -> Navigation -> Walk" line. Now the WASD keys will work like they do in games, Q and E go down and up, spacebar will take you to where you're pointing, Shift will increase the speed of any letter key. Fly is similar, but you're setting the velocity. If you click somewhere you leave this mode. Just press F3 and Enter to return to it.

7) Lighting: For OBJ, change the default light to be more useful. Click on the Sun setting, then I'd also crank the Strength down to 8.0 or so, as shown:

For USD, the file comes with a sun light (and a dome light, which Blender currently ignores). This light may import with a strength of 50000. Or 2.284. As with the OBJ instructions above, change the strength to around 8.0 or whatever you like.

To adjust the direction of any light, select it, press Shift-T, and move your mouse around in the viewport. Hey, the sun's moving. When you left click with the mouse, you lock down the direction of the sun. It's a bit non-intuitive, and you may need to rotate the view, Shift-T, rotate again, etc. to get the angle you want. Try F12 again to render the scene.

Frankly, an easier way to control the light's direction is to choose the orange box icon ("Object Properties") a few up from the lightbulb icon in the vertical strip of icons. Then play with the Rotation angles: if you set these to 0,0,0 for XYZ you'll have a light directly overhead. Go from there (and there's probably some good "Mode" to set the light to, but I haven't figured one out yet...).

8) Rendering: You are now ready to do a first render of your model. Once you like the view, click Control-Alt-"Numpad 0" (the zero in the lower right of your keyboard) to set the render camera to your view (or at least the center of it). If you move your view of the world, you can go back to this saved view by hitting "Numpad 0" again, or Control-Alt-"Numpad 0" to set the render camera again.

However, there's a better way. In the upper right corner of the viewport there's an "Options v" menu. Just below that there's a little "<" symbol. Click that and you'll see more menus appear: Item, Tool, View (and MCprep, if you add this). Alternately, click the "N" key, which toggles the display of these. Now click on View, open up the dialog that appears, and click the box that says "Camera to View" under View Lock. This makes it so that what you see in the rectangle is what you get. You might want to first use the mouse wheel to adjust this rendered view's rectangle, then turn this on.

But wait, there's more. If you find some or none of your model appears when you dolly out, you need to adjust the clip range. In this same View dialog change the "End" value from 1000 m to something larger, e.g.:

If you do change this, I've found it's good to then change Clip Start to 1 m or higher, else you'll get strange z-fighting artifacts around the edges of blocks.

Now press "F12" or select "Render | Render Image" from the menu and have a look.

The distant part of the model might not appear, as the Clip End distance of the camera might still be too small, which somehow (if you didn't click "Camera to View" is a separate clip range. Adjust this distance by selecting the camera object in the Scene Collection in the upper right of the screen, select the camera icon, then click on the "End" value box and type in a new value such as 1000 m or simply drag your mouse:

Another alternative is, when exporting from Mineways, make the model smaller. In the upper right of Mineways' export dialog you'll see "Make each block 1000 mm high." If you change "1000" to "10" or similar, the exported blocks will be smaller. You can also change the scale on import to Blender, which is even simpler. Making the model smaller will also often make shadows work again with the Eevee renderer; these disappear if the model is large, for some reason.

To get back to rendering, the render will look pretty much like what you already see on the screen. To use a higher-quality, but slower, renderer, do this: Along the top of the program click on the gray "Rendering" (not white "Render") menu item, towards the middle. In the upper right, under "Scene," you'll see "Render Engine". Pick "Cycles" instead of "Eevee." Now on the top edge click on "Layout", which is what was selected originally. Things will look nicer, but interaction will be laggy. If you want faster interaction, in the upper right corner of the viewport select the second-from-the-right sphere icon, the material preview mode. What F12 does is uses the renderer you select. If you chose Cycles, it will progressively improve the result, by default running 4096 passes to give a nice final image. You can see the Sample counter along the upper edge of the image for progress. Save your image using the Image menu along the top. Close this window when you're done.

9) Material Conversion: This step will improve OBJ files, and can make USD textures look "chunky". Low resolution textures are fuzzy, not blocky like in Minecraft. Transparent objects such as water and glass may not look quite right. Cutout objects have poor blending modes assigned, and anything with transparency will not cast shadows properly. The fastest way (by far) to fix these problems in OBJ files is to use the Prep Materials button in the free MCprep addon. Here's my short video on how to install and use it. They also have a MCprep Blender Discord server with people that are quick to respond to Minecraft + Blender questions.

As I say, USD imports can be made to look chunky. Unfortunately, the MCprep add-on also seems to remove normal maps. So, read on.

Another automated method that fixes just the blockiness for OBJ or USD is to use a script. The advantage of this method over MCprep is that you are in control, making minimal changes to the materials. First paste this text into a text file (or use the one Mineways provides in scripting/blender_blocky.txt): 

import bpy

for mat in bpy.data.materials:
    if not mat.node_tree:
        continue
    for node in mat.node_tree.nodes:
        if node.type == 'TEX_IMAGE':
            node.interpolation = 'Closest'
Then, in Blender, just below the bottom left of the viewport click on the little clock icon ("Editor Type") - it looks a bit like a "<" - and select "Text Editor" under the Scripting header, third over. You will now see a little text icon replacing the clock. Use Text | Open to open your saved text file, then do Text | Run Script (or hit Alt-P) to run the script:

Doing so will change all materials to look blocky.

If instead you want to do this conversion manually, it's a tedious process of selecting each object type in the model (and, in fact, trying it out manually on Blender 3.1.0, I could not get this process to work properly - not sure why). You still might want to do this once, just to understand the material properties better. Select a material and, under the Surface parameter window below, click the small "right arrow" icon to the left of "Base Color", about five lines down. Two more lines down it will say "Linear"; change this to "Closest". Scroll down considerably further to "Alpha" and click on the small right arrow again and also set to "Closest". Here's the Base Color sequence:

All this said, setting the sampling to "Closest" can give noisy renders, as far away objects may twinkle or form Moiré patterns. You may want to consider using the high-resolution "1024" or "8192" textures when exporting from Mineways, as these give a blocky appearance and also allow mipmapping to be used for filtering when blocks are distant.

With OBJ you might also notice that objects underwater kind of pop out, like they're not in water. To fix this, in the properties page below, in Settings at the very bottom, change the water's Blend Mode and Shadow Mode both to Alpha Hashed. Here's an example of doing this for glass, which can have the same problem:

Here is the automated script for this, called scripting/blender_alpha_hashed.txt: 

import bpy

for mat in bpy.data.materials:
    """If material has nodetree"""
    if mat.node_tree:
        for node in mat.node_tree.nodes:
            if node.type == 'BSDF_PRINCIPLED':
                alphasocket = node.inputs["Alpha"]
                if alphasocket.is_linked:
                    mat.blend_method = 'HASHED'
                    mat.shadow_method = 'HASHED'
These two scripts above could be combined into one text file: just paste one after the other (removing the "import bpy" line, which is needed only once).

