How To Export Models Made With Qubicle To Minecraft
Tutorials
By Tim Wesoly, developer of Qubicle Constructor
What you need: Qubicle Constructor v1.07+, MCEdit
The workflow described below will soon be replaced by a much more intuitive way when the Qubicle Constructor Minecraft Edition is released.
Minecraft is THE voxel game everyone seems to play. With Qubicle Constructor being a voxel editor it only seems natural to provide an export to Minecraft. So I wrote a routine that writes Minecraft .schematic files. This fileformat can be imported by MCEdit a popular external Minecraft Editor. In this brief tutorial I will show you how you prepare your models and how easy it is to add pixel art to your Minecraft level.
How it works
If you’ve used Qubicle before you will know that Qubicle doesn’t work with textures, every voxel uses a single colored material (and I don’t want to change that very soon). So you have to work with predefined colors resembling a particular block. For example a voxel with the color value #825D41 will be exported as a dirt block. Qubicle supports 8 natural resource blocks (stone, dirt, sand, gravel, clay, wood, leaves and bedrock) and – to add more colors – the 16 wool blocks.
Download the minecraft colormaps
I don’t want to list every single color value here (and you don’t want to copy those values every time you want to change a color), so I made two color maps that you can download and add to Qubicle. One for the supported natural blocks and one for the wool blocks.
Download Minecraft Color Map 1: minecraft.qcm
Download Minecraft Color Map 2: minecraft_wool.qcm
To add those color maps to Qubicle use the Color Map Settings button and in the popup menu select Open Color Map. Do this for both color maps. Now you are ready to create models for Minecraft.
The what is what of color map 1 (colormap 2 is quite self explainatory because it’s all wool)
Change colors of existing models to the ones supported
Provided you’ve already got a model and don’t want to change every voxel’s color manually to the ones supported use the Apply Color Map modifier. As a short example I want to use the first model i’ve ever made the Q:Bot 2000..
To change all colors of the bitmap in one step do as follows:
Select the color map you want use (in this case one of the two minecraft color maps), select the image and use Modify > Apply Color Map. Done.
Every color of the bitmap is now replaced by the nearest color of the current color map. Of course this is not losless but it saves plenty of time.
From left to right: original, minecraft color map 1 applied, minecraft color map 2 applied.
Export as .schematic
Now let’s see how this looks in Minecraft. Select the matrices you want to export and use File > Export Selection from the main menu. In the save dialogue select Minecraft .schematic as filetype and click on save.
Use MCEdit to import .schematics
Now we leave Qubicle and change to MCEdit. MCEdit is a tool that loads Minecraft save files and allows for them to be edited. With this tool you can read your .schematics file and save them into your level. First download MCEdit and install it.
Run MCEdit and load your Minecraft level (or create a new one). There’s a button on the bottom shelf saying import. Use it to import your .schematic file. Place it at the desired location and press enter. That’s it.
