Prototype by Clíona Faichney, Digital Media Graduate | Cambridge, Anglia Ruskin University

I decided that I wanted to see how we could view the world, and how the users interacting with the content could experience what we made. To this end, I endeavored to look into how to take what we made and export it to different mediums. This was indeed helped by working in Minecraft to create the world itself, utilizing a variety of mods and plugins, and free content assets that helped us bring it to life as our own little approximation.

Looking around the world gave me small model village vibes, which then led me to the idea with other team members of making our own physical interactive elements.

With the idea that "What if we could 3d print models we make to use for interactivity", this conceptual idea I then spent some time trying to figure out how I would get the data, would I have to recreate the models in Blender or is there any way of taking the data from Minecraft.

This led me into looking back into the modding and plugin sites and forums we used for building the Minecraft world and I discovered this program called "Mineways" which allowed me to load a Minecraft world and extrapolate 3d imagery from it.

This was confusing to learn but ultimately quite worth the effort, as the program was able to generate full models of the buildings and the world. Through a painful trial and error process I managed to get models to print. However, this through up an issue in that I got too much data and it had created interiors that would not print well, leaving me having to rethink the idea of 3D-printed models.

The sheer time it would take to clean up the models generated for 3d printing would have been too much for my time frame, so resolved to just make their digital assets that I was able to use and other project members could utilize in their work.

This mirrored what I had been attempting with physical interactive model prototypes, to get different ways of experiencing the world. I began trying to make the basis for a map using a file provided to me of height image data that was converted to a 3D printable format.

This went through some iterations, that helped to showcase a model approximation of the world that I would have used the 3d model prints to control aspects of the interactivity. With more time and effort I'm sure this would be entirely possible.

Rethinking my approach, I decided to go big and managed to generate and export a full world map made in the program, fully 3D that once imported into Blender, I could light the textured objects and create renders to showcase our work.

The render quality could be increased but this would also require better hardware and would take longer to do so. Though it is also wholly possible, to print this as well if the interiors weren't included, it could simply be made in pieces and then glued together.

As you can see my exploration in 3D was interesting and certainly challenged me to what I could do, what could be done, and why should we limit ourselves to storytelling via traditional methods when we can innovate and experiment and overall, just have fun while doing it.