BlockBlender 1.41 - How to use it

so to get started with block blender version 1.41 you're going to need to download and install blender so if you haven't done that already you can go to blender.org go to this download page right here and what you want to get is either 3.5 or 3.6 so 3.6.2 will work also that's the one that I'm using in this video so once you download and install blender then you can actually download block blender either on gumroad or on blender Market this is gumroad right here and as you can see there is a free version you have to click to select which one you want if you haven't used blender before I definitely recommend getting the free version first to try it out because I don't want you to get the full version and then feel like I ripped you off but anyway if you get the free version you can just type zero in right here and then click this button or if you want you can still pay for it even though it's free full version is twenty dollars US dollars but depending on the region you're in um might change price that's just the thing that gumroad does it tries to make this like equivalent to how much it's worth in your country so I've seen it as low as like six dollars so definitely check that out but anyway once you press this button it will send you to a download page right here so as you can see this is the add-on it says add-on right here and it's a zip file this file right here is a blend file that means you can open it with blender and it's basically just a bunch of examples and stuff like that so you can download that too if you'd like but definitely download the zip because that's what we're going to be using in this video so then once you get into blender you need to install it that's pretty easy you just go up to edit preferences add-ons and then install right here and yours is probably going to be in the downloads folder mine is somewhere else so I'll just find it really quickly so right here we have two different zip files and you want to make sure that you don't open them up just leave them like this that's how the add-on works but we have the free version and the full version so you can select whichever one you downloaded and then click install and then you just want to make sure that it's enabled so that it has a check like that and then you can also save preferences down here so that every time you open blender it will be installed and enabled and then once you do that when you're hovering over the viewport right here you can press n to open up the side panel and you'll see that there's like a block blender tab right here and you'll have all these options if for some reason you don't want to use the add-on there are other ways to use it you can also append it to your file or you can use the asset library and if you want to learn about that you can watch this video I'll put it in the description you can just check that out I explain it there I'm pretty sure it's like right in the beginning of the video I recommend using the the add-on though before we actually get started I just want to talk about these buttons down here we have frequently asked questions and my Discord server so this is going to be helpful for if you're a beginner and you're just getting started you can click this button and it will send you to this page right here where it's just a whole list of questions that people have asked me that I tried to answer here so check this first if you have any questions and then if you don't find your answer you can click the Discord button and ask me there but this will will have a lot of stuff and I will be covering like some of these questions in this video so the very basics of it is you select an object you want to make sure that it's a mesh object and you'll know it's a mesh if when you select it over up here in the outliner you can see that there's this like triangle icon that means it's a mesh and it's the correct type of object if it's like an empty or a camera or a light or something like that like as you can see in this Castle right here this is a different icon that means that it's an empty and that's not going to be able to convert because it's just kind of like a reference object it has no real geometry or anything like that but anyway what you want to do is select your object and then you can click this button turn select it into blocks and it will turn into blocks that's the very basics of it let's just select the mesh right here and then you can press this button it's like a little wrench to go to the modifier panel this is where a lot of the options are for Block blender if we scroll to the very bottom you can see that there are a ton of categories right here and this is the main difference between the free and the the paid version is that this is the paid version right here it has all these um different selections that you can choose for blocks the free version doesn't have that it just lets you choose a single block right here which if you if you check this right here it just lets you turn everything into one block like that so the free version has that but it doesn't have all of these other options because it only has like 32 blocks which should be enough to test things out and get colors that are close enough so that you can actually tell that they're the same as your object but that's the main difference everything else is going to be pretty much the same so as you can see right now this is just glass because we haven't selected an image for it to use as a color so our beach ball you can see we can hide it right here or we can press this hide button and it's going to basically do the same thing we also have a remove button if you just want to remove it completely let's just turn it back though so we need to select an OB we need to select an image to make sure that it's the right color and to make sure that you're using the right image you can go to this right here material you can see this is our beach ball material go to surface you want to look at the base color press this Arrow you can see we have two things plugged into it right here let's check the first one and this one is an image you can tell because this little