The Minecraft Master Sword June 9th, 2011
Folks we have reached PEAK NERD.
So, you want to build an object from a much-loved Nintendo 64 game?
First, fire up your game in the 1964 emulator with the Nemu plugin for VRML extraction. Proceed through the game until your desired object is rendered on screen (it doesn’t need to be super clear – you’ll see why in a minute) and then use the plugin to dump the graphics RAM to VRML.
Fire up Meshlab and import the VRML file produced by the emulator:
Oh man! It’s the whole damn Temple of Time! That’s why the quality of the on-screen render wasn’t super important when we exported. Time to start deleting geometry:
Keep going until all that’s left is the object you want!
Export your model as a PLY file. Use ‘binvox’ to voxelize the model. the -d parameter sets the dimension of the cube inside of which the model will be rendered. The number you supply will constrain the object in “minecraft block units” on its largest axis to that number. In this case, we used 64 because I had 64 blocks of height between sea level and the build height limit.
Now use ‘viewvox’ to open up the resulting binvox file. We’re almost there!
Orient the camera to look down from above and then restrict the view to a single slice at a time:
Build that slice in minecraft, then increment the slice index and build the next slice. Continue through all 64 height layers. Build the object. Pretty soon, you have this:
