Some success with MC Edit!

Posted on September 29, 2014 by Caroluna

I made a tall, skinny island that to me looks like one of those Chinese mountains

found here — The Zhangjiajie National Forest Park

My mountainous island is called Gloveria, named after a friend of mine who is a mountain climber!

I was able to “capture” it in MC Edit and move a copy of it over to another world. This is great because eventually I want to make an ocean world that has dozens of strange, varied islands.

I finally figured out you don’t have to FLY while selecting objects in MC Edit. Just start anywhere…

Click to make the yellow cursor and blue cursor appear, then “nudge” them

Keep nudging til the island is enclosed — then export it

Then when you are ready, open your destination world in MC Edit, and import the island. Gloveria is now located in an ocean, instead of floating in the Void!

“The Minecraft Parent” — article in the New Yorker

Posted on September 28, 2014 by Caroluna

Thank you to the homeschool organization Baltimore Washington Home Educators for bringing the article to my attention! Here’s an extended quote.

The Minecraft Parent

Minecraft is played by both boys and girls, unusually. Players can join together to build worlds together: airports, castles, cave systems, roller coasters, an accurate replica of Westeros. At its best, the game is not unlike being in the woods with your best friends. Parents also join in. The Internet is full of testimonials of parents playing with their kids, of children reading their first word in Minecraft, and other milestones usually performed in the analog world. This paradise is not entirely without its shadows. There are mods and different versions that introduce weapons and all manner of “Hunger Games” scenarios. You can kill and be killed. In multiplayer mode, I’ve witnessed asinine comments get typed back and forth for hours. But the foundational experience is wholesome—shredded wheat for the mind. [snip]

But Notch should feel good, as the significance of Minecraft, ultimately, is how the game shows us that lively, pleasant virtual worlds can exist alongside our own, and that they are places where we want to spend time, where we learn and socialize. There is no realistic chance of pulling the “full Amish” and living in the past—nor is that a good idea. We need to meet our kids halfway in these worlds, and try to guide them like we do in the real world. The late Robin Williams had this right. In this video, he explains why he named his daughter Zelda after the princess in The Legend of Zelda, and what’s noticeable is how free of angst the whole conversation is. The two laugh together as they recall playing the game together. Who knows how Minecraft will change under Microsoft’s ownership, but it’s a historic game that has shown many of us a middle way to navigate the eternal screens debate.

Note that this video is also a commercial for the new version of the Zelda game — but what I like about it are the interactions between Robin and his daughter. The last couple of minutes is them cracking up together.

Lots of little squares

Posted on September 26, 2014 by Caroluna

I just discovered this while goofing around in Microsoft Paint. If you take a section of a picture

and resize it by the maximum amount (500%) and then the maximum amount again, you get…..

Lots of little squares! This sort of pattern could be the inspiration for a mosaic, a quilt, or something in Minecraft.

There is software that will allow you to do the same thing in a much more complicated way. It’s called Spritecraft. Not only does it break your picture into little squares, it also translates the colors into the Minecraft approximations (using colors of wool, clay, etc). It doesn’t build the object for you, you have to build it yourself using the pattern it gives you.

http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding/minecraft-tools/1261370-tool-spritecraft-turn-images-into-minecraft

Here is a Minecraft mosaic of Notch from that link above.

Absent friend

Posted on September 25, 2014 by Caroluna

This is one of those off-topic posts.

The reason I got interested in computer graphics software was because of a friend of mine, with the appropriately cosmic name of Denny Ray. I met Denny on an Irish Traditional Music forum. Chiff and Fipple contains many sub-forums that are related to Irish music in varying degrees, and one sub forum, the “Post-structural Pub”, was particularly miscellaneous. Denny had joined when the forum was still fairly new. Along with his trademark dry humor, Denny also liked to post links to unusual scientific discoveries, TED videos, and odd news in general. And, every single day without fail, he posted a link to the APOD — Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Every time he posted the APOD picture, people in the Poststructural Pub would comment on it. Some of the comments were serious, some were silly, and some were visual puns and jokes.

It became my goal to make Denny laugh. I started making visual spoofs on the APOD pictures, and had so much fun doing it that I bought a graphics tablet and software so that I could make better ones.

Original APOD

Caroluna tries to make Denny laugh

Doing these computer graphics projects became a big part of my daily routine, and a part of my identity.

Later on when I got a job that involved working with MS Publisher, it was much easier to tackle that software because I had already beat my head bloody against the keyboard trying to get Corel Painter to work.

So I have Denny to thank, for my willingness to push through the frustration of learning new software. As I try to learn MC Edit, WorldPainter and Avanti, I say a silent thank you to Denny.

And it has to be a silent thank you, because Denny is no longer with us. He passed away about 2 years ago. I still think of him when I read anything about astronomy, or when I listen to a TED talk, or watch a NOVA program about quantum mechanics. I also think of him whenever I see draft horses, because he and his wife raised Shire horses.

Hello Denny where ever you are, and thank you for the ways you influenced my life.

We miss you.

New header

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Caroluna

I made a new blog header today to reflect some changes. Instead of just saying “a Minecraft blog”, now the tagline is “Minecraft and more”.

The things I enjoy about Minecraft connect with — fantasy art, art software, the world of gaming, girl geekery, science fiction, documentaries about creative people, Volvox, magnetars, ….

