Minecraft: Pi Edition - Manhattan Island

How about a stroll around Manhattan? Well a stroll around Manhattan in Minecraft, perhaps admire the Empire State Building or the pay $25 to take in the view from the “top of the rock”?

Empire State Building

View from “Top of the Rock”

I decided to see how much I could push the program I wrote which uses the API in the Pi edition of Minecraft to render 3d models in the Minecraft World. It turns out I could push it a LOT, I fancied creating a city scene, and is any more dramatic than New York, Manhattan Island.

I found a Google sketchup model of Manhattan and using OBJexporter, exported the model to an OBJ file.

Sketchup 3d model of Manhattan

To give a scale of how massive this model is, previously the most complicated model I had produced in Minecraft was of a girls head, that took about 3 minutes to render, this took 1 hour 25 minutes, and that was after I had already cleared a suitably large area! The Pi took it all in its stride though and while it took a long time, there were no errors or glitches.

The model is pre 9/11, so the iconic Twin Towers still dominate the skyline.

Iconic buildings

Download and run I have updated my programto include the new york model, which you can download direct from git-hub, so run minecraft, open/create a world and follow the instructions:

sudo apt-get install git-core
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/martinohanlon/minecraft-renderObj.git
cd minecraft-renderObj
python minecraft-renderObj.py

If you want to know more about how this works and have a go yourself, head to this post, http://www.stuffaboutcode.com/2013/03/minecraft-pi-edition-create-massive-3d.html.