Q: Can I use Blender to make maps for Minecraft?A: Not at the moment.
Minecraft doesn't appear to be planning the addition of that type of custom content, it's unlikely but not entirely impossible at some point in future. However, what you can do is build Minecraft 'style' content to see what it would look like in game and/or to do some form of rendered visualisation over which you have more options and control. The following assumes you have full access to minecrafts assets (via unzipping the *.jar file in the installation directory). If not it's quite easy to make a set of 'editor textures' that represent the various texture/object types in game.
The important part of using Blender in this way with Minecraft is to realise that the building blocks used by the game are 1x1m (meter) cubes, which directly equivalent to Blenders unit system so that one "unit" is the same as/is equal to, one "meter"
(Blender 2.5+ has the additional benefit of being able to use an actual "metric" system for measurement. For more info on this read the Metric and Imperial unit system tutorial
). This means that once the unit and/or grid system has been correctly set up, the 1x1m blocks can be snapped to the grid as they are moved by holding the "Ctrl
" key in the knowledge that what-you-see-is-what-you-would
-get in game.
For Blender 2.5 you can either leave the measurement system on the "Units
" default (of "None
") or set the "Unit
" system to "Metric
". In the View Properties panel
, set "Spacing: 1.0
" in the "Display
" sub-settings (shown below).
For Blender 2.49, from "View >> View Properties
" set "Spacing:1.00