There are plenty of other material properties you can modify, these are just a start. You can read documentation on the Blender site about texture and material modification. Have fun!

10) Render Size: You can also set several parameters of the Renderer by selecting the Camera in the Scene Collection in the upper right, then clicking on the Context.Output icon in the vertical list of icons - it's the third one down, it looks like a printer spitting out an image. In the section "Dimensions", you can set the Resolution of the image, add a border, and so on. To export Full HD, you can set the Resolution to X:1920 and Y:1080, and set 100% in the bar below these settings.

11) Optional: Split into Objects: Blender 2.92 imports a Mineways OBJ file as a single object. If you did not use the "Make groups objects" option but now want to split the object in Blender, do the following. First, switch to Edit Mode. Then hit the "p" key and with your mouse select the option "By Material." The objects will now be separated in this way. Separate objects is nice for selection and material editing, but by default "separate" objects are not so separate - if you move one, you'll see a gap where it touched other blocks. If you truly want separate blocks, for animation or other reasons, you'll need to use the "Export individual blocks" option in Mineways to get "solid" blocks you can animate.

12) Upload pictures of your creation to the Mineways Discord #showcase channel or the reddit group. (Optional, but I hope you do - I like seeing what people make.) You can also look in the website gallery or old Mineways Flickr group for some past screenshots.

I'll again note that you should probably be using MCprep to convert your OBJ materials. Here's my short video on how to install and use it. They also have a MCprep Blender Discord server for asking questions.

Omniverse USD Composer

Here is how to import a model into the free Omniverse USD Composer program. First, download the Omniverse Launcher, install and run it, then from the launcher install and launch Omniverse USD Composer.

See the tutorial video. It runs through a lot of the common operations for Omniverse USD Composer: moving the camera, modifying the lighting and materials, etc. There's a lot of documentation on Omniverse and Composer, but the video will get you started. I also give some tips and tricks in this "the whole process" video. I also show Omniverse in action here. What follows are the steps in the first video.

Step 1: Select your world and region for export in Mineways, then from the menu choose File | Export Rendering.

Step 1a: I highly recommend doing "File -> Choose Terrain File" and selecting the terrainExt_JG-RTX64.png file that comes with Mineways. This will give you more interesting and physically realistic materials for some blocks.

Step 2: Save as the file type 'USDA'. This is the Universal Scene Description ASCII file format. USD is a format developed by Pixar that is used in film studios and other applications. You can see my test scene project (updated here) for an idea of how various renderers handle this file format as of August 2022 (they're always improving).

After choosing the file name, you are faced with many export options. Most are grayed out in the upper left part of this dialog, with one important exception: "Custom material." By default this box is checked. Doing so gives the distinctive blocky look for Minecraft textures. However, if you are using higher resolution textures, 64x64 or larger, I recommend unchecking this box. You will then use Omniverse default materials, which blend smoothly between texture texels. Also, these default materials will display much more quickly; the custom materials need to be compiled when viewed in Omniverse USD Composer for the first time.

Setting the "Light scale" to 0 will turn off export of lights and camera. The "Export individual blocks" option works, though has not undergone much testing.

As far as other export options go, best of luck. USDA export is a new feature, so some modes to be unlikely to work fully. I am happy to listen to requests for improvements in any of these areas.

Note that Pixar USD files can be read in by other applications, for example the free Houdini Apprentice and Cinema 4D.

Step 3: Load the model into Omniverse USD Composer. Easiest is to copy and paste the directory where the USDA model is located into the Content directory bar, towards the lower left, here highlighted in red:

Hit "Enter" and below this line you should see the USDA file, some MDL (material) files, and a texture directory. Double-click the USDA file to load it. The scene may take a while to resolve and look good, as two things are happening: textures are loading, and material shaders are being compiled (if "Custom material" was checked - see Step 2). This compilation can take a while, but after the first time you do it for a directory it should be faster.

Pro tip: if you click on the bookmark icon, highlighted in green (and already clicked) in the image above, you will add a bookmark to the list of files at the lower left. Clicking that bookmark entry takes you to this directory.

Note: one glitch in the beta is that the directory shown in Create does not refresh when new files are added to it, or deleted. If you save and don't see your file, right-click in the window to the lower right and select "Refresh" (highlighted in orange). Step 3a: Adjust the orientation of the dome (environment) light. As of August 2023 there is a bug in USD Composer (and possibly other packages) in which the Dome light comes in sideways. The fix is to select the "DomeLight" in the hierarchy list in the upper right. Then in the Transform section in the lower right, change the Rotate X value from 0 to 270.

Step 4: Move your camera around. Easiest is to right-click-and-hold in the viewport. Mouse rotates the view, WASD moves you, QE move up and down, and holding Shift during any of these key presses doubles your speed (and Control halves it). If you get lost, the F key will frame your model, i.e., pull you all the way back so you can see the whole thing. One gotcha is camera speed: you can adjust this by clicking on the gear icon in the upper left of the viewport and adjusting the first slider, Camera Speed. To go faster than 10, you can Control-Click on the slider and type a number.

Step 5: Adjust the lighting. Look in the upper right. Select the Stage tab, if not selected. You'll see the sun and a dome light. You can toggle these on and off by clicking the eye icon to the right of each. You can move the position of the sun by selecting it, then clicking and dragging in the box highlighted to rotate its angle. You can also adjust the sun and dome light's intensity in the Light dialog area below. Also, note that if you toggle the "lighting" view in Mineways (the "L" key), so that the map is shown in a nighttime mode, nighttime lighting will be exported to USDA instead.

Step 6: Take a screenshot. First, you'll need to adjust one property. On the menu choose Edit | Preferences. At the bottom left see the Preferences dialog. Click on Capture Screenshot, and then on the right check "Capture only the 3D viewport":

Take note of the "Path to save screenshots", just above - I copy and paste this and go to it in my file explorer. Now, each time you press F10, a screenshot is generated and put in this directory.

I have noticed this feature can sometimes be a bit flakey, with F10 not consistently working after adjusting this. Restarting Create seems to help.

Step 7: Adjust the camera exposure. By default, the camera exposure is set for a daylit, outdoor scene. If you go inside, it'll likely be dark. In the menu, choose Rendering | Render Settings, if not already checked. In the upper right should appear "RTX Settings". By default, Mineways uses the Path tracer, so select "Path-Traced" for the Renderer, then "Post Processing", below that to the right. Open the Tone Mapping menu. You can then fiddle with the Film ISO, Camera Shutter, and f-Number/f-Stop to adjust the exposure. If you're feeling bold, you can also try the Auto Exposure feature in the menu below Tone Mapping.

Step 8: Edit a material. Click on an object in the scene, or in the content hierarchy in the Stage list in the upper right (pro tip: you can type. Below a picture of a sphere should appear. Click the sphere and you will see below a long list of material settings. Have at it! Note that you can also simply replace textures in the "textures" directory created by Mineways and then read the scene in again.