icon right here looks like a picture frame that means that it's an image and this is just called scene root base color so so that's the one that we're gonna try seeing root base color and that's the one that's going to turn it the correct color so this is very low resolution right now so basically what we have to do is just scale it up there are a few ways that we can do this we can tab into edit mode just press tab or you can change that up here to go into edit mode press a to select everything and then s to scale it up like this and when it's the scale that you want you can just left click like that and now it's bigger a thing to notice is that all of the blocks are the same size as they were before and the object is getting bigger so a different way to do that let's just press Ctrl Z to back out of here is you can come over here and you can change the block size instead so one meter blocks is how big the blocks are in Minecraft so that's why it's set to one meter right here but if you want you can make this smaller and basically it's just going to make the block smaller but the object is going to stay the same size so that's another way to kind of to increase the resolution we also have model scale right here so you can just turn this up like that so if you use model scale and then you go into edit mode and look at the wireframe you'll see that this is still very small so this is kind of it's not actually scaling it it's a non-destructive way of doing it which is good if you just want to scale things up pretty fast it's good for beginners who they just see scale right here they turn it up and it actually makes the thing bigger but if you want to be able to like edit it and have it be the same scale then I recommend just scaling it up in edit mode like I showed you first the other way of scaling is actually an object mode so if you select your object and press s to scale you can see it's getting bigger but the blocks are also getting bigger which is not what we want a thing to notice is this little panel right here shows the scale and the dimensions so typically you want your scale to always be one so when we scale this up you can see the scale is getting bigger like that the dimensions are also getting bigger so if we turn this up to around 10 like that and then we apply the scale what's going to happen is the scale will turn back to one but the dimensions should stay the same so we can apply the scale and now our model has uh has changed so that the the blocks are now one meter blocks and it's about 10 blocks across that's what the dimensions are showing us basically how many blocks are in each Direction but that is another way of doing it you can just scale it up in object mode and then apply the scale like that also works when you scale it it also works when you rotate it which is a problem that some people have they might notice that their blocks are rotated at a weird angle or whatever all you have to do is press this button to apply the rotation and uh and then it will work so let's talk about uh converting errors now because a lot of people have been complaining about getting error messages which is something I need to fix in the future but I haven't had enough time to do it lately I've been kind of busy with other stuff so let's just talk about where they happen and why they happen and how to avoid it so like I said before you want to make sure that you're converting meshes and they're going to have this triangle icon so check out a different one this Castle right here you can see has a lot of empties that's what these little like y-shaped icons are and if we select one of those and try to convert it we're going to get that error because you can't convert an empty into blocks you can't convert it into a mesh it just doesn't work that way because they're just these like little reference objects that have no geometry it's also not going to work if you have if you have an Armature selected it's not going to work if you have an empty or a light or a camera it's also going to give you an error so just make sure that you always have a mesh selected let's talk about uh this join selected objects this is going to be helpful for models like this that are made up of a bunch of different objects right here so basically what we want to do is you want to just select a piece of the mesh then you can press a to select everything else or you can just like select it and then click and drag to box select like that when you have everything selected then you can press join selected objects but before you do that make sure that the active selection the one that's yellow right here is actually a mesh that's selected because like I said before if you have an empty as your active selection when you try to do this it's going to give you an error also so uh now we can press this and it will join all of them into a single object like that another thing to pay attention to is if this is parented to anything and as we can see over here well a quick way to find your object that's selected over here let's just select it hover over here and press period on the number pad and it will find it for you so it's actually parented to this empty right here which might make the scale or rotation a little weird and I'll show you what I mean when we select this you can see that the dimensions are like less than the size of a block so when we turn this into blocks it should be invisible but it won't be because the size of the empty is different and that's what it's parented to so let's press Ctrl Z select everything and just apply the scale of everything and now it should work properly another thing we can also do is just delete all of the empties so we can do that by selecting this object then pressing Ctrl I that's just going to invert the selection so it's selecting everything else now and then X to delete those now we can turn this into blocks so this is another problem that people run into where they turn something into blocks and it just disappears and like I said before that's because the dimensions right here are less than the size of a block so let's turn it into blocks again tab into edit mode with