Minecraft Grass Block Container

This is a figure of a Minecraft grass block that is a small storage container with removable lid. The cube has a pixelated texture relief that is true to the game. The lid fits on like a puzzle piece, but is symmetric and fits in any orientation. The overall size is about 69 mm³. Interior dimensions are 58 x 58 x 60 mm.

STEP files of the models for anyone attempting to remix. 

Print Settings

I printed both parts with 3 walls and 30% infill to make it strong for kids to play with.

The base can be printed without support.

The lid needs support to print all at once. It came off pretty easily for me with mostly default settings; just changed support X/Y distance to 1.2mm for more clearance around the intricate features.

For the lid, I turned on ironing and coasting to improve the finish of the lid's top surface.

Alternatively, you could print the lid in 2 pieces with no support and superglue together using the _split.STL.  However I highly recommend to print the lid as one piece, it works and looks way better.

How I Designed This

I wanted to surprise my kid for Christmas with a unique Minecraft themed 3D print. So I came up with this idea for a pixelated textured block container, but didn’t find anything close to what I was looking for on the web. I didn’t think it would be toooo tough to design from scratch…

Textures

I started with the actual Minecraft grass block textures from the game. I converted to gray scale to use as a height map and separated the grass and dirt sections of the side texture to form the lid and base separately. I made some small adjustments around the grass/dirt interface to get the edges to tile cleanly in 3D.

Generating the Mesh

After experimenting with a few different software packages to emboss the texture to form the relief, I was not getting the results I wanted. This was turning out to be a much more difficult design than I first thought.

I decided to just script the tessellation of the texture myself using MATLAB. I built panels to form the sides of the cube using Delaunay triangulation to form a mesh then offset the vertices using the height map images. The panels of the cube were pieced together by rotating and translating the meshes into the right position. Once I had the look I was going for, I exported the meshes as STL files.

Modeling

I imported into Solidworks to do the cutouts to get the grass lid and dirt base to fit together like puzzle pieces. I cut out the cavities for the interior and added some chamfers to make it easier to put the lid on. Finally I cut additional clearance into the lid for it to fit on smoothly by making a slightly enlarged offset mesh of the base part and using that as a negative to cut into the lid.

I mated the 2 parts in an assembly and used cross-section analysis to check for clearance and interference between the parts. Once everything was looking good, I exported the STLs.

Slicing

Slicing in Cura was pretty straight forward, except the ridiculously large support structure required to print the lid made me nervous.  Incase the lid was too hard to print or separate from the supports, I also split the lid into 2 pieces that can be printed without supports and superglued together. Turning on ironing and coasting made the top finish of the lid look much smoother.

The print turned out beautifully. The massive lid support came off easily and cleanly, and it fit together perfectly. The lid went on easily, but just tight enough to stay on by itself. Really happy how this one turned out and it’s going under the Xmas tree.