Project Showcase: Mojito Manor

[Daigle]

I wanted to write an in-depth exposé on my rank build with which I earned the rank of Architect on the Survival Server. When I look through architectural publications, every now and then a house design mesmerizes me and I become inspired by it. The first time this happened to me was just as I started playing MineCraft. I planned out and built a house that I fell in love with. It was a smaller more simple house which I built in Solitude but later decided it was in the wrong setting and I used the wrong materials to build it so I tore it down.
The second time this type of inspiration happened to me, I was an experienced MineCraft player and I thought to myself "I must build this house in MineCraft." At the time, I knew without a doubt that this new house was definitely big enough, unique enough, and beautiful enough to obtain the Architect rank on RenMX. This probably took me a month to complete, working on it off and on in between other activities and a busy lifestyle. This house is a minecraft rendering of Ramon Esteve's "House in Monasterios" in the outskirts of Valencia, Spain. Read on to find out how it was accomplished.

[Daigle]

The first step is a very important step in the whole process: obtain the floor plans. Luckily there were several 2-D bitmaps of the floor plans and elevations available on the several architectural websites that featured this house.
I then took these bitmaps and imported them into AutoCAD. One of the most difficult tasks was figuring out the best scale to use in order to achieve a finished product that is as close as possible to the real thing. I figured a MineCraft avatar stands about 2 blocks tall, and the average human is about 6 feet tall. Therefore 1 block = 3 feet or about the width of the main doorways on the floorplans I'm using.

[Daigle]

Now that I had the plans on the drawing board and properly scaled, it was time to start overlaying some squares to see how this building was going to work in MineCraft language.
As I started to lay it out, I was amazed at how close the main walls fell into the grid. I thought things were going to be WAY off and I would have to do some major re-design to get it to work, but this was not the case. It is almost as if the Architect used MineCraft to design this house. Of course it's not perfect; I did have to omit some small rooms and modify some wall locations to make things workable in the MC world.

[Daigle]

Once I completed a working first floor plan, I did the same thing with the elevation drawings I obtained from the web. I now had a nice vector drawing of my plan that I could easily measure and dimension so I could begin searching for a suitable location on the map for this build.
By this time I had several hours into the project and I hadn't even placed a single block yet. I was anxious to start building so I skipped the second floor plan layout and immediately began searching the map for a site.

[Daigle]

It didn't take me long to discover a nice empty island not too far from my home town of Solitude. It was somewhat level but there was still quite a bit of terraforming to do to prepare the site. Also, I had to clear hundreds of trees that were in the way because the entire island is a forest biome. I was happy to see there was also plenty of room on the island for future projects. At first I was doing this all in the wilderness because I knew nothing about Towny and how to run a town. Eventually, the sheer size of the build began to sink in and the work I was putting into gathering the material (particularly the quartz roof) made me worry about griefers, so I learned how to use Towny and started my own town so I could protect my land.

[Daigle]

Once I had the shell of the building roughed in, I began to notice that the land around it needed a lot of work because it was dragging down the mood of the whole project. I envisioned a large sandy beach surrounding most of the house with a nice smooth-curved shore line.

[Daigle]

As I was working on the land I began to learn the importance of having "gardens" as a part of your build. At first I hated the idea because I originally envisioned my house sitting on a nice clean, open plot of grass blocks. But after lots of research and looking at other people's Architect applications, I decided that gardens were an absolute necessity whether I liked it or not. So I got to work on a plan for a garden on the north side of the house where there was plenty of open space. This design is not based on any existing garden, but of course it was influenced by other gardens I have seen on the server. After it was done, I had a new appreciation for exterior decoration. I also improvised gardens for the south and east sides of the house, and was quite pleased with the outcome.

[Daigle]

Here is the "after" shot of the build with the exterior decoration complete. Much better, wouldn't you agree? It was now time to decorate the interior. I had been dreading this task ever since the minute I realized it was necessary.

[NorwegianCraft]

This is what I call dedication! Looks awesome so far.
I can help you with forming the island if you want me to, just give me a nudge when I'm online

[tigger255]

this is amazing!!! I may have to take your idea of using blue prints of places and doing this. Luckily my dad is architect and he just finished a amazing park made out of containers witch I might make in MC!

p.s.
If any people are looking for how to make a good Architect build and wanted to make a famous house (or building) this is definitely the place to learn how to do it