Minecraft to 3D

This project introduces a novel pipeline for converting any Minecraft world into a high-quality, realistic polygonal scene compatible with major 3D engines like Blender, Unreal, Unity, and Godot. The goal is to bridge the gap between voxel-based creation and professional 3D production, enabling a wide range of creative applications. The pipeline begins with a Sponge Schematic export of a Minecraft world. This data is fed into a 3D convolutional U-Net, which has been trained to recognize default Minecraft structures (e.g., houses, trees, pathways). The blocky terrain surface is then resampled into a smooth height map. Each recognized object is intelligently substituted with a high-quality 3D model from an external library, preserving the original layout, orientation, and any associated tags. To create a clean landscape, non-terrain voxels are hidden, the terrain mesh is up-sampled and smoothed, and adjacent tiles are seamlessly merged using Poisson blending to eliminate seams. A separate water plane is exported to allow for advanced, engine-level ocean rendering, and the final scene is packaged for direct import into popular 3D engines without requiring manual cleanup. The entire pipeline is highly optimized, capable of processing a 1 km² world in approximately 147 seconds on a single consumer-grade GPU. This work provides a powerful tool for indie game developers, educators creating immersive learning environments, and virtual production teams looking to rapidly prototype large-scale digital sets.