Bonus feature: I've included a water_normal.png normals map (from the open source MDL material set) in the Mineways distribution. Resource pack authors basically never include a normal map for water, because the renderer usually generates this. You can include this in your "block-and-chest" directory when making a terrain file set using TileMaker or assign it manually in Create or other applications.

Step 9: Save your work. You can simple choose "File | Save", but for faster loading in the future, you could do "File | Save As...", check that "USD" (no "A") is selected in the lower right of the save dialog, and click "Save". The binary USD format is about 30% more compact and faster to load.

For more about physical materials and how to add them into Mineways, see the texture tutorial page.

By default the RTX Path-Traced renderer is used, as shown in the upper left corner of the Omniverse USD Composer viewport. Changing this to "RTX Real-Time" will give faster, lower quality renders. If you want even faster interactivity - useful for large scenes - click on the Render Settings tab in the upper right, select "Real-Time" for the Renderer if not already selected, choose the "Ray Tracing" option just below, then under Translucency uncheck the box "Enable Fractional Cutout Opacity." Having this box checked can be up to 3x slower than unchecked.

This is as far as I'm going, as explaining materials, animation, and many other features is definitely beyond the scope. But, notice that last sentence has links to documentation for these topics. Some people know way more than I do about Omniverse.

Since you got this far, I'll note one option you can choose at Mineways export: the "Custom material" checkbox on the export dialog. By default it is checked. This exports a custom Minecraft.mdl material that gives textures the classic blocky look. However, if you are using a high resolution texture you likely won't care about this look. Unchecking the box means to use the default materials, no MDL files written out. A minor thing, but you may prefer it.

Here's JG RTX in action (and more resource pack previews - these are not included in Mineways):

JG RTX

Cinema 4D

These instructions explain how to import a model and set the textures are mostly for Cinema 4D R25 or newer; the instructions are similar for older versions, though USD support is unlikely. Really, I should redo this section, but I hope you'll be able to figure things out. Most steps are mostly from this excellent (though now-dated) video from this forum post, which includes a number of other useful Cinema 4D animation tutorials and resource links. Here's one more useful post.

That said, you may instead want to use jmc2obj or MiEx. I won't be insulted - use what works best for you!

Step 1: In Mineways, select your world and region for export in Mineways, then from the menu choose File | Export Rendering.

Step 2: You have two choices here, USD (Pixar's Universal Scene Description) or OBJ export. USD is particularly useful for physically based rendering resource packs, such as JG-RTX that comes with Mineways. Beyond color and transparency, these packs include normal maps, specular textures, and more. Alternately, save as the file type 'OBJ'. Use Absolute OBJ, not Relative, as older versions of Cinema 4D do not read relative OBJs well.

Step 3: For USD export, make sure to set "Light scale" to 1, else the sun will be too bright (you can always fix this in C4D itself by turning the sun from 3000% to 100%). Otherwise, adjust the export options as you wish. By default, blocks will come in at a size of 1/10th meter each. You can adjust this by changing "Make each block 100 mm high"; for example, 1000 mm is 1 meter. You may also wish to use the "Export individual textures" option, as this allows mipmapping and similar filtering in Cinema 4D to work better.

Step 4: Once the model is exported, open Cinema4D and drag the .usda or .obj file generated into the main window. For OBJ, make sure the "Presets" at the top of the OBJ Import dialog is set to Default. (If you don't, your grass blocks will import upside-down.) Hit "OK".

Here is what the OBJ defaults are, just in case:

Cinema 4D object load

To move around the scene, hold down Alt and use the three mouse buttons and scroll wheel. For USD you may wish to rotate and turn down the brightness of the DomeLight. First, choose it in the upper-right Objects dialog's list (opening the world's list first). Pick "Coordinates" and then change "R.P" to -90. Then, pick "Tag" below and then under "Color" set "Brightness" to 50% or as desired.

Step 5: At this point you can render by clicking Ctrl-R. It won't be the most exciting render, as there are no lights. Try "Create -> Light -> Light" and move the light up a bit to illuminate your scene. Select the light and in the material editor in the lower right, select "Shadow" and then, a few lines down, change "Shadow" from "None" to "Raytraced (Hard)." Now Ctrl-R will give shadows to your scene.

Step 6: Select all the materials in the material manager, the row of spheres at the lower left (or alongside the right edge of the viewport). Do this by clicking one sphere and then hitting Control-A. All spheres should now be selected. If the material manager is not visible, open it with Window -> Material Manager, or the shortcut Shift+F2.

Step 7: If you want to make textures look blocky, like they do in Minecraft, do the following. In R25 or newer, you select the material, then pick "Tag", then "Material", then "Color" in that area. For older versions, first click on the "Color" box next to the "Basic" box at the top of the material editor, then in this area you will see a section below labeled "Color." In this section you will see "Color," "Brightness," "Texture." Just below "Texture" and to the right, "Sampling," which will say "MIP" or "<<Multi." In the menu list for this option choose "None." When you are done selecting, it may still say "<<Multi", but don't worry, you have changed it. See the figure below for how things looked in R22.

Cinema 4D color material

That said, setting the sampling to "None" can give noisy renders. You may want to consider using the high-resolution "1024" or "8192" textures when exporting from Mineways, as these give a blocky appearance and also allow mipmapping to be used for filtering when blocks are distant.

That's about it! I'll mention that you can also import Mineways' VRML files into C4D. This will work, but all blocks will share the same material, limiting what you can do to them.

Houdini

Houdini Apprentice can be downloaded for free for non-commercial use. Houdini Apprentice pays attention to the UsdPreview material Mineways produces. Their support for USDA continues to improve, so get the newest version when you can. One nice thing about Houdini is that it can read USDA files from Mineways, allowing more elaborate material descriptions, such as using normal maps. Make sure to have the newest version (at least version 19), as their USD import has improved enormously recently.

I made a short tutorial video for how to import Mineways USDA models with physically-based rendering textures attached to them. It's for an older version of Houdini, but should get you most of the way there. Here's a run through for Houdini 19.5.303: select Build -> Solaris, right-click in the lower right "/stage" dialog, type "file," and pick "Sublayer" in the USD dialog that pops up. Then click in the dialog to place this element. Above this dialog, in the upper-right of the application, is now "Sublayer file1" - scroll down to find "Sublayer File" and in "File" give the USDA file you want to import. Once imported, scroll out with Alt and mouse-wheel down. Turn off the sun and dome light in the lower left dialog, "Scene Graph Tree." Add your own lights from the icons in the upper left of the app. Hold down "Alt" and use the mouse for camera moves. In the upper right of the viewport select the Karma renderer from "persp" to use the path tracer.

One thing I did forget to mention in the video narration: at time 1:14, where I add a File node, what I did was right-click in that lower-right area and typed "file" to get that node, then clicked in the area to make the node appear.

3DS MAX

Note: 3DS MAX is free for students and teachers.

These instructions are for 3DS MAX 2012. You might also try jmc2obj instead, as it does a better job producing some geometry. The steps here should also work for cleaning up jmc2obj OBJ models.

For newbies (like me): in a Viewport, middle-mouse button changes the view: mouse-wheel to zoom, button to pan, Alt key down to rotate, Control key down to fast-pan. Shift+Q to render. Steps are as follows:

Step 1: Select your world and region for export in Mineways, then from the menu choose File | Export Rendering.

Step 2: Save as the file type 'OBJ'. You likely want to keep the "Custom material" option on, as this gives a slightly different water color by changing the diffuse color to white.

Step 3: Adjust the export options as you wish. Nothing is required here; by default, blocks will come in at a size of 1/10th meter each. You can adjust this by changing "Make each block 100 mm high"; for example, 1000 mm is 1 meter, MAX's unit size.

Step 4: Use the upper left MAX symbol menu and select Import. Find the .obj file and select it. In the OBJ Import Options, under Normals select Faceted to get Minecraft's blocky look. Alternately, if you want to smooth water surfaces a bit, select "Auto" and leave the setting at 30 degrees. Click "Import" at the bottom.

Step 5: Go to Render Setup in the Rendering menu (or just hit "F10"). Select the Renderer tab and uncheck the "Filter Maps" checkbox under Antialiasing. This makes cutout objects look correct, as well as making the Minecraft textures have their distinctive blocky appearance.

Step 6 (optional): At this point rendering should work fine. In interactive preview mode you will see some transparency problems in the Viewport. To fix these, bring up the material editor by pressing "M" and expand the view. Scroll down in the Material/Map Browser on the left and find "+ Scene Materials". Click on the "+" to show the scene's materials. Double-click on whatever material looks bad, e.g., Stationary_Water, Glass, Leaves, Torch, Tall_Grass, Sugar_Cane, Rose, Dandelion, or other cutout object. Now click on the "checkerboard-with-light" icon along the top, which does "Show Shaded Material in Viewport". This material should now look better. Do this for each material that looks bad. Press "M" again when finished, to dismiss the material browser. If someone knows a faster way to change all materials, let me know. Note that these fixes do not affect the final render itself.

Maya

Note: Maya is free for students and teachers.

First, there is now a material converter for RenderMan. Notes from the author: "I've created a simple Python script for Maya to convert all the imported materials from the standard 'Phong' shader to Renderman's 'PxrSurface' shaders. It'll also re-use the same file reference node and clean up the duplicates and the old shaders. Bonus is that it will also turn off filtering on all the textures."

If you want to rendering within Maya, I will not give a comprehensive tutorial here; it's up to you to know the basics. The main tasks facing you when importing from Mineways is adjusting the Transparency material attribute, which Maya does not set up at all on import. The steps:

  1. Import an OBJ from Mineways. Turn on texturing and lighting by pressing "7".
  2. Select each transparent or cutout object in turn, right-click and drag to choose the "Material Attributes" menu.
  3. On the right, under Common Material Attributes, click the small checkered box to the far right of the Transparency attribute. This will let you assign a texture to the alpha channel.
  4. In the "Create Render Node" dialog that appears, choose "Maya | 2D Textures" on the left, then click "File" on the right. You will now see a "File Attributes" parameter dialog.
  5. Click on the file folder icon to the far right of "Image Name" and select the grayscale image for the alpha channel, e.g., MyModel-Alpha.png. While you're here, you can change the "Filter Type" above from Quadratic to Off; this makes the alpha channel have the blocky Minecraft look.
  6. The cutout object will typically disappear; you need to reverse the sense of the channel. There's probably some easier way, but scrolling down to the "Color Balance" section and setting Alpha Gain to -1 and Alpha Offset to 1 works.
  7. To make the colored pixels blocky, again right-click on the model and select "Material Attributes...", then click the small box with an arrow to the far right of the "Color" attribute, the first thing listed under "Common Material Attributes." Change the "Filter Type" from Quadratic to Off.
There may (and probably is) a more efficient way to make these adjustments - let me know.

For instructions for older versions of Maya, check out this video from this playlist, it shows how to set transparency and texture sampling. That said, you may want to use jmc2obj, which even comes with a MEL script to perform cleanup during import (that said, I don't know if this script still works).

A problem with jmc2obj is that each material must be adjusted by hand. One option in Mineways that can speed import conversion is to uncheck the "Material per family" checkbox in the OBJ file export options. Doing so means you have to fix up only one material, though at the expense of not having a separate material per block family (that said, you can always add new materials later). That said, this option tends to mess up Maya's display, as every object will be considered semitransparent and all will be sorted from back to front by depth in the interactive viewport, causing objects to flicker in front of each other. The scene will render just fine, however.

Publish to Sketchfab

Sketchfab is a free service that lets you upload your models and share them with others; try an example here or look at the end of these instructions. Mineways exports to it in a straightforward fashion, there are just a few steps to get your model up and running. It's always been possible to upload models to Sketchfab, see these illustrated instructions. With the 4.16 version of Mineways you can now publish directly from Mineways to Sketchfab. Note: you can always export a rendering as usual to an OBJ file and upload the ZIP of the files output to Sketchfab. This will give a somewhat different rendering style, sharp and less shadowed.

1) Sign up for an account on Sketchfab.

2) Open your World in Mineways, then, select the area for exporting (hold right mouse button and drag the rectangle), and choose "File | Publish to Sketchfab" from the menu.

3) The Sketchfab dialog will come up. Click on the button "Get your token." This will open a web page.

One line says "API Token," as shown below. Copy the API token, a long string of letters and numbers (a black box covers mine here), and paste it into the Sketchfab dialog. Fill in the other fields as you wish, then click "Upload" at the bottom.

4) When done, a new dialog comes up saying, "Your model has been uploaded. Click OK to view it on Sketchfab." - do that!

5) On the model's web page, adjust and save the view. You can orbit, pan, and zoom (mouse wheel). In the lower right corner is an eye icon, where you can switch to a "First Person" mode - I find it a bit zippy by default, so use the mouse wheel to dial down the speed. Also, if you double-click with the middle-mouse button on your object, you set the pivot point that the camera orbits around. Pick a nice view and then click "SAVE VIEW" in the upper left-hand corner.

6) In the lower right of the window click "SETTINGS" and choose "3D settings". I recommend clicking on the light-bulb icon in the upper left, then turn on the lights (just below); this will give shadows. There are lots of options here - explore and have fun! You can change the surrounding environment, make various materials look different, and other options. Annotations are nice for setting up views and touring your model.

7) In the upper right click "SAVE SETTINGS".. Then click "EXIT" and you're done.

If for some reason you can't get the "Publish to Sketchfab" feature to work for you, or you want to use anything but the default export options, there's another way to upload to Sketchfab that's only a little more work. Follow these instructions or go through the step-by-step below.

