Mineways is a free, open-source program for exporting Minecraft models for 3D printing or rendering, including Sketchfab.
Uploading
See also Eric Haines' official Mineways to Sketchfab documentation.
1. Open your Minecraft World: File → Open World
Optionally, you can choose a new terrain file instead of using the default. File → Set Terrain File.
2. Select an area of your world (Right-click + drag) and go to File → Publish to Sketchfab.
3. Enter your API Token, model title, description, tags, and mark it as Private or Draft as necessary.
4. Click Upload!
Processing
During the model processing, we do lots of things on our end to make the model look great.
- Enable Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) to give corners and interiors those nice shadows
- Set all textures to Nearest (mipmap) filtering to preserve the blocky Minecraft look
- Set all materials with transparency to Single-sided to help with some transparent blocks like water and grass
- Adjust PBR factors to make the materials look correct (roughness, etc.)
- Use Alpha Masking for trees to preserve blocky look and avoid draw order problems
- Adds 1% emission to maintain correct brightness after AO is added
- Adds a single directional light to create nice "sunlight"
The result:
Comments
11 comments
I have a few updates to these instructions, as Mineways 4.14 makes things simpler still:
1. File ? Open World - yes, do this
2. File ? Set Terrain File - you don't need to do this, the default terrain file is built-in; you can change this file if you wish to.
3. Navigate to your terrain file and click Open. - ditto, ignore this step.
4. Select an area of your world and go to File ? Export for Rendering.
5. Name your file and choose Wavefront, OBJ.
6. Choose your export options and click OK. See the Mineways Documentation for details. - I recommend you choose the "Create a ZIP file..." checkbox near the upper left. Then you can simply upload this ZIP to Sketchfab.
7. You will now have 4 files to upload to Sketchfab: *.obj, *.mtl, and two textures (*.png). - ... and the ZIP. 8. For best results, go to Settings ? 3D Settings ? Materials tab ? Transparency. Switch to Alpha Masking and set the texture Format to Luminance. - you no longer need to do this, as Mineways has been improved to work better with Sketchfab.
@erich - Thanks! I made these changes, including the export dialog image (you can see I upgraded to El Capitan since then...)
And yes, Zendesk has been giving me some issues with Markdown and line breaks recently. Interestingly, the "Edit" comment dialog is more robust and respects line breaks. I've fixed your comment :)
Actually, I use wine to run the 32-bit Windows version. I gave up on the Mac version, but I'll give it another go sometime.
Strange, I just tried again and I don't get that file - is it a known bug or something you just noticed from my screenshot?
I need help!!! i can's download mineways on the newest version of mac is there and alternative?
@ctk08 - I'm sorry about that. Looks like it's a known issue on the Mineways end. There are some workarounds here:
http://www.realtimerendering.com/erich/minecraft/public/mineways/downloads.html#mac
When I upload, it uploads white. How do I fix this?
yountm: could you point out the model you uploaded so that I (author of Mineways) or people at Sketchfab could examine it? I tested just now, and export to Sketchfab is working fine, both with the default Minecraft textures and with a resource pack applied. One thing I noticed is that it's usually good to refresh the page (F5) to get the textures to appear properly, but maybe I just wasn't patient enough.
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