Minecraft Is Now A 3d Design Tool

[Cody Sumter] and [Jason Boggess] are students at the MIT Media Lab, and they just came up with Minecraft.Print(), an attempt to create a bridge between Minecraft and the real world via 3D Printers.

The print is first prepared by placing obsidian, diamond, gold, and iron blocks on opposite corners of the model in Minecraft. From there, a Python script takes over and parses the world map to generate an .STL file for a RepRap or MakerBot.

So far, [Cody] and [Jason] have printed a few Companion Cubes and the model of the Enterprise D. We’re pretty impressed with the resolution of the prints, especially considering the original model is voxelated. The prints look very nice, and right now we really want to print out all the cool stuff we’ve seen, like Isengardgigantic CPU, or maybe a Minecraft 3D printer.

Minecraft.Print() sure is a nice program [Cody] and [Jason] have there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it. Check out a video demo after the break.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CLfNIZ4LNo&w=450]

19 thoughts on “Minecraft Is Now A 3d Design Tool

  1. This is quite incredible (:
    But I must add the guy who created the model of the Enterprise in mine craft must have far too much time on his hands :D good job though (: you have a seriosly large amount of patience (: but im wondering how detailed the interior of this ship was created? Would be interesting to take a wander inside (:
    Now to build a 3D printer large enough to print it…

  2. point for the technical expertise to pull this off, and getting a little token from the minecraft game. but seriously, how much time did it take to build the stuff in minecraft. i tried playing it before, took forever and gave me a headache. mega points for building something like that.

  3. MCEdit allows you to do things like import files, build large swaths of blocks at a time. It’s not like they went and mined for iron then made picks then mined for the materials and then placed every single block.

  4. that was SSSOOOO!!!! f_ckin’ sweet! a game that allows you to build anything you can imagine with a printer that will (print) it for you. now for the sick people to make life size sex dolls with it….

  5. @Andy

    Hmm…in theory you’d just need a way to swap printing materials in-process.

    I could easily envision a three function printhead on a reprap. One is standard plastic, the second is a fine powder sifter that drops conductive powder onto the sticky plastic. The third does vacuum pick-n-place and you could construct a solid object with a circuit inside.

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