1) Open your World in Mineways, then, select the area for exporting (hold right mouse button and drag the rectangle), and choose "File | Export Model for Rendering" from the menu.

2) "File | Export Model for Rendering" and save the file as a Wavefront Object (.obj) or USD (.usda) to a folder of your choice. Call it myobject.usda or whatever you like. For any file type, in the dialog with the export settings click on the option in the upper left that says "Create a ZIP file containing all export model files". For OBJ output (honestly, USD is generally wiser), you'll want to also check the box in the lower left for "Double all billboard faces" (more on this below). You also need to decide whether to "Export all textures to three large, mosaic textures" or "Export individual textures". If the model has only a few block types, I'd select individual textures. The trick here is that Sketchfab has a limit of uploading 100 textures total. The "mosaic textures" option gets around this, but if you're using a custom texture pack like JG-RTX, these mosaic textures can be huge, and so can be slow to download when viewing the model. Click "OK".

3) Sign up for an account on Sketchfab if you haven't already, then upload the zip file you created by clicking on the "UPLOAD" button in the upper right. A dialog pops up; click on "CHOOSE FILE" and upload the .obj.zip file you created. Click "CONTINUE".

4) Fill out the form as you wish. It's nice to add "minecraft" and "mineways" tags, so others can find your model. It's also nice to "Allow download", if you like.

At this point the steps are much the same as above, starting at step #5. The main difference is that your uploaded model is not published by default; for the last step you'll want to click "SAVE AND PUBLISH," then "EXIT."

One other thing you may wish to do is material cleanup. There are two things to possibly correct: normal flip and single- vs. double-sided rendering. If you are using a physically based rendering texture pack (like JG-RTX), you currently need to flip the Y of the normal map in Sketchfab's material editor. To do so, hit "Edit 3D Settings" on the Sketchfab page for your model, then select the Sketchfab Materials tab (the third icon over at the top). You will see a material listed just under these icons. For each material, see if there is a "Normal/bump map" for it (click on that line to open it) and check the "Flip green (-Y)" box.

I also mentioned that, for OBJ export, in Mineways for OBJ export you want to check the box "Double all billboard faces". This is simplest, you then don't have to make any edits in Sketchfab. However, checking this box doubles the number of polygons generated for tall grass, flowers, etc. To avoid this, you could export and not check the box. However, you then need to edit the model's materials. Do this similarly to editing normals, as just explained, but go to the "Faces Rendering" option at the bottom and set each material to be "Double sided".

An irregularity: if you download your uploaded model from Sketchfab, it may not display correctly. The short version is that you probably have to comment out the "map_d" field in the .mtl file for the model. Some viewers incorrectly grab the red channel instead of the alpha channel from the four-channel map that Sketchfab uses for compactness.

Physically based rendering support: Sketchfab does recognize addition material types, see their page for details. Note that when you use individual textures and "custom material" for OBJ export, you get these extra files, if available (or derived, such as the emission textures). However, the naming doesn't quite match for normal and emission textures currently; it does match for specular ("_s") and metalness ("_m").

Here's an example of Sketchfab in action, a model I uploaded. Click on the window and you can interact with it. More models here and here.

Sentinel Castle by erich on Sketchfab

If you want to make a 3D print of a model, the easiest way is to use a 3D print service such as Sculpteo. The main differences are cost, quality, and speed of delivery. Protolabs Network also has some users with various types of printers, so may be both competitive and fast. There are other 3D print services for consumers, such as i.materialise and Ponoko, but currently these two do not offer fully-textured 3D printing, just solid color blocks. There are many services offering single-color (i.e., single material, such as plastic) prints, such as any of the above or those on this list. Finally, here's a little collection of articles on 3D printing Minecraft, from 2020.

Sculpteo

Go to the Sculpteo site and register for an account.

WARNING: Currently (as of 2021) Sculpteo no longer supports textured, colored output for objects. I'm leaving these instructions in place, though they're unlikely to do you much good.

In Mineways, you normally want to export to Wavefront OBJ when exporting to print, using the "Sculpteo" file type. Sculpteo also accepts VRML2 files, but the OBJ exporter sets some useful defaults for Sculpteo. One major advantage of Sculpteo is that they support the "Export lesser blocks" option, which allows you to export slabs, stairs, fences, doors, and other smaller objects. Please read the documentation for that option before using it. Also note that when you export, the price shown is the (now-defunct) Shapeways price; Sculpteo prices tend to be about a third higher overall.

Once you have your export file ready, on the home page click on the Upload a 3D file button in the upper right (you can also go to your account and find the "Upload a new design" link).

On the upload page choose a file - you must pick the .ZIP file for your model. Adjust the design name, description, keywords, and categories as you wish (personally, I fill these in later, when I'm sure the model is a keeper). Note you can also add French translations; I use Google Translate. Agree to the terms of use at the bottom and click "OK". Wait a bit.

You should then get a page showing your model has been uploaded. You can interact with it in the viewport using left-mouse, right-mouse, middle-mouse, and scroll wheel. Pro tip: note that rotating by going up and down near the edge of the window gives a different rotation than going up and down in the middle. This can help you adjust the "up" direction.

You now have a range of options. One service worth checking is "Thickening" in the viewport. This view shows you whether your model is printable. Red areas are likely too thin to print properly.

Scripting

By using "Import Settings" you can make Mineways do all sorts of things quickly. You can also temporarily modify blocks when exporting. It's easier to use than you might think, read about it here.

Related Resources

Here are some related (free) tools that are handy, collected in one spot:

Stuff to Print and Render

Want something to try Mineways on? There are a number of sites with cool downloadable models and worlds, including: You could get a copy of our world, Vokselia.

For something amazing, check this out (more here)- meta!

Other Packages

Mineways is not the first to offer a Minecraft model exporter, nor necessarily the best for export for rendering. Minepedia has a page about exporters. Here's more information on the ones I know about and related services.

Older Stuff

Mostly defunct, but FYI and because I like to keep track.

Minecraft Bedrock Support

Mineways works on only Minecraft Java (aka Classic) Edition worlds. You can determine whether you're using this Classic Edition or the Bedrock Edition by following these steps.

This section describes how to convert a Minecraft Bedrock world to a Minecraft Java Edition one so that Mineways can read it. NOTE: No converter can convert Bedrock Marketplace worlds, see this explanation.

Minecraft for Windows 10, also known as the Bedrock Edition, uses an entirely different database format for its worlds, called LevelDB. If your level.dat files are located in a directory with the path ..."\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.Minecraft"... in it, or have weird directory names like "ZAD1Xfl9AAA=", that's a Bedrock Edition save.