everything selected we can just scale it up and you can see when it gets big enough then you'll actually be able to see blocks like that or as I said before you can also just make the block size smaller I recommend leaving the block size set to to one meter just because it's the same as Minecraft you'll actually get like an accurate scale but let's scale this up anyway and before we apply the textures to this I just want to talk about this last button convert to mesh so this is good for if you have an object that has a bunch of other modifiers like we have all these modifiers whenever you convert something to a mesh it's going to apply all the modifiers and make it so that when you go into edit mode you can actually edit everything everything that you're seeing it's also good for if you have curves and you want to turn them into a mesh so let's hide this really quickly and I'll just bring in a curve scale it up and we can give it some thickness over here like that and so you can see the icon is different this means that it's a curve object and not a mesh this actually will turn into blocks just fine but if you have this and you have like a mesh object and you want to turn both of them into like if you want to join them together you're not going to be able to join them together because they're two different object types and you're probably going to get an error or like nothing's going to happen as you can see right here nothing is just happening so let's just convert this to a mesh you can see that the icon changed and now if we want we can join these into one object so this is just useful for like I said converting things into a mesh and applying modifiers and now this will turn into one object like that I'm just going to delete that go back to our castle and let's talk about if you have multiple images and you want to apply the color to it so let's just select this and go over to the materials and you can see that it has a bunch of different materials so that means that we're going to have to give it a few different images and luckily I know this one is already made of images we'll talk about if you don't have an image texture to use we'll talk about that a little later but to make sure that you're putting these one thing about using multiple images like this is you have to make sure that you put them in the right order or else it's not going to work right so to make sure that you're doing it in the right order you just want to put them in the same order as they're appearing over here and if you want to be able to like reference it quickly without jumping back and forth between these two tabs a lot you can right click where two windows meet and then until split like that we can just make a new window so one of these is going to show us the materials the other one's going to show us our our modifier panel right here so let's do what we did before and just look at the base color you can see the first thing is just an image called material base color so let's set that material base color so part of it is uh is right now but we need to fill in the other ones so let's check the second one and we can see that this is .002 base color and luckily I know with this one that all of the images are the same names as the materials so I'm just going to go through really quickly and just put them in this order so zero zero two base color zero zero one zero zero three and then zero zero four and now it should look correct we can scale it up a little to see it in a slightly higher resolution like that and just to show you what I mean that like it doesn't work if you do it in the wrong order let's just like put these backwards or something like that okay so these are all the correct images for this object but I put them backwards and as you can see this it just doesn't look right so you have to make sure that you're putting them in the correct order as we see over here and if you'd rather not deal with this whole thing or if you have like a ton of images there is another way to do it and I will talk about baking textures that's what you would need to do I'll talk about baking textures a little later so let's join this back up we can just right click where the windows meet join areas and I'll drag it down like that okay a thing I forgot to mention is that you can choose different block selections so if you're on a server that's still using 1.17 and you don't want to include newer blocks you can select this there is a little problem that might arise if you're switching this a lot so let's just set this to 1.19 and try to turn this into blocks I'll show you what I mean and how to fix it so let's bring back the beach ball right here and let's turn this into blocks and as you can see it will turn white so this is a thing that might happen and it's pretty easy to fix basically you can just remove the modifier from this object like that then come over here and find all of the blocks that you had imported you can just select both of those right click and delete hierarchy like that and now when you try to convert things it should work fine like that so if you're ever getting that problem just delete all of the blocks and then turn it into blocks again okay so let's talk about if you just want to use custom colors so for that there's a palette that I have included you can either use it to color something completely from scratch or if you want you can actually mix the color with the existing color so let's mix with the existing color right here first basically what we need to do is just select the object go over here to the material and then we can create a new material material right there and then what I'm going to choose is called full palette material that's just gonna make it so that we can see a little better then I'm just going to hide the the modifier really quickly and we can tab into edit mode and I'm just going to select part of the mesh that I want to change say for instance the blue doesn't look right to you so you can just select all the parts that are blue and then assign right here make sure that you have the second material selected and press assign and you can see that it has already