EPIC Minecraft Tutorial: Insane Gothic Stained Glass!

Hello everybody my name is shells and welcome to another minecraft video so in my last video i was talking about how to make gothic architecture and gothic arches and i did mention that i was going to do a video on stained glass windows so here it is ta-da let’s talk about tracery

So tracery is the term for making stained glass windows or well uh rather it is the term for the stone work that holds the windows in place so that stuff so there are two different kinds of tracery uh essentially there’s plate tracery and then there’s spar tracery um

Plate tracery was the older form of tracery the the what was originally made where they had a big old wall and they just poked holes in it now the problem with having plate tracery was that because you had to poke large holes in the already existing wall you had to leave

Most of the wall there in order to maintain the structural integrity of your wall and so you couldn’t get very complex shapes with it and it meant that you couldn’t let in nearly as much light what i’m talking about more today is bar tracery bar tracery is where they actually built up the

Individual stone bars in between to fit the windows into so rather than having a pre-existing wall that they poke holes into they actually build those shapes into the wall if that makes any sense so the way that this equates to minecraft is um you can see my cathedral way over

There that i did my last video on i would consider that to be plate tracery i had walls that i poked some windows in and put some unadorned panes in with large gaps between each of the windows this however is bartracery the way that it is made is with the

Large panes of glass that have these designs of stairs and slabs over the top of them you will note that i had to use full glass blocks for this method of stained glass windows that’s because the glass panes would leave a large gap in between your stone work here and the window itself

Which doesn’t make sense technically this stone work needs to go all the way through the window but that’s not going to happen without basically making it into plate tracery so you do what you can now before we get into some common designs that you would find in tracery i

Want to spend a little bit of time talking to you about the fog effect a lot of you have probably heard about the fog effect with stained glass windows but i’ll go ahead and cover it here again so one of the big issues that you’ll find with vanilla minecraft stained glass windows

Is that they’re way too translucent you can see right through the dumb things this is problematic because most of the stained glass windows you would find in cathedrals are not meant to be able to be seen through it is said that traditional stained glass windows and cathedrals are

Less windows and more illuminated wall decorations so you’re not meant to see through them unfortunately if you just add more layers of glass directly to it here i’m just going to do this it actually doesn’t change the opacity see they’re the same color there so but if you add an air gap between

Your stained glass windows so one right here one right here with an air gap in between then you’ll see that it does actually start to increase the opacity now something else that you can do that’s really cool with this is to actually add more gradients than you would otherwise so

You can see here i have a nice gradient going from magenta all the way to blue and the way that that was arranged was you can see i have the middle changes first then the middle and the back change then i have the back and the front change

And then all three have changed and that creates this lovely gradient here something i will warn against though is that if you have a magenta layer and then a blue layer the magenta layer will actually be the dominant layer because it is the first thing that you see

And what that means is that this gradient doesn’t look the same on the other side you’ll notice that suddenly once it loads in that this panel is actually more purple than this panel so it doesn’t always equate properly so you have to watch that for a little

Bit something else you may have noticed as i’ve been flying around here is that there is a visual glitch associated with using these fog windows if that really bothers you then you don’t really have to use the fog effect windows i won’t judge you too much the big issue that you’ll run into

Though is look at how thick these windows are yeah that’s stupidly thick and what that means for you is a couple of things first of all you’ll have to have an inside wall and an outside wall it’ll actually leave gaps in your wall for rats to live in

Which is fine it doesn’t really affect anything it gives you a good place to sneak redstone in if you really want but there are some problems associated with that here i’ll go ahead and show you with this cathedral over here let’s assume that instead of using a one block wide wall

I decided to use a seven block wide wall which would be used for three block thick fog effect so one two three four five six seven well first of all you’ll notice that i’m sit over here eating this poor flying buttress so in order to compensate you would

Actually have to move the flying buttresses further away from the wall the second thing you’ll notice is that one two three four five six one two three four five six suddenly these windows are running into each other and that’s no bueno you can’t have that that will look really funny

What you’d need to do then is on the inside you’d have what is called blind tracery which as the name suggests just means that the eye of the window aka the glass parts would be blinded by replacing them with stone other than that i honestly would recommend using these

Fog window effects they look much nicer and you will appreciate them a lot more all of these are done using the fog effect windows and i can actually go over to this side i didn’t put the facade over so you can kind of see what it looks like without the facade you can

