Learning How To Art... With Minecraft

     It looks like once again, I'm going to be talking about Minecraft and how I've developed some skills and knowledge as a result of my pursuit to be better at building in Minecraft. Last time I wrote a blog about this, it was centered on structures like trees, churches, and libraries, delving into the theories and architectural styles that inspired each build of mine. However, I haven't been building many homes as of late. Instead, I've been focusing on improving my terraforming, or building of landscapes.

    This has long been touted as one of the most difficult aspects of Minecraft building to get right, since the blocky medium doesn't translate smoothly into creating believable landscapes. Think about it, most houses and buildings you see in real life can be translated (with a little creativity) into a few cubic shapes, given a sloped shape or two. But landscapes, whether they be lush, sprawling forests or gentle sloping hills, are a little more difficult to emulate with blocks.

Early attempts

    When I first started working on my immersive world project (which I explained in the previous blog post about Minecraft), I wanted to focus more on the buildings that defined each quadrant, in order to define a vibe for each corner of the project early on. However, I couldn't just have a few floating houses and buildings, so I was forced to build a basic landscape around it. Admittedly, I wasn't super interested in working on landscaping at the time, since I knew I was pretty bad at it and even if I was decent, it's a very long, repetitive project to start working on. So I opted for a sort of staggered hills, which resembled shelves (for which I could place my buildings on).

    Don't call me bad just yet though- I did consciously research types of landscapes that would be easy to build, but did actually exist in the real world. Call me lazy, but at least I do my homework to be lazy well. The sort of landscapes that most closely resemble what I was aiming for were staggered cliffsides, The reference image I used was of the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, which were featured in the classic movie The Princess Bride.  While not exactly identical, I liked how steep the cliffsides were, since it was a simple enough shape to build, and I liked the how the moss would subtly indicate the different layers of the cliffside, as the eventually run off into the sea. 

    I'll be the first one to say that the real life picture and the Minecraft screenshot don't look alike AT ALL. Like I said, I wanted to do the bare minimum of effort for landscaping at the time, and I was rushing my work so I could focus on building structures like a market, barn, and farmer's hut. I would do a lot different now if I were to revisit this area today (which I might end up doing), specifically with the block choice, since using the same moss, dirt, stone combo that much ends up looking rather bland, with a significant lack of textures and shades. I do still like how gently the hill slopes under the grain silo building in the center of the picture, however.

    Skipping into the modern day, I've flipped and flopped between many different styles of building and terraforming between my first terraforming projects and today's efforts. I'm opting to not go into the different styles I cycled through because honestly, I'm just not that interested in those anymore. I want to talk about how I eventually ended up on the opposite end of the spectrum in my building motivations. Rather than emulating an existing environment with the awkward blocky medium of Minecraft, I want to try making less realistic, more stylized landscapes that are more befitting of Minecraft and its artstyle.

Image from the Minecraft Movie Trailer

    Interestingly, this idea popped up into my head because of the recent Minecraft Movie trailer that released a few weeks ago. While there were a lot of things in that trailer that I didn't really like or criticized, there was one shot of a STUNNING landscape that caught my eye. Again, I'm not much of a terraforming guy, but this shot of this massive stone arch over a village really stuck with me, since it achieved a wonderful deviation from traditional Minecraft terrain while still embracing the blockiness of the game into something special. This was the image that made me think about making more weird-looking terrain, and it was the start of a new age for me. 

    And so, filled with a newfound inspiration and creative rush, I experimented with terrain in the shape of several rectangular prisms made of stone. While I'd chip away and add extra bits to the shape in order to give it some variation, the base of the mountain was still blocky, just like the movie arch.

    Another thing I wanted to fix from my early attempts at terraforming was the block choice and colors. I really played around with different shades of gray being used to accentuate the lighting of the terrain (since Minecraft doesn't have a super advanced lighting engine). There are no shadows created by light in Minecraft, so I looked at what areas would be darker in real life, and I highlighted those areas with darker blocks of stone, which mimicked gentle shadows in the dark. Conversely, I used much lighter shades of gray blocks on certain sides of the cliff face to mimic how light shines off different surfaces on uneven rock formations in real-life. Even small details like using less dirt everywhere and only placing dirt on areas where the cliffside may collect sediments in the real world adds to the stylized realism of the mountain.

    Even though this is very clearly an unfinished area of my project, as evident by the big gaps of space and skeletons for future mountains, I feel much better about this style of landscaping. I've found a nice balance between stylized and realism, and simultaneously applied more understanding of colors and lighting in art to accentuate features of real-world landscapes and cliffsides into a game where they don't exist. It might not be much, but this was very creatively fulfilling for me, and I'll make sure to update on how its going soon!