changed now let's uh let's turn this back on and we can actually select the second image so that's going to be full palette right here and now we can choose the color so to choose the color you can go over to UV editing right here the one that I want to look at is either going to be called full palette right here or you can choose full palette block reference so full palette is just going to look it's just going to show you the texture that it's actually using the one that I like to use is the block reference right here there's also an isometric one where you can see like all of the the corners like all of the sides so I'm just going to select this right here and I want to make it a Blue Block so wherever you drag this is going to change those colors if you want to be a solid color you can just press s to scale it down and scale it to zero so it's going to be like a single point now and we can just drag this over whatever block color we want so so you can just drag this to select whatever block you want basically so if we wanted we could make this like Emerald or whatever amethyst just to show you how it works if you're doing it from scratch let's just bring in a Taurus right here and turn it into blocks just going to tab into edit mode and scale it up so it's quite a bit bigger and now we can again select full palette right here and we can go over to the UV editor so if you don't have it already unwrapped like this one's going to already be unwrapped but if you don't have it unwrapped you have a few options in edit mode make sure make sure that you're in edit mode right here you can press U and then I would recommend either smart UV project and the default settings should probably be fine or you can do projected from view so projected from view is basically just going to make the UV Islands over here the same shape as however like whatever Direction you're looking so let's look from the top and project it again you can see it's a little different now but uh wherever you move this is going to change the colors over here so let's just select this and instead of scaling it all the way down let's just scale it on the X direction right here and we can make it a gradient let's just make it a black and white gradient by dragging it over here and I'll scale that press s and Y to scale it in the y direction and you can see now that it is dark on this side and light on that side right there so that's how you do that and if for instance you want part of it to be a different color you can just select that part and move that somewhere else like this and these can be gradients too colorful gradients you can just pull them across the colors like that there you go so that's how you do that let's talk about color attributes you can see down here we have an option to use color attributes but when we check it it's just going to turn into glass at the beginning so by default the color attributes are going to be called color like this so but if you decide that you're going to change the name of it then you want to make sure that the name is correct here you can tell the name of your UV map and the color by pressing this button right here it's the object data properties it's like a it says data so we have UV Maps right here and so you can see that's the name that we have for our UV map that's the one that we should be using here color attributes we don't have one yet but we can add one and it's going to be called color by default so that's the one that we want to use here also so let's turn this on and a few ways that you can do it you can either go into sculpt mode or vertex paint mode sculpt mode is the the new way of doing it and you can just scroll down until you see paint right here and then it should use these colors at the top or the first color anyway so you can paint it white blue you have the radius right here which is going to change the size of the brush or you can press F and we have the strength right here so let's just turn the strength all the way up to make it like a solid just full strength color like that this is going to be like a good way of making gradients also if you don't use the gradient tool which I'll show later so this is a fun thing to do you can also go to vertex paint and this is basically going to work the same way if it doesn't crash right now and this is basically going to work the same way we have a few different tools over here to use if you want to blur it or whatever but yeah this just works the same way so let's go back now how to do color attributes let's just go through all of the different modifier options right here so I already talked about the color attribute block size let's get rid of this and I'll explain it with some other ones so we have keep centered and basically what that's going to do is it's going to lift it up to this line right here and it's going to center it in every direction this only this doesn't work like an object mode or you're still able to move it around in object mode but if if you move it in edit mode it will always snap back to that point right there so this is just a quick way of like if you're modeling a house and you want to make sure that it's all centered and it's a top of the ground then that's a quick way of doing that next we have interior and exterior thickness so for that let's look at the beach ball and I'll talk about another issue that these can solve so for interior thickness that's going to be like how many blocks thick this is if we go into object mode and look or whatever go into wireframe mode it's kind of hard to tell but this is hollow right now and if we turn this up you can kind of see it's it's changing it's just getting thicker on the inside you can also tell in material preview by just flying inside of it that is hollow so exterior thickness is just going to put the thickness on the outside instead and one good thing about exterior thickness is um it solves another issue that people run to a lot where uh if we delete part of our mesh so that it has a hole in it right here you can see now that it's like if we delete part of our mesh so that it has a hole in it you can see that it kind of breaks the reason for