See just how thick these windows are compared to the wall so what i had to do was just build a completely separate wall over here and had this little section here to kind of bridge the gap of the actual wall and the fake wall the facade

Something else that i tend to do with the fog effect and you’ll notice that i did it over here is that i actually tend to put either a layer of black stained glass on the outside or a layer of tinted glass on the outside and the reason i do that is

Because when you’re looking at a building from the outside looking in you don’t tend to see the colored glass bits and it doesn’t actually affect your colors too much when viewed from this side this rainbow still looks perfectly bright even with a layer of tinted glass on the other side

It does mean that your lighting is a little bit wonky you can see in here i have lights basically all the way along the bottom on either side and along the top because the tinted glass doesn’t allow the natural skylight in and for the most part that’s actually okay

Because even if you didn’t have the tinted glass there um with the fog effect in place the skylight isn’t actually enough to reach all the way through the windows your windows will be too dark anyway you kind of want to hide your light sources though try to make them as unnoticeable as possible

Because like real life would actually be enough to illuminate the full window so something else that you can do for lighting is to actually poke holes up above in between your layers of glass if you do end up poking holes into the the roof just to add in natural light natural skylight

You will need to try to find a way to plug the holes without obscuring the the skylight or blocking the skylight what i ended up doing here was i actually added some trapdoor switch let in light here on the roof and i put in walls the black stone walls here

Just so that way you don’t have big gaping holes and i find that that’s honestly the best way to illuminate your full window otherwise it’ll just oh it’ll always inevitably have dark spots in the middle hey look that lighting that visual glitch i mean lovely isn’t it beautiful

Um if you really want to get rid of this visual glitch and it’s stuck like this the best way to do is to go up to your window and give it a little smooch and then back away and the visual glitch is fixed so now that we’ve got all of the our

Bases covered let’s go ahead and start talking about the actual tracery itself so the most basic design in tracery is this thing here it’s called the twin lancet and oculus these are called lancets they look like the lances like what a knight would use um usually they’re more elongated

Technically the arch itself is considered a lancet but in window designs they tend to be a lot thinner and these are little lancets this triangular space between lancets here is called a spandrel a spandrel can be filled either with stone or you can poke more holes in it to make more windows

And then this space up above this little circle window is what’s called the oculus most windows are based off of this uh concept and again you can have the lancets split down into more lancets etc etc what you can also do up here is this is a twin lancet and oculus

Design but the twin lancets are filled with more twin lancet and oculus designs this is a an essential part of geometric tracery something else you can do with the lancets is you can take this line where it’s curving up and you continue it up across and it they start weaving together into this

Net shaped thing this is called intersecting tracery and has a lot of these diamond shapes in it now let’s go ahead and talk a little bit about some of these wheel windows and some other designs you can do in the oculus as you can probably tell this is called

A wheel window because it has the bars coming out from the center like the spokes of a wheel if you’ve heard about rose windows specifically famous rose windows like in notre dame they’re basically very elaborate wheel windows a rose window is called that because all of the radiating windows come from the center

Look more like the petals on a rose they tend to be a lot more complex than you’d find in a basic wheel window but we’re in minecraft and you can’t really tell most of the difference anyway so i just recommend sticking with basic wheel windows something you will notice if you’re

Trying to do a small circle like this there aren’t any vertical slabs so you have to use these upside down stairs on either side if you’re wanting to do that something that i end up doing with that is i just make lines ready radiating out from there

To connect the sides to make it look a little bit more intentional something else you can put in your circle windows is what’s called either a quattro foil or a tree foil the basic ideas behind these shapes is think four leaf clover three leaf clover unfortunately like most designs that

You’ll come across they get harder and harder to make the smaller you go with them this is basically the smallest i could go with a quattro foil to make it actually look more definitively like a quattro foil likewise this is the smallest i could get this tree foil it’s really

Unfortunate for the tree foils because they’re supposed to go in the spaces between the lancets in the spandrel you know this little triangular thing and there’s no way i’m getting them that tiny you can try and it certainly helps if you have larger lancets but that that’s just the way it goes

Now we get into curvilinear tracery this is probably one of my favorite forms of tracery unfortunately it’s also one of the hardest to try to make in minecraft the whole basis of curvilinear tracery is called or based around this shape looks like an s um well more of an elongated s it’s not

