Help:Isometric renders (Minecraft Dungeons)

Download Blender Render template Gifski render.bat

Render of the Dungeons Creeper character using Blender.

This article contains instructions for creating standardized views for isometric renders of Minecraft Dungeons elements. The instructions describe only one way to create the desired view. Individual authors may work differently, though a consistent quality with the procedures below is expected.

The views follows the standardized views rules for lighting and camera projection. To the right is a downloadable file template with all preferences prepared.

Getting started

Dungeons renders are created using 3D graphic software. This software may be freely chosen, however our common procedure involves the use of Blender. This tutorial uses Blender 4.1, but any version upwards of 2.93 will suffice.

Remember to use the template linked above, as it provides a standard base used across all Minecraft Dungeons renders across the wiki.

In order to render, you'll need game files such as models, textures, and animations, which can be obtained here: UModel

The only folder you need from the package is Game.

In order to import these models, however, you will need to install a Blender add-on, as they use the .psk file extension, which cannot be loaded normally - animation files additionally use .psa. This psk/psa importer will be used for this purpose. Instructions to install it are on its Github page.

Using a free-view camera

In order to ensure accuracy with in-game models, a free-view camera is often used. This can allow close-up views of every detail of a Minecraft Dungeons model, from the weapon and armor positions, to the blinking animations, to the visual effects.

The Universal Unreal Engine 4 Unlocker, or UUU, can be used for this. Upon installation and launching, it prompts the user to select a program to inject it into - after launching Minecraft Dungeons, you can select it as a program and inject the UUU.

Once in-game, you can toggle the HUD, though this will not be perfect. In most levels, if you toggle the HUD and then open your map overlay, it will fully disable the UI. From there, you can hit tilde to open the console. To enter freecam, first type "EnableCheats" into the console, and then "ToggleDebugCamera". From there, you can type "FOV" to enable the default debug camera FOV. The camera can be turned off by re-entering the command used to enable it.

Novice

Setting up the model

Let's import a Minecraft Dungeons model into Blender. For the sake of this tutorial, a creeper will be used.

Through the top bar, select File>>Import>>Unreal PSK (.psk/.pskx) and navigate to the creeper's directory within the UModel export, located in Actors/Characters/Enemies

Before selecting Import, you must modify the Scale parameter to be 0.01 in order to get an accurate size.

After importing the model it should look something like this:

In order to make a default pose render, a mob needs to be represented in its default pose, or in other words, the first frame of its idle animation.

Select the model's armature in blender, named SK_Creeper, and then navigate to File>>Import>>Unreal PSA (.psa). Next, go to the Animations folder within the same folder as the model's PSK file, and select Creeper_Idle.psa.

After importing it, you will notice that nothing has changed - to activate it, it needs to be turned on through the action editor. You need to change the editor type in the bottom tab of Blender to "Dope Sheet," which can be done like so:

From there, clicking on Dope Sheet will bring up a drop-down menu where you can select Action Editor:

Finally, next to the + New button will be another drop-down menu, where you can see your newly-imported animation! Selecting it will enable it on the model. It should look something like this:

Applying texture and setting up material

Now that we have our model set up and posed, let's apply the texture. Select the creeper's mesh and navigate to the Material Properties tab on the right (represented with a pink and gray circle). The tab should look like this:

Here, two things need configuring. First, navigate through the menu until you see Viewport Display, and open up the drop-down. From there, in the Settings menu, change Shadow Mode to None, and if your model has transparent elements, change Blend Mode to Alpha Hashed. Otherwise, leave it as-is.

Further configuration will be done in the Shader Editor editor type.

You can change the editor size to make it taller by dragging its edges. You can also use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out.

You will see a grid-like dark gray window with two boxes connected with a node: Principled BSDF and Material Output. In the BSDF there are several values that needs to be tweaked:

• Set Roughness value to 1
• Open Specular and change IOR Level to 1

Now it's time to add the texture. This is done by adding a new box via the ⇧ Left Shift+A combination. From the context menu that appears, select Texture>>Image Texture. Place the box and then connect its Color dot with the Base Color dot in BSDF by dragging it.

In the Image Texture box change Linear to Closest, and open the texture file T_Creeper.png, found in the same folder as the model.

Additionally, you'll want to turn on the Rendered viewport shading in the top right by clicking the rightmost button represented by a circle.

The whole workspace should look something similar to this right now:

Rendering the model

Finally, it's time to render. Before you do that, though, you need to modify the camera settings. Select the camera, and then hit your Num0 key.

From here, you can change the camera's Orthographic Scale in the Data tab on the right, represented by a green camera icon. This changes the "zoom" of the render.

Ideally, you want the render to be perfectly lined up with the model. Beyond changing the Orthographic Scale, you can also mess with the camera's position in the Object tab to the right, and change the output render's resolution in the Output tab, represented with a printer. Ideally, the resolution should be between 300-800 depending on the model. While you're here, you can also change where the render is output to.