this is that it basically has no thickness anymore it can't tell what's inside and what's outside so it doesn't really know where to put the blocks but if you use exterior thickness it should solve that it's going to inflate it a little by like one block but otherwise you would have to make sure that all of the holes are completely closed up which can be kind of hard to do manually so that's a way to get around it another thing that another reason for why when you convert it into blocks it might just disappear is uh that it has a hole in it so just use exterior thickness for that so let's back up close that hole and uh let's talk about fill interior which as you might have guessed is just going to completely fill it so it's not Hollow anymore delete Alpha is useful for if you're trying to turn images into blocks so I do already have a few images right here let's do it with this face right here we can turn it into blocks once again it's a plane so it has no thickness that means we just have to give it exterior thickness and it will turn into blocks let's tap into edit mode and just scale this up and we need to make sure that it's using the right image so this one's called real Steve and now it's working properly but this was a transparent image so the background is made of glass but if we check delete Alpha then all of the glass will disappear it will still include other types of glass it's basically looking for when something is completely transparent and you can see some of the blocks are sideways so again apply the rotation that's going to solve that another thing to talk about with uh images is the auto resolution and subdivide so by default Auto resolution will be turned on which for most things should make it so that the colors are accurate if you turn it off basically just going to treat it's going to look at the faces and give each face a color that's like closest to the image so this only has one face right now and that's why it's not appearing it's probably seeing it as transparent or something but when you turn auto resolution up or when you turn it on then it should be a little more accurate if it's not accurate like if this is really low then you can just turn it a little higher but be warned that this will get kind of slow when you turn it high it will get more precise but it'll be slower or you can use subdivide mesh which when we turn this up usually the maximum I'll turn it up to is like seven and this can be pretty good for images or if that your object is made out of quads but um basically what it's doing is similar to when you're in edit mode and you right click and subdivide it right here it's like doing that so this would be subdivision one this would be two it's going to like quadruple the faces like every time basically so that's another thing that can help you get more accurate colors but it will also get really slow especially if you set this high so turn it up one at a time and it'll probably work fine for you a show height is just gonna show how many blocks tall it is and that will change in real time as you scale it up like that this should be the same as the Z value over here so this third one right here is always going to be the same like that it should be anyway next we have join all parts this is another thing like if you hover over it it's going to tell you what it does and it's going to tell you that it's slow also so this is another thing that can make the colors more accurate and I have an example made right here okay so let's turn this into blocks and we also want to use I think I'm using a 1024 palette it's a different palette that I have for the color let's just select everything and scale it up so you can see this is not really looking the same way right here and the reason for that is if we tab into edit mode and select this this is actually just an entire sphere and if we hide that and and hide this one also you can see that there's also another hidden sphere inside that's a that's a different color so that's why it's like white also sometimes a thing that can happen is it's trying to check like where what color to make the blocks and so it's looking for the closest mesh and what color it is and so the the white sphere that's inside it can't really tell which one's closer like if the white or the red is closer so sometimes it's using one sometimes it's using the other join all parts is basically going to remove all of the geometry that's inside so we can check that and now you can see there's like less gradation and it's basically just ignoring the white sphere inside so this is pretty helpful for specific types of models it will make things a lot slower but sometimes it's necessary for accuracy make instances real at this point well originally it was for helping with exporting and it was trying to make things faster so if you uncheck this it will probably get quite a bit slower so I recommend leaving this checked and also if you want to turn this into a mesh like we can convert it into a mesh right here you have to make sure that this is also checked if we uncheck this and convert it into a mesh it's not going to work it's just going to disappear so yeah this is not really very useful at this point and I might get rid of it in the future show layers is useful for if you want to try to build something by hand so if you wanted to build the castle you could turn on show layers and it's basically just going to show you each layer so this is the first layer this would be the first two layers so the second one and you would be able to build it like stack by Stack if you choose to do that instead of exporting it so let's set this back to one turn it off so I have this uh model of Steve by the way all of these models are just like free models that I got from sketchfab and I'll try to link them down below let's turn this into blocks and this one's probably going to be called Steve it's not let's see what it's called default base color Okay so let's look at the noise now basically this is just going to randomize the colors so we don't get as much like solid patches like this so we can turn the strength up and the higher we turn it the more it's