The options I know of are:

Short Amulet instructions: Amulet converts, but need to have a world to save into. Make an empty world in Java (Classic) Minecraft, easiest is to make a superflat world. Start Amulet and make the window much larger (this is important for usability - in general, resize all windows in Amulet to be larger, so you can see all the controls). Pick "Open World". Pick "Bedrock" and select the world you want to convert. Click the "Convert" tab along the left edge. "Select Output World" and choose the empty superflat world you made at the start. Click the "Convert" tab at the bottom (a large world can take a fair bit of time to convert - patience). If you don't see the "Convert" tab, you need to resize the Amulet window to make it visible.

Longer Amulet instructions: There are any number of ways you can go wrong with Amulet, so here are detailed instructions. I use some directory paths on my machine as examples. Yours are almost assuredly going to be different. Here goes:

  1. Start up Java Minecraft and make an empty world, let's call it NVIDIA RTX Winter World, a free Bedrock map I'll use as an example. This is the world you’ll convert into. The empty world is best as a superflat, but it doesn’t matter much (other than avoiding wasting time), since we’re going to delete all the data from it manually.
  2. In Windows Explorer, go into wherever the world was created, e.g., C:\Users\ehaines\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\saves\NVIDIA RTX Winter World. Go into the region subdirectory. Delete the four files there, r.-1.-1.mca etc. You now have an empty world you will now fill with the conversion from Bedrock. This step is not strictly necessary, but I like knowing that there aren’t any extra chunks sitting around.
  3. Download the Bedrock Winter World. In theory you could double-click the Winter World download and it’ll install into Bedrock Minecraft (if you have it). I did this, but it didn’t seem to work the first time I tried; I couldn’t see the world. Alternately, right-click the s.zip.mctemplate file you downloaded and open with WinRAR. Unzip the contents into a directory called something like "NVIDIA_RTX_WinterWorld" created in some temporary directory, say C:\temp or your Downloads directory. Alternately, and not required, but in theory if you have Bedrock Minecraft installed, you could unzip it into the save directory, something crazy like directory C:\Users\ehaines\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.MinecraftUWP_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\games\com.mojang\minecraftWorlds (or similar - basically, search for "minecraftWorlds" on your machine to find this well-buried directory).
  4. After downloading Amulet, unzip it into some directory in your personal area. I tried putting it in C:\Program Files\Amulet, but it then had permission problems when run. I ended up with putting it in my C:\Users\ehaines\Documents\Amulet directory.
  5. Start amulet_app.exe in that directory (double-click, or start in a CMD window so you can see any problems). Make it full screen.
  6. In Amulet, pick Main Menu (if not there by default) and Open World.
  7. In the upper left, you have a choice. You want to open the world you want to convert. If you just unzipped the Bedrock world into C:\temp, use the "Open other world" button and navigate to and choose "c:\temp\NVIDIA_RTX_WinterWorld". If you instead put the world into your Bedrock saves, click the down-arrow next to Bedrock and then pick Christmas Adventure RTX.
  8. Now, along the left edge of Amulet, pick the Convert tab, then the Select Output World button in the middle, and pick the empty Java world you made earlier.
  9. Wait a bit. You should see the converted files in your Minecraft Java save directory, e.g., C:\Users\ehaines\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\saves\NVIDIA RTX Winter World\region or wherever your Java world is. You can also look at the Amulet CMD output window for errors. I've found it's usually an all-or-nothing affair. Amulet either succeeds or fails on everything, for whatever reason.
  10. Once done, you can now read this world into Mineways. Start Mineways and pick the world.
Note: Amulet can be a bit flaky at times, e.g., I've seen biomes not get generated. If you have problems with the converted world, try opening it in Minecraft itself. Doing so can clean up problems.

MCC ToolChest PE instructions: Download it, install, and run. If you get an error about some missing DLL, you may also need to install the VS 2015 C++ Runtime. Once running, do the following in MCC ToolChest - PE:

  1. Select "File | Open" and choose the Bedrock world you want to convert. It should read in, and you'll see "level.dat", "players", etc. listed on the left. If you don't see the world you want to convert, you'll need to (somehow) get it to your PC and find its path via "File | Open" and "Select Folder."
  2. Select "Tools | Convert -> To Java." A large dialog box appears.
  3. For the "Minecraft Java world folder" at the top put a path where you want to create the converted world. If you leave it the default "\" you'll get a mysterious error. As an example, I use "C:\Users\erich\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\saves\bedrock_test\" - my user name is "erich" and the world directory name I want for the converted world is "bedrock_test." By putting the path "...\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\saves\..." I am putting the converted world in the default directory for Minecraft Java worlds, which means it will then show up in Mineways' list of worlds automatically.
  4. Halfway down on the left of the dialog look for "Convert into." Change this from "Empty Dimension" to "Empty World."
  5. Click "Convert" at the bottom of the dialog. Cross fingers.
If there were no errors, great, and you should see your converted world in your saves directory, and Mineways can then convert it. In Mineways you should look for the directory name of the world on the right-hand side of the "File | Open World" list of worlds.

If you did get some error, try the "Help" button, it might actually help. I found not setting "Convert into" properly or not giving a good directory path can give errors.

If you need more help, this older site might help.

Note that this tool can also convert from Java to Bedrock, if that's of interest. This video goes through most of the steps for that process. There's also this detailed guide, which filters out bad data.

There are other, lesser converters out there. Another possibility is to find some way to convert your model to the original, now old and dated, Schematic file format, which Mineways also reads.

Structure Block Export

You can also export 3D data from (only) the Bedrock Edition directly to a 3D model file format, the glTF binary format. Give yourself a structure block in Minecraft by typing the command "/give @s structure_block". Place this block near the area you want to export, then right-click it. A dialog comes up in which you can specify the size of the export (never larger than 32x32x32, even if you set it higher), the offset, and the file name to export to, along with some other options. This file can then be viewed by the built-in Paint 3D program and be converted and loaded by many other programs in the glTF ecosystem.

Keyboard Shortcut Keys

The quick reference of handy shortcuts is here, with the full list here. Most operations in Mineways can be done with the mouse: left button drag and mouse wheel for viewing, middle mouse click for setting the depth to whatever is at that location, right mouse selects a region to export. If you don't have a right mouse button, hold Control down and use the left mouse button. Instead of using the height sliders at the top, using the mouse wheel with the Control key down changes the depth, with Shift down changes the max. height (this second mode can be slow, since the map is regenerated). More on mouse controls in the Selection section.

Block Types Supported

There are two main modes of export: for rendering and for 3D printing. These mainly differ in that some blocks, such as flowers, are not things that can be printed as is. For 3D printing, the "Export lesser blocks" option has a major effect on what gets exported. Note that this option is on by default for rendering; turning it off will turn a number of blocks into "full blocks" instead of true geometry, for a more abstract look (but, no one ever turns it off). Finally, for the "lesser blocks" option there's a "fatten" suboption, which makes fences, fence gates, doors, free-standing sign posts, and pressure plates thicker, so they're more likely to print without snapping off.