A true s this is what’s called an og and what you can do with these is first of all you can kind of sort of tip your lancets with them to make a different design and the it turns your diamond shapes above it into a little bit more rounded diamonds

If you try to do intersecting tracery with these ogs then that would be called reticulated tracery but you’ll notice that the more you try to shrinky ink that down it just looks like intersecting tracery so there’s not much of a difference but something you can do with these ogs is

To quote strong a bad trying to make trogdor first you draw an ass and then you draw a slightly different s and it kind of makes this flame shape this is actually where the term flamboyant comes from if you’ve ever heard of a flamboyant styled gothic windows

It’s because of these flame shapes that are in the window flame buoyant the next thing i’m going to go over with you is how to draw some basic lines using stairs and slabs a lot of you already know how to do this stuff but for those of you who don’t here it is

45 degree angle is really easy just stair step up likewise most times that you’re working with slabs they’re also pretty straightforward even a repeating pattern like this one one one two one one two one one two is technically a straight line so long as you’re staying within that pattern if you’re

Trying to use stairs however you have to know that a stair facing this way will almost always lead to a stare upside down stair facing the opposite way so likewise this becomes an angle and then in order to increase the that angle you have to then start adding

A block in between each of those if you’re ever planning on doing curves with lines i’ve talked about this before but i’ll go ahead and reiterate it you would start with an arbitrary number like 4 then the next one would be 3 2 1 and then it would move up and then you

Would start counting up two three four the further up you go that way if you’re trying to make a full circle this kind of works for a small circle but if you try to make this on a larger scale you’ll quickly find that it actually turns into a square with rounded corners

So not a true circle but it’s great for small curves like this those are all of the basic shapes you’ll find in stained glass windows for the most part everything else you’ll find will be variations on the same and something i will note is that when you’re making your stained glass windows

It doesn’t really matter what you put in them you could design anything you wanted and it would probably look just fine but i’ll go ahead and go over some of those these windows that i made in here this one is the geometric tracery that i was talking about

Where you have an oculus with twin lancets on the side and in those lancets are innocuous with twin lancets inside and then i made a little triangle in the spandrel there this window over here is the intersecting tracery though you’ll notice that i kind of fudged the top which is perfectly fine

This one was me playing with circles there’s uh some designs that just use circles and circles and circles and more circles i tried to add little quattro foils inside but they’re that you know that’s the best you can do as for the smallest quadrifoil

Over here i have a quattro foil in a in the oculus but it’s really just a twin lancet and oculus design again though i did try to add in these og’s the s-shaped og’s because i was trying to go for making leaves as though this is a flower with a

Stem and leaves radiating up from the side and then i put circles down here just because it looked a little bit empty but um and now it just looks like eyes with angry eyebrows and now you can’t unsee it the rest of these windows can really

Be summed up as i played with slabs and stairs and i did some and something turned out and there’s not really much more to say about them something you’ll note is that i didn’t do the fog effect for these top windows i just have one layer of stained glass and one layer of

Tinted glass the reason i did that is because you can’t really see these windows hardly at all and when you have a really super thick wall or window in your way you can’t see any designs the best angle you can get from the window is standing over here and most people

Aren’t going to be standing over here and if they are they’re looking at these windows so you don’t really need to care too much about these ones on the sides it’s just not enough space to admire them now this big window i’ll go ahead and break down for you

This window as you can probably see we have three lancets here but what you don’t may not have seen is that it’s actually two lancets that are intersecting here and the lancets have a little bit of an og shape to them and then this is just an oculus here at the top

Though i did fill that with two circles top and bottom these ones used to be circles as well but they looked too much like eyeballs staring into my soul so i decided to turn them into quattro foils instead now you notice that they’re shaped a little bit funny and that’s because when you’re

Viewing it from an angle it’s from down here it actually looks like a quattro foil whereas it looked like just a bunch of smaller windows if you had if you actually had these as stairs instead here i’ll go ahead and show you put stairs here instead of that slab

To make more of an uh formal quattro foil but then when you come down here it actually cuts that up a little bit more you can see it’s standing up back a ways where this window actually looks more like a quattro foil and that one looks like it has lines running down

On either side that’s something you have to keep in mind when you’re making these shapes as they go up they may not may or may not look the same visually the same thing actually applies for the gradients you’ll notice that my uh i have a lot of these gradients that