going to change 0.5 is usually the maximum them I'll go but it really depends so you can change that if you want W is just going to change the pattern but it's not going to change the scale so if we change the scale if we want we can make it a lot smaller like 0.1 and you can see now the shapes are quite a bit bigger and more noticeable I mean this is what I mean when I say the W will change the pattern but it won't change the scale like it's never going to make like if it's not already really big splotches like that it's not going to make it bigger bigger or smaller splotches by changing the w detail is going to make these less soft and less round like that roughness is uh similar if you've used the noise uh the noise node in like geometry nodes or Shader nodes then you'll understand what all this does distortion is another similar thing it's just going to push it around a little more change color basically what it's going to do right now this is mostly just making it lighter or darker colors but if we choose change color we will actually get some random color in there which can be nice for things especially if you're coloring things manually like from scratch it can be helpful to just make things solid colors and then change it with noise over here so we turn this up you can see we're getting a little color variation like right there stuff like that then we have block selection which is just going to let us decide which blocks we want to use so let's turn this back to zero and yeah we have a bunch of different types of blocks you can hover over over them to get descriptions what I like to do usually is just use like the first three or four and if you want to see what is in all of these you can just look over here in this collection you just have to turn it on and you can see like what all of the the blocks are in here if you want you can move them around it's not going to save the next time you open it but you can move them around so that brings us to the next one which is like changing block categories I already have ones at the bottom that are just called unstable and unused so we can we can take a look at those so in unstable that's things like ice that might melt shulker boxes that are gonna like move or like visually will despawn like at a different distance things like TNT and coral Coral dyes so but yeah so if you want you can use those if you're in a creative world or something we also have unused which has some other things that I just don't really like seeing the skulk Catalyst and the dried kelp block I think they just usually end up messing messing up how things look so if for some reason to preview the blocks being changed let's use a different model I'm just going to bring in uh the palette so I'm using images as planes and that's just something again that you can turn on uh in the add-ons that's it's built in by default so you can use that okay so let's turn this into blocks full palette and exterior thickness I'm going to turn auto resolution off and turn this up to seven and I'll just scale it up so we can actually see like a whole bunch of blocks now and this will be helpful for letting us see what we're removing so for instance if you don't want any of these bee hives or the B nests then what you want to do is you just want to make sure that this is enabled so you can actually see things in here and then you can just search for B nest and beehive we can just select them over here press M to move and then you want to move them to well you can move them to whatever collection you want but I'm going to move them to unused right here as long as we have unused not enabled then they should go away so let's do it for these ones over here also move that to unused and now they're gone so it's not being used anymore we always have the option to turn it back on if you want or you can move them back you can see the kelp blocks in there too so yeah move them around if you if you don't want to use them I don't have a way of saving those selections right now so unfortunately that's just the thing you'll have to do each time or you can maybe just save a file and just keep coming back to the same file for uh for your objects but yeah you can search up here then you can clear the selection to bring everything else back okay so for the next one I want to talk about optimizing like making things faster so right here we have a city and I'm just going to turn this into blocks but first I'm going to apply the scale and make sure all of these are joined together and I'm going to delete this okay let's bring this back to the start turn this into blocks okay so right now if we try to edit any of this it's probably going to get pretty slow like for instance if we want to like change the blocks you can see it's it's kind of delaying a little bit and if we make it bigger it's going to be even worse so let's actually make it bigger I'm going to save it in case it crashes yeah so you can see how slow it's moving right now and there are a few ways to optimize it that I I already have it in the FAQ but I'll tell you here also so the first thing is just make it smaller a thing you can do is uh temporarily just like make the block size bigger so you could do that by making this like a two and now it's a little faster right here obviously you can make it bigger if you want but I'll set this back to one you can also turn off auto resolution and that will make it a lot faster it's already moving faster basically if you have Auto resolution off or you have the resolution low it's going to be faster if you have subdivide subdivide mesh turned off or lower it's going to be faster make instances real if you have this checked it will be faster typically join all parts is very slow so don't use that unless you have to and I think that's kind of it those are all the ways to make it faster next we should talk about baking so I actually already baked this off screen but I can show you with a different model just to make it a little easier we have this fruit bowl right here and it is made of multiple objects and it is parented to an empty so as always select a part of the mesh press a then we can uh