Magnetar found here

I’m having a great time collecting material for this blog, and I’ve been learning a lot. Right now I’m so frustrated with MC Edit that I’m ready to start learning Python so I could write a mod for the stupid thing. (Cartesian coordinates!! Really guys, would that be so hard?!)

World in a bubble

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Caroluna

I’m still experimenting with variations on the “Volvox” theme (the crystal balls with green things inside them). What if the green things inside the crystal balls were actual islands? For my first attempt, the island was much too large. When I put the dome around it, the dome was so large that it extended into the “you can’t build below this point” zone.

These experiments with “things inside of domes” have been reminding me of the movie “The Fountain”.

There is a tree (or is it a person?) inside of a dome (or is it a spaceship?)…or was the whole thing a dream? I’m not sure, but it was a beautiful movie — I highly recommend it. Very cosmic.

The special effects of this movie were done in an unusual way. Instead of computer graphics special effects, they used a more organic method — blobs of fluid in petri dishes.

Parks and his son run a home f/x shop based on a device they call the microzoom optical bench. Bristling with digital and film cameras, lenses, and Victorian prisms, their contraption can magnify a microliter of water up to 500,000 times or fill an Imax screen with the period at the end of this sentence. Into water they sprinkle yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge… The upshot is that Parks can make a dash of curry powder cascading toward the lens look like an onslaught of flaming meteorites. “When these images are projected on a big screen, you feel like you’re looking at infinity,” he says. “That’s because the same forces at work in the water – gravitational effects, settlement, refractive indices – are happening in outer space.”

article here:
http://nofilmschool.com/2013/05/microscopic-cosmic-organic-vfx-fountain-tree-life

And here is a short film clip where you can see the layers being added.

Back to my own little domes!

These landscapes are real!

Posted on September 22, 2014 by Caroluna

The blog io9 has such cool stuff. This article has a series of unusual landscape photos that (to me!) look like they could be from Minecraft.

http://io9.com/satellite-images-of-agricultural-fields-make-the-earth-1637547151

These crazy circular patterns are because of something called “center pivot irrigation”. From Wiki —

Center-pivot irrigation (sometimes called central pivot irrigation), also called waterwheel and circle irrigation, is a method of crop irrigation in which equipment rotates around a pivot and crops are watered with sprinklers. A circular area centered on the pivot is irrigated, often creating a circular pattern in crops when viewed from above.

If you would like to make your own variation, here is a template for making circles in Minecraft…

http://forums.arresteddevelopmentclan.com/download/file.php?id=523

If you click on the link, you will get a much larger version of this.

Land and Sea Squid finally meet

Posted on September 21, 2014 by Caroluna

Not sure what these creatures are in Minecraft, but IRL they look a lot like the Hawaiian Bob-tailed Squid and the air plant Tillandsia bulbosa. I can’t imagine why!

Volvox Globatoria

Posted on September 20, 2014 by Caroluna

A short entry today, due to other responsibilities. Here’s Volvox Globatoria, a World In Progress.

Inspiration from here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvox

These are mother colonies with daughter colonies inside. Sometimes even granddaughter colonies!

Here’s a challenge — the Minecraft version would look much more realistic if there were different shades of green. There is such a thing as green glass, also green clay. I don’t see those options in MC Edit, because they are a fairly new addition to Minecraft. But maybe there is a way to use the numerical codes for these kinds of blocks?

“Blender” — amazing free software

Posted on September 20, 2014 by Caroluna

A friend of mine is studying Game Design in college. When I asked him what he was up to this week, he said he was building a door in a blender.

Or something like that. After asking more questions I found out that he is learning to use some software called Blender. It is FREE and PROFESSIONAL LEVEL — people actually make games with it. Hard to believe? Well, check this out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_%28software%29

Blender is a professional free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, interactive 3D applications and video games. Blender’s features include 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, raster graphics editing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animating, match moving, camera tracking, rendering, video editing and compositing. Alongside the modeling features it also has an integrated game engine.

I watched a few of the tutorial videos. This is some very very very deep software (I mean, it will do a billion and one things). But there were also some tutorial videos that were more approachable — they were mini-projects. “How to make a landscape” “how to make a fuzzy stuffed bear” “how to make a planet bursting into pieces”. For some reason these reminded me of the old Bob Ross painting shows on TV…

…which gives you an idea how old I am, since he passed on to the land of Happy Happy Trees back in 1995. Anyway, the Bob Ross classes were formulaic (here’s how to paint a tree, here’s how to paint a mountain) — not “real” oil painting. But they got you elbow-deep into the paint, and you could continue learning from there.

Here are two of the Blender tutorial vids I watched this evening. This one is on how to build an island…

and this next one is an inspirational video on the creative process itself — encouraging you to just get out there and try stuff, and not worry if people criticize it…because, they will. So don’t let that stop you.

“I guarantee you, no matter how good you get in your art, or how correct you think you might be in your art, there is ALWAYS going to be somebody who says that it’s not the way it should be. Because for those people, they think art should conform to a certain thing.”

Thank you to my friend the Padawan Learner in Computer Graphics. Best of luck in your Jedi training, and thanks for telling me about Blender!

Horsetail Nebula

Minecraft, and more

Monthly Archives: September 2014