If you want to test particular blocks to see what they look like, use the "[Block Test World]" and the block IDs to select and export whatever block types in whatever mode you want. Alternately, you could find a texture test world you like, such as this one.

In Minecraft itself you can also create a Debug block world (short version: "Create New World", click "World" tab middle top, hold Alt and keep clicking on "World Type:" until "Debug Mode" comes up) - note Mineways doesn't support everything, as noted below. If you are using the debug stick or commands to set a state for a block that is not valid in a normal world, don't expect it to work. Desperate? Try jmc2obj - they do some fancy stuff, like create banner textures.

Here's what Mineways exports as of version 5.01:

Material Sampler by Eric Haines on Sketchfab

Mineways does not support export of characters, creatures, sign text, paintings, or banner patterns, among other things.

All "full blocks" (stone, dirt, wood, on and on) export the same under all modes. The table below outlines the rest. "Flatten" means a billboard, such as a flower, or small object, such as a torch or lever, is flattened to be a decal on the block below, since such objects are too thin to be 3D printed.

Also see candle.
Block Type and ID (for 1.12 and earlier) Render Export Print Export Print w/"Lesser" Notes
Saplings (#6)
Tall Grass (#31)
Dead Bush (#32)
Flowers (#37, #38, #175)
Mushrooms (#39, #40)
Pumpkin and Melon Stems (#104, #105)
Billboards
Flattened
Flattened
 Pumpkin and melon stems do not darken with maturity when exported from Mineways. When "Split by block type" is set, separate (identical - you may edit these) materials are output for each age of stem, 0 through 7, e.g., "Pumpkin_Stem_age_5" is nearly fully mature.
Water (#8)
Stationary Water (#9)
Lava (#10)
Stationary Lava (#11)
Proper geometry
Full block
Proper geometry
 The bottommost texture copy found in Minecraft's water_still.png and lava_still.png are used for these blocks. The water_flow.png and lava_flow.png bottommost left tiles are used only for vertical walls. For walls behind glass blocks, water_overlay.png is used. Bubble columns are identified as a subtype of Stationary Water when output with "split by block type" but have no effect on rendering otherwise.
Bed (#26)
Always red, legs not solid
Stretched to full block
Area under bed is solid
 Only the red colored bed is supported (supporting all beds results in an excessive number of textures dedicated to beds).
Rails (#27, #28, #66)
Yes
Flattened to block sides
Yes, slope block added
Cobweb (#30)
Crossed billboard
Block with texture
Block with texture
Piston Extension (#34)
True piston head
Block with texture
True piston head
 Detailed piston heads not fattened for 3D printing, may break. The "short" property for pistons is ignored, the model is always exported full length.
Slabs (#44, #126)
True slab
Full block
True slab
Torches (#50, #75, #76)
Billboard torch (no flame)
Flattened
Flattened
[Soul] Fire (#51)
Billboards
Block with texture
Block with texture
 The bottommost texture copy found in Minecraft's fire_layer_0.png is used for this block. The various direction data values are ignored; the fire is always solid.
Stairs (#53, #67, #108, #109, #114, #128, #134, #135, #136, #163, #164)
True stairs
Full block
True stairs
 Note that Minecraft 1.4 connects stairs differently. If you have a pre-1.4 world, use Mineways 2.22 to export it.
Chests (#54, #95, #146)
Proper geometry
Full block
Proper geometry
 The chest textures in terrainExt.png are created by TileMaker using assets/minecraft/textures/entity/chest normal.png and normal_double.png.
Redstone Wire (#55)
True geometry 1/4th pixel above surface - may cause z-fighting; use "Create composite" option to flatten
Flattened
Flattened
 In Mineways wire is show either off or on, baked into the texture, with no gradations. When "Split by block type" is used, the redstone wire is separated into up to 16 (identical - you may edit these) materials, "Redstone_Wire_power_15" down to "_power_0" to show how bright the wire should appear. For 1.16, the ability to turn an isolated dot into a cross is not supported in Mineways current.
Wheat Seeds (#59)
Sugar Cane (#83)
Nether Wart (#115)
Carrots (#141)
Potatoes (#142)
Beet Seeds (#207)
Grows properly
Block with texture
Block with texture
 The fully matured texture is used for printing, on all sides.
Farmland (#60)
Proper geometry
Full block
Proper geometry
 Wetness level is ignored.
Sign (#63)
Wall Hanging Sign
Hanging Sign
Proper geometry
Removed
Proper geometry, with objects enlarged and chains removed
 Signs are cobbled together from block textures, not from assets/minecraft/textures/entity/signs. No lettering will appear.
Doors (#64, #71)
Proper geometry
Full textured block
Proper geometry
 Door hinges and tops and bottoms on edges are not consistent with Minecraft.
Ladder (#65)
Lily Pad (#111)
Proper geometry; "Create composite" option shifts suspended lily pads to water level
Flattened
Flattened; suspended lily pads shifted to water level
 Orientation of lily pad is not available in basic data, so orientation is always the same.
Wall Sign (#68)
Pressure Plates (#70, #72)
Buttons (#77, #143)
Snow (#78)
Proper geometry
Flattened
Proper geometry
 Wall signs are put next to wall for printing - no gap. Signs are cobbled together from block textures, not from assets/minecraft/textures/entity/signs. No lettering will appear.
Lever (#69)
Proper geometry
Flattened
Flattened
Cactus (#81)
Interlocking billboards
Full block
Smaller block
Fences (#85, #113)
Fence Gate (#81)
Cobblestone Wall (#139)
Proper geometry
Full wood block
Proper geometry
 For 1.13 and newer versions, only "normal" wall types seen in game (without the debug stick) are supported, due to a limitation in the number of bits available in Mineways for data storage.
Portal (#90)
Proper geometry
 Uses the last texture copy in the Minecraft portal.png texture.
Cake (#92)
Proper geometry
Stretched to full block
Proper geometry
Redstone Repeaters (#93, #94) and Comparators (#149, #150)
Proper geometry
Flattened
Geometry without torches
Trapdoor (#96)
Proper geometry
Flattened or block filled
Proper geometry
Iron Bars (#101)
Proper geometry
Textured block
Proper geometry
Glass Pane (#102)
Proper geometry
Replaced with Glass block
Proper geometry
Vines (#106)
Geometry/flattened
Block geometry/flattened
Block geometry/flattened
 Since vines cannot hang in air for printing, blocks are added.
Enchanting Table (#116)
Proper geometry, without book
Grown to block
Proper geometry, without book
Brewing Stand (#117)
Proper geometry
Textured block
Textured block
 Delicate, and billboards won't print on a 3D printer.
Cauldron (#118)
Dragon Egg (#122)
Proper geometry
Stretch to full block
Proper geometry
 When printed, area under cauldron is solid; top bit not added to completed portal frame.
End Portal (#119)
End Gateway (#209)
Full block only
 Uses the custom texture MW_END_PORTAL.png for the void
End Portal Frame (#120)
Proper geometry, rotation is simplified to 90 degrees or not
Full block, no ender eye, correct rotation
Proper geometry, rotation is simplified to 90 degrees or not
Cocoa Pod (#127)
Proper geometry
Removed
Pod geometry, no stem or gap
 Stem is removed for "lesser" printing.
Ender Chest (#130)
Proper geometry
Full block
Proper geometry
 The ender chest textures in terrainExt.png are created by TileMaker using assets/minecraft/textures/entity/chest/ender.png.
Tripwire Hook (#131)
Proper geometry
Flattened
Flattened
 Note that tripwire itself is currently not added.
Tripwire (#132)
Removed
 Hey, it's supposed to be hidden...
Beacon (#138)
Proper geometry
Full block
Full block
 Faked by putting "beacon.png" texture at 11,14 in terrainExt.png.
Flower Pot (#140)
Proper geometry made
Removed entirely, no decal
Pot geometry, and only cactus is made
 In Minecraft flower pot flowers are dimmer than the originals. Mineways does not dim these.
Head (#144)
Half-wide pumpkin
Full-size pumpkin, rotated to nearest 90 degree angle
Half-wide pumpkin
 Mineways reads block entity data to get the rotation and type of head, but currently does not use the head type to put something other than a pumpkin. There is an add-on for Blender that fixes this limitation. See this issue for more solutions.
Hopper (#154)
Proper geometry
Full block
Hopper interior filled in to make it solid
Barrier (#166)
Normally hidden
 To make the barrier appear, create a color scheme and change the barrier's alpha to 255.
Standing Banners (#176)
Reasonable geometry, no banner pattern
Removed
Removed, too thin
 Try jmc2obj, which generates custom banner textures.
Wall Banners (#177)
Reasonable geometry, no banner pattern
Removed
Made thicker, no banner pattern
 Try jmc2obj, which generates custom banner textures.
End Rod (#198)
Proper geometry
Removed
Removed, too thin
Chorus Plant (#198)
Only one shape
Full block
Only one shape
 In the game itself the shape used varies based on location, in some unknown way.
Grass Path (#208)
Proper geometry
Full block
Proper geometry
 Renamed to "Dirt Path" in MC 1.17, so Mineways 9.00 and newer versions use this name.
Structure Void (#217)
Normally hidden
 To make the tiny structure void block appear, create a color scheme and change the alpha to 255, and "Show all objects" (F7) to see it on the map. Structure void uses red wool for its tiny output block.
Observer (#218)
Unlit only
 The lit observer texture is found in terrainExt.png, but is not tested for and displayed.
Shulker Boxes (#219-234)
Side and bottom textures are derived from templates. Default shulker box colored purple instead of pale purple (doesn't use shulker_box.png).
 Shulker box sides and bottoms are created by using the color of the upper left pixel (2,2) of the top of the shulker box compared to the white shulker box top, multiplied by MW_SHULKER_SIDE and MW_SHULKER_BOTTOM.
Coral, Coral Fan, Coral Wall Fan
Proper geometry
Flattened
Flattened
 Flattened texture always applied to ground, even if wall fan.
Sea Pickle
Proper geometry
Flattened
Proper geometry, no tendrils
 Textures not applied exactly right. "Split by block type" will give separate emission levels based on number of pickles.
Turtle Egg
Proper geometry
Flattened
Proper geometry, neighbor eggs touch
 1.14-style eggs; 1.13 mapped a 4x4 texture to a 3x3-size egg. Textures not applied exactly right.
Bamboo
Proper geometry
Grown to block
Grown to block
 Using the bamboo mosaic texture when 3D printing is a little odd, but better than nothing.
Stonecutter
Proper geometry
Grown to block
Proper geometry, without blade
Lectern
No book
Grown to block
No book
Lantern
Proper geometry
Removed
Removed
[Soul] Campfire
Proper geometry
Flattened
Flattened
 "Split by block type" will give separate emission levels for when the campfire is lit or extinguished.
Scaffolding
Proper geometry
Full block
Full block
 Side texture for 3D printing is a little bit wrong, being thick on the top.
Respawn Anchor
Proper geometry
Full block
Full block
 "Split by block type" will give separate emission levels for how many charges are left, 0-4.
Candles
Proper geometry
Removed
Proper geometry
 No fire is exported on the wick for lit candles. "Split by block type" will give separate emission levels based on number of lit candles.
Bamboo Fence and Bamboo Gate
Proper geometry
Full bamboo block
Proper geometry
 Currently the bamboo_fence_particle.png and bamboo_fence_gate_particle.png textures are used for these, since the proper textures will take a lot of fussy texture mapping to use them properly.
Chiseled Bookshelf
Proper geometry
Full block
Proper geometry
 The six separate books are not displayed individually. If there is any book in the bookshelf, it will be shown as fully occupied.
Decorated Pot
Proper geometry
Full block
Proper geometry
 Only the basic, uncracked pot is represented.
Pink Petals
Billboards
Flattened
Flattened
 When 3D printing, only the full, "all petals" texture is applied to surfaces.
Open Eyeblossom
Billboards
Flattened
Flattened
 The emissive texture (which does not actually shed light in Minecraft) is merged with the un-emissive texture when output. The full-featured way would be to output two separate models, but this is a fair bit of coding and, unless changed manually by the user, the results look the same.
Light
Always hidden
 Meant for map makers

