3D Printing and Minecraft
Why 3D Printing?
With the advance of modern technology, 3D printing has taken off the ground from its industrial level into a commercially affordable area.
As the manufacturing of these machines and printing materials gradually becoming more inexpensive due to the economy of scale, consumers from all age group may get their hands on one without breaking their bank. Starting a 3D printing hobby means that one may access an infinite amount of possibility. This ranges from designing your own project to simply creating your own toy.
With the growth of Minecraft, more and more youth joined the forces of designing and building their own worlds. They together formed a large part of the Minecraft community and supports the creativity within this massive virtual world. However, their Minecraft creations stop at the computer monitor and prevent them from further interacting with the world and the object they had created. Many of the Minecrafters dreamed of one day to touch their own creations, and here, with the aid of 3D printing, the community of Minecrafters may touch, feel, and sense their creations.
There are many reasons to try 3D printing, and with the aid of Minecraft, we believe here are the 3 main reasons why 3D should be something that everyone should try.
MineCraft as a tool
Minecraft is a great tool to work on. It provides great accessibility to younger children, and it is way more fun to work on comparing to the professional tools one may use to create sculptures. The unique pixelated form also brings a uniquely artistic feeling compare to realistic sculpts from more professional tools. If you are familiar with the mechanics behind Minecraft, simply go into the game and start creating! Anything at any size!
We recording using Creative Mode and a Flat world to create everything. This is to make it easier to transport your creations into another format - OBJ. You can download either MineWays or JMC2OBJ software to convert your Minecraft creations into OBJ files for printing.
3D Printing is Inexpensive
The first and foremost question that many people want to ask and are concerned about is the price to pay for getting a 3D printer and to get it working. It all depends on what kind of a printer you are after. If it is simply just something you want to get your hands on, the most printer can do the job. Most of these commercial printers are inexpensive, and you get one today and have it running.
This ranges from DIY kits that are sold online, to those that are sold in complete sets. If you are new to this, it would be best to start with something that cost within $500. This will allow you to have the budget to purchase better printing materials and painting tool kits for later on.
Integration of Education
Professional tools are hard to learn and requires a very steep learning curve with years of experience built up. For younger children and teeangers, this would mean countless of hours behind a computer doing practice and grinding a better results. In terms of education, beginner level 3D designs and modeling should begin with something more simpler, but at the same time offer a good result. Minecraft offers such practice, and combining the forces of 3D printing technology, it can be integrated into early classrooms for students to pratice on.
Demonstration of Work
If you are interested in our work, check out this video below! It is a brief process of how some of our 3D printed sculpts are made from printing to painting.