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Minecraft Map of Northwestern Campus Printed In 3D
erich666 writes "Ben Rothman has created a five-foot-wide scale model of most of Northwestern University, where he was a sophomore this past year. This campus model is unique: it is the first modeled in Minecraft and then printed on a 3D printer. It is also the largest Minecraft 3D print to date, and will be on display in the main lobby of the largest building on campus in a few weeks. Ben began in November and spent about 600 hours recreating the campus. He notes that "this felt like playing a game more than a modeling task." The cost of the print material was about $2000 to $2500, well less than the cost of the display case being built for it (admittedly, labor costs are included for the case). The free Mineways program was used for export. It can help upload an exported Minecraft model to Shapeways, i.materialise, or other 3D print service. Models cost as little as $5."
Wasting primetime college years not getting laid.
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I don't see any tell-tale creeper scars in there. I bet he wasn't even mapping in survival mode; cheater.
A site which doesn't use that craptacularly insecure Flash to display simple pictures.
And on one page no less!
Maybe that supposed Mayan prediction is coming true after all.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Wouldn't this violate the copyright held by the architect?
While this would be a cool spare-time project, I don't really see how using Minecraft to model something is even a remotely useful skill that a school would want to teach, let alone spend $5000+ on. He should have spent the 600 hours learning a real CAD or modeling software package. 600 hours is enough to get really good at just about anything. Seems like a waste of school resources to me. Flame away.
Here is your Flash Fix
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
or maybe they set the bar just high enough to rule out those who can't spell the name of the school.
This sounds eerily like a page taken from the Dresden Files books, in which the titular character builds a model of Chicago in his basement in order to better keep an eye over his home town using magic.
Seriously the last line just kills it. "Models cost as little as".
how much time would it take to make that model in blender instead?
But why didn't print the display case too? Or even print the model IN a display case in one go?
SSSsssssss! Ahem, anyway, what's with all the bum hurt in the posts? Modeled the university and made a physical model cheaply, win win. Looks better than the dioramas I see in museums.
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
It turns out that Minecraft trees tend to snap off when 3D printed at that scale. The trunks are usually too thin to stand up to the model cleaning process.
This is actually the first time I've seen 3D printing material up that close. It actually doesn't look very high quality. The edges are not at all sharp. It actually looks a bit like some kind of foam rubber or styrofoam cut into those shapes with an exacto.
Gotta mine that....
a globally accessible persistent user-constructable 3D world, but it hasn't happened yet
SecondLife. The limiting factor is that after you've created a dildo gun and traded it for strap on wings, it comes down to either socializing (which IM accomplishes with lower hardware requirements), or endlessly creating for creativity's sake, which only a small percentage of people care to do.
How about a 3D model of the Pentagon or nuclear power plant? The White House (where you can get blueprints from public sources)?
What happens when DHS sees a bunch of pyros make these models out of TNT in Minecraft?
Would a forest with conjoined canopies hold up, or is overhang difficult to handle in this process?
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Yes, enough trees together definitely hold up, this model (one of my favorites) is printed at an even smaller scale, 1 mm/block, and the canopy prints fine. The forest has to be pretty dense, though. The default Mineways print size of 2 mm/block is mostly good enough that normal trees are unlikely to snap off. More info here.