let's apply the scale and rotation join selected objects and let's delete this let's make this quite a bit bigger you can see the dimensions right there that's how many blocks wide it's going to be so let's turn this into blocks apply the scale and we have quite a few materials so if you wanted to you actually could go through and place all of them here I think there are only 10. but it's going to be a lot easier to just bake it most of the time so that's what uh this bake button is for so if you don't see it like if yours doesn't say bake a texture or if it's not there then you need to save your file that's another bug that I haven't been able to figure out how to fix but yeah make sure that you save it otherwise it doesn't know where to place the texture that it makes and also if you don't have it installed it will send you to the site where you can download it well it'll actually send you to the FAQ right here and it'll tell you how to install it in the GitHub page is right here so you can check that out and then basically all you have to do is select your object and if it has any modifiers or anything like that then you want to make sure that you apply those first or as I said before you can also just click convert to mesh this one doesn't have any modifiers so we don't have to worry about that but most things you should be able to just select them and click bake texture and this is going to create a texture that's like a thousand pixels by thousand pixels you can see already that it saved it so the place that it saves it is going to be wherever this file that you're using wherever that file is so you can see up here like the file path and if I open it up you can see that it named it the same name as the OB as the object over here except it has three dots in front of it the reason for the three dots is that when we turn this into blocks it just makes it so it's at the very top right here you can see we have that one and now the the colors should be correct let's just uh scale this up a little more so we can see it and yeah the colors are are matching a little better now one thing that happens with this is that you're not going to be able to see your materials here anymore the reason for that is because sometimes the materials can interfere with the the image that you're using right here because like I said when you have multiple materials and multiple images you want to make sure that it's in the same order that it's appearing over here and using this it wouldn't be the same order so basically we just have to remove all of these materials but it does it automatically so yeah this you can tell that's a pineapple it might not be the most accurate and so if you want it to be more accurate you can do it manually with the bakelab add-on that you downloaded this is just my attempt at doing like a one-click solution so that it's just choosing all of the the settings that I think will work for most people so it might not work for every model you might have to unwrap it and do some stuff like that or you can just use these settings over here to change things basically all you want to do is is bake to a diffuse map that's just going to go into look at the color of the object it's going to ignore the roughness and things like that but if you want you can mess with these settings to get something a little more specific you can change the resolution things like that so now we can talk about exporting so if you don't have the exporter installed already then this will send you to the page where you can get it and I didn't make the exporter so you can see right here it says it's made by Brian and uh you can click that to go to the gumroad page to download it so I didn't make it I am in contact with Brian to help him like make sure that it works with block blender properly but I don't decide what price it is I don't really know how it works that well so definitely ask him questions about that or like if you're mad that it costs a lot don't tell me about it because like I can't change that you can talk to him about it he made it I didn't make it I get a lot of questions about it and like I didn't make it so yeah you can get it here and then once you install it then we'll have this export schematic button basically you just need to select your object and then click this button and it will give you some options on the side also if you want to like rotate it or scale it up things like that and then you can just decide where you want to save it it's going to save as a DOT skem file like that and then you can use a program like uh like light matica I'm not going to show you how to do it just because like the way that I learned how to do it is I just searched how to use light Magica how to install lightmatica things like that I just searched for it and I'm not like an expert at using that program that plugin so you can just look it up basically you just put it in a folder that it tells you to use and then you can bring things into Minecraft I've shown it a little in other videos so you can check those out if you want but yeah that will help you actually bring it directly into Minecraft it will work with bedrock I think there's like a website called amulet or maybe it's an add-on I don't know I've seen Brian talk about it explaining to other people again I don't really know how it works that well so that's a question for Brian you can go to his page he has information about like the best practices and how to contact him and things like that so if you have problems with the exporter ask Brian next we also have gradient tools which kind of a separate thing it's basically just going to import these and this is just for reference for like if you're building in Minecraft you can kind of get an idea of like what blocks would flow into each other a little better and you can just change it over here in the modifier settings and it should update in real time for you you can just change the color so this one's just linear it's just two colors this one's also two colors but it's radial and then this one is four colors so it's one at Each corner like that you can do whatever you want all right uh let's take a quick look at the FAQ to see if I missed anything so how to use block blender it's just going to send you to a YouTube playlist which is gonna contain this video and those are the best ways to learn because I have the most stuff you do need to use blender a lot of people think that I like made blender or that block blender is its own program for some reason that's not true it's it's just an add-on that I made so you have to use blender you have to use three point 5 or 3.6 for this version that I'm talking about if you want to update to a new version of block blender you just go to back to your gumroad library or blender Market Library you can see I have links right here you will have to be signed in for these links to work it will just send you to where you can download it again you don't have to pay download the new file that's that's it I talked about if it uses an image texture or multiple textures you can either bake it or you can use multiple images blocks don't appear sometimes if you have the wrong blender version like if it's too old then it just won't work and if you like save with an old version try to bring it into a new version it can kind of break the file so that's a thing that happens or it would have a hole in it which I already showed how to fix that with exterior thickness or it might be too small in which case you just make it bigger also be careful about like it being parented to things which again I already showed you can just apply the scale of everything if parts of the models aren't appearing same reason it's probably just too thin or uh has holes joining you just press the join button blocks aren't right side up you apply the rotation with the apply scale and rotation button oh this is an interesting one if you want to move blocks without moving the model if you want it to be like one block in this in the center instead of two there's an interesting way to do that yeah let's go with the beach ball and I'll just um scale this down a little more okay so a way to do this quickly is to press this tool button right here you can also I think I already said you can press n to open and close this or you can pull open this button but you just want to select effect Origins right here and then this will let you like rotate it's rotating all of the blocks but as you can see the colors are kind of staying in the same spot you can also scale this up and down and this is going to be changing the scale but it's going to try to keep the dimensions the same you can also move this around so if you do this you can see that the blocks are kind of Shifting position and if you wanted to you could use this to try to make it um in the center like that so there's one block in the center so that's how you would do that is just affecting the origins just make sure that when you're done you uncheck that so that you're not constantly using it blender lagging or crashing that's probably just you have like you're using too many blocks like I've already shown that if you make this really big you see at a certain point like it's already starting to lag like that if you make it big enough it's just gonna crash so sometimes people have issues where they're just trying to convert a model that's already like really huge so just make it smaller first or you can optimize some settings or sometimes if you want you can also just break things into multiple pieces so if you want to break things into multiple pieces actually let's go back to the city because I think I messed this up this is a good example to show a thing that can happen so it seems like this became linked and a way to fix that it's kind of annoying but you can just open up a new window right here go to the image editor and you can just open the image so let's see it would be this one building material we can open that image and it's this one right here or maybe it's this one yeah okay so now it works basically you just have to bring the image back in sometimes that'll just happen anyway if you want to separate parts of your model you can just tab into edit mode probably make sure you're in x-ray mode right here and you can select Parts like that and then press p and separate by selection and this will make it a separate object so now we have two objects like this and you can convert this one into blocks and then export that as its own schematic and you can do the same thing for like other tiles and then you can piece them together it's a little more annoying I guess to do it that way but if it's a really huge map like I've seen people try to do this with like really big game maps and it's just not really blender just can't handle it it's going to be too many blocks especially if you want it real scale so yeah this is probably the best way to go about it is to export it in chunks and then when you're done you can remove the modifier and like maybe hide hide it right here or delete it something like that so yeah that's one thing you can do this one is just how to turn each block into separate objects if you do that you're not going to be able to export it still but it's pretty easy all you have to do is select your thing your object make sure that make instances real is checked then you can convert it to a mesh come into here to edit mode select everything p and then separate by loose parts and then back into object mode and now each of these blocks is its own piece right here you can see that if I try to rotate it it's not rotating from the middle so if you want them to all be rotated from the middle you can select everything right click set origin to center of mass I would choose volume like that and it's just going to make it so they all have their own origin point in the center like that I think that is probably it the rest is about texture baking and about the exporter so yeah hopefully this cleared things up for a lot of people I hope this actually helps if there's another big update then I will make a new video Until then have a good one

Channel: Joey C-quel

Views: 7,354

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Id: QuSay4M9qnY

Length: 49min 47sec (2987 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 21 2023