How to Model an Iron Ore Block in Blender

Among the millions of block types in Minecraft some of the most cherished are the Ore blocks that give you valuable resources. In this tutorial I will go over how to make an Iron Ore block in Blender. The cool thing about the resource blocks is that they look alike, the only difference is the color of the ore, which is easy to change in blender. Below I have provided a file with materials that you can use for the color of the ore. It is very easy to search "Minecraft iron ore texture" on the internet to get an image to use as your back round image.

Step 1: Getting Started

The first thing you want to do is switch your view to "Top" and "Orthagonal." Delete the cube and add a plane. Then press "N" to open another options panel. Scroll down and check the "Backround image" box. Press "Open" and in downloads, (at least on my computer I find images that I download in Downloads,) and select the Iron Ore image. Or what ever you named the image.

Step 2: Set Up

By now you may have noticed that your plane is a lot smaller that your picture. To fix that press "S" then "5." Then switch to edit mode by pressing the "Tab" button. Make sure that everything is selected then subdivide the plane 4 times. It would be very helpful to press "Z" to ensure that you can see the image.

Step 3: Making the Texture

To make the texture I used the materials that I provided and somewhat "Painted" the texture. In some distant way this is like Dot Art. Above are a few images above that show how I did this. I did have to switch back and forth between edit/object mode and Wireframe/ Solid mode a lot to make sure I was coloring the plane right. Even afterwards I had to do some touch up work.

Step 4: Building the Cube Part 1

After finishing "Texturing" I changed the view back to perspective, it really doesn't matter how you have your view. Building the cube is very simple. First you need to scale your plane back down to size. To do this press "S .2" Here is a combination of keys that will give you a cube.

G,Z,-1

SHIFT,D

R,Y,90

R,X,-90

G,X,1

G,Z,1

SHIFT,D

G,X,-2

SHIFT, D

R,Z,90

G,X,1

G,Y,1

SHIFT,D

R,X,90

G,Y,1

You will want to be care full with how your plane is scaled. I had trouble with scaling it to short. Please tell me if you have the same problem so that I can fix the problem.

Step 5: Building the Cube Part 2

The next step is to join the planes. But if you join them you will have a messed up active point. So in order to make it so that you don't have a bad active point you need to add a cube and scale it down. Then press "A" to select all. Make sure you don't have the camera and lamp selected. Then you want to make sure the cube in the center of the textured cube is the selected parent, or the object outlined in yellow. Then you press the Join button on the left side. That leaves you with an Iron Ore block.