The finished configuration should look something like this:

Here, the camera's height was at 4.82, its Orthographic Scale was set to 1.8, and its resolution was set to 350x600.

Lastly, you can render the image by selecting Render>> Render Image from the top bar. It will open the rendered image in a new tab, and from there you can select Save As... under the Image drop-down.

Dealing with transparency

Many models in Minecraft Dungeons utilize transparency in their textures. With our current setup, however, this is not accounted for. A prime example of this is the powersmith, whos face and skirt are painted black:

The solution for this is quite simple, however. After returning to the Shader Editor, you can simply attach the Alpha dot of the texture to the Alpha dot of the Principled BSDF shader, like so:

Now the black sections are gone and see-through. When we render, we get the result we expect:

Apprentice

Weight mapping

Sometimes characters have additional equipment as separate models. After importing, you will notice that those models are not attached to the main model skeleton. To fix that, the objects will have to be parented to the skeleton and weight mapped so they can follow certain bones the same way as parts of the main character model.

In this part of the article our creeper will be replaced with a Piglin holding the golden sword.

Before getting to weight mapping you have to get and import two models:

• Whole piglin directory located in Content_DLC4/Actors/Characters/Enemies
• Sword model located in Actors/Equipment/MeleeWeapons/Sword_Steel

Position the sword model to the piglin's right arm and attach the textures the same way as it was described in applying texture section. Do not scale the models down or apply animation at this moment, it will be done after weight mapping.

The objects after these actions should look like this:

Select the sword object and, while holding ⇧ Left Shift click on the armature, type Ctrl+P and from the context menu select With Empty Groups. Now the sword is parented to the armature, but doesn't follow the movement of it.

There's two ways to attach the sword to a specific bone.

First method

Select armature and while holding ⇧ Left Shift, select the sword object. With those two selected, change Object Mode on the upper left corner to Weight Paint. For better visiblity, you can change the color mode to material as seen here:

You will see three sliders: Weight, Radius and Strength. The weight slider describes bone influence. The radius slider, as the name states, affects the radius of the brush. The strength slider describes the strength of weight application. Set Weight and Strength to 1. The brush radius value is up to your preference.

Before painting on the sword, select current bone the mapping will be applied to. In this case it would be the bone on the bottom of piglin's right arm. After doing that, start painting. The bone influence is applied to model's vectors, and every value is described with certain color as seen in image below.

Red color represents full bone influence, while blue - zero.

After the process the sword should be fully red, as seen below:

Second method

This method will require you to know the bone name you will be attaching sword to. Select armature and change Object Mode to Edit Mode. Select the bottom bone of right arm and on the right panel go to Bone Properties (Green bone icon). Here you will see that bone is named J_R_Hand. Exit Edit Mode. Now select the sword and change Object Mode to Edit Mode. Select all vertices with tapping A and go to Object Data Properties on the right panel. This should look like this:

Select J_R_Hand group, click on the Assign button and exit Edit Mode.

Rendering animations

To get started with rendering an animation, you'll want to first head back over to the Output tab, and change the "Output Path" to a new folder. Here, you can see I set it to be in a special "Renders/Frames" folder. My finished gifs go in Renders, and the frames get outputted to the Frames folder.

Now, to select your specific animation, you'll want to return to the Action Editor. Here, you can hit the X next to the animation name to remove it, assuming you still have the Creeper_Idle enabled. Afterwards, you can import a new animation, and then select it once again:

From here, you'll need to select the Timeline editor type, and then adjust the End time of the animation to be the last frame of the animation. The Creeper_Walk animation ends at frame 8:

Now, just like normal rendering, you need to head over to the top bar, but this time you'll select Render>> Render Animation. This will cause Blender to output each frame of the animation to the targeted folder you selected earlier.

You've only exported each frame, though. Now you need to turn these into a gif. For this purpose, you can go to gif.ski, and click Download CLI binaries. This will install a program that you'll need to unzip somewhere. Afterwards, you can delete everything outside the "win" folder. Inside the "win" folder is a file named gifski.exe. To run it, you'll need to download the gifski-render.bat file linked above, and place it in the same folder as gifski.exe. It should look something like this:

Next, you'll need to quickly edit the gifski-render.bat file. By right-clicking it and selecting "Edit," you can open it in Notepad or a similar program. From here, you'll need to replace the "D:\Renders\%name% (Dungeons).gif" with the folder you want to output your renders to. Make sure to keep the "%name% (Dungeons).gif". Afterwards, the "D:\Renders\Frames\*.png" needs to be replaced with where you exported your frames, but the "*.png" must be kept:

Now, you can open the file, and you'll be prompted to select the name, framerate, width, and height of the animation. Make sure that the width and height are the same as in Blender, and set the framerate to 24. Afterwards, your finished animation will be exported! Here's the result of the tutorial creeper: You should be able to handle it from here, but make sure to set the framerate to 24. Afterwards, your finished animation will be exported! Here's the result of the tutorial creeper:

Journeyman

Expert

Master