A 3D printer that prints in Minecraft
A pipeline that takes any 3D model (STL, OBJ, even a raw 3D scan) and generates a sequence of Minecraft commands that build the model in-world, with colour support and block-palette controls.
Demo: a 3D-scanned friend, restricted to stone blocks for a statue feel.
The pipeline
- Load: Any common 3D format, including meshes, point clouds, or coloured 3D scans.
- Voxelise: Resample the model into a voxel grid at the target resolution.
- Colour-match: Map each voxel's colour to the closest Minecraft block from a configurable palette (e.g. "stone only" for a statue look).
- Emit: Generate
/setblockcommand sequences, batched so Minecraft doesn't choke when you paste them in.
What was fun about this
Minecraft's block palette is small but the colour space is real. Getting good likenesses out of stone-only or wool-only restrictions turned the project into a small exercise in palette quantisation, which, as it happens, generalises directly to image-processing problems I'd hit later.