Version History

You can also see release notes at the Github repository.

Find the latest Mac port on the downloads/quick start page.

The textures and rules used in Minecraft for how blocks appear and connect have changed over time, such as how stairs and chests are formed. If you want the closest fidelity, for a given version of Minecraft use the following version of Mineways. That said, older versions may have bugs fixed in newer versions. So, for texture consistency, you could also go the route of using the Minecraft textures of your world's version and make a special terrainExt file for Mineways, as explained on the textures page.

From newest to oldest. The very newest is sometimes unreleased work in progress, with "*" meaning "to do" and "**" meaning "stretch goal."

Wish List

This is the wish list, in rough order of personal interest and bang for the buck. If you have a good idea, let me know. Most of these are frankly a ton of work to do for minor benefits, but I might as well keep track. If you want a feature and I can't or won't do it, consider adding it yourself! The code is open source on github. I'm happy to give advice and take pull requests. That said, the code's something that has grown over time and is obtuse in some areas.

Nightmare List

Just a joke name, but ideas I've pretty much ruled out at this point, and why. Listed in order from "some slight chance it could happen" to "extremely unlikely."

Links

Some links I commonly use.

Credits

The Mineways program is open source and is based on the (late, great) mapping program minutor written by Sean Kasun - his work gave me a huge head start. Mineways is a superset of his mapper, with a model exporter and other features added, though with slower map loading than his much-evolved version. I wrote this program just for fun, I'm not associated with Shapeways, Sculpteo, Sketchfab, or Mojang; more about me here.