Mineways
is a free program that makes it easy to select a model from a Minecraft world map and render it and 3D print via Shapeways.

Designing Christmas Decoration in Minecraft

Developed by Eric Haines, the latest version of Mineways runs on Windows (or Linux under Wine) and allows you to output Minecraft models in full color, or to fabricate in plastic.  Check out Eric’s Mineways Shapeways Shop for examples or the Mineways Flickr group he has set up.

There are already over 1900 Minecraft tagged items on show, for sale or download in the Shapeways gallery and we are expecting to see many, many more as the game engine makes 3D modelling fun and accessible to thousands of people.  Minecraft and Mineways may end up being a great stepping stone to 3DTin which has a comparable base architecture or Tinkercad which may also be intuitive to those who enter 3D modelling via Minecraft.

Take a look at the video which shows how easy it is to export a part of the Minecraft world to Shapeways via Mineways.

The (C/C++) code is available open source and based on minutor written by Sean Kasun, Mineways is a superset of his mapper, with a model exporter and other additional features.  Take a look at the Mineways page for all of the documentation.. A big thanks to Eric for all his work in making this happen, we are super excited to see so much Minecraft coolness in the Shapeways galleries.

Designing Christmas Decoration in Minecraft / post-apocalyptic research institute / CC BY-SA 2.0