Are centered on a point here a lot of those gradients um in my layers of glass here i’ll i’ll go over here so that way i can kind of show you what i mean if you were to say grab blue stained glass where are you there you are if you were to say

Have a circle here and repeat that for every single window so these windows that circle is lined up when you are exactly at eye level to the window the moment you drop down a floor level you’ll notice that they disalign so what you would instead do is stair step it up

In this window the center would then be raised up to here and then the next window you’d raise it up even more so that way even though it looks funny at eye level you’re not going to be at eye level ever you’re going to be down

Below and this is the angle in which you’re going to see and you can see that that suddenly is lined up it does warp a little as you walk around it but that’s actually okay because when you have your tracer over the top most of those effects will fade and you

Won’t even notice it i totally forgot to keep breaking down this window so let’s keep going shall we so we have these general shapes the lancets that are intersecting the oculus at the top it turns into the three lancets down below all of these other things are just filler for the most part

We have a leaf shape that radiates out to the center of these diamond shapes here similarly there’s a shape that looks like a three leaf thing not fully a tree foil but similar where it’s a leaf a leaf and a top leaf here and i did that for all three of these lancets

Um and then i just divided this into more lancets down below more twin lancets though i will say that with leaving those gaps in the spandrels between the lancet it actually kind of turned into little butterflies here which is perfectly okay i kind of like that effect similarly down here

We obviously have a tree foil there and then i had oculus with another tree foil design here and here which those again turn into butterflies whoopsies that’s okay and then i was trying to replicate the three lancets down below so i did the three lancets with a diamond shape in

Between similar to the diamond shapes up there all right i was planning on leaving this video here but you probably want me to actually build one of these on camera with you so i’ll go ahead and do that i left this wall here blank on for that purpose

Now for as far as the design goes i’m just going to be replicating this design over here which this is just a small smaller version of that design but i’ll go ahead and do that with you on camera here so first thing you would want to do is create your windowsill

At this point i actually put the windowsill out one in front here so this is where your main windowsill is going all right at this point we can we’re on our first layer of glass and we can start adding in lighting at this point i always put in a layer of lighting at

The bottom for the most part you won’t see this layer unless you’re like jumping so it’s the best way to hide in some lighting light up your windows the other places i’m going to put lighting is at the very tippity top here and i’m going to put one on the sides

Probably approximately here-ish i will note that the ones on the side those are not even i will note that the ones that are on the side here i only put on the first and the last layer of glass because otherwise they looked too visible to me

The rest of this we just fill in with more black stone or whatever stone you’re using the next thing we’re going to do is add in a layer for an air space we don’t need to worry about lighting this one so just and i find that it keep helps keep track

Of where your layers of glass are supposed to go if you mark them with light your lights so air space another layer of windows not doing the sides for this one though just the top and the bottom another air space final layer of glass put the lighting on the sides here since

This is your final layer of glass regular glass anyway your colored glass air space and then we’re going to put in a layer for tinted glass this one doesn’t have to be illuminated because tinted glass blocks all of your light anyway and then finally your outside layer for your

Design that was a lot of work just to make a windowsill all right so the next thing we’re going to do is we’re going to actually start making our gradient here i’m going to be continuing this full rainbow gradient but i’m not putting in a layer of white

Stained glass like i did here i’m just again repeating this this is the rainbow gradient without the white layer all right so the front is going to be on blue whereas the other ones are already going to be on magenta and then all three layers are going to be magenta

So we’re just stair stepping up for all of these at this point the middle layer is actually going to start transitioning to red so we’re going to go ahead and grab our red stained glass and the way i’ve been doing these gradients is i’ve just been doing the middle changes first

Then the middle and the back change and then all three change and back to middle back all three middle back all three so i’ll show you what i mean make the middle be red while the back and the front are still magenta and then for the next layer

This is still going to be red but the back is also going to be red this time but the front is still on magenta this point all three of them are going to be red now we switch to our next color which is orange middle back and then all three again

And so on and so forth you get the gist i’ll go ahead and make the rest of this gradient off camera i’ll get back to you when it’s done alright we now have our gradient done now at this point i’m going to go ahead

And go over to the back and fill it with tinted glass and i’m just going to go ahead and use a world edit to help me with that all right at this point the actual glass part of the window is done now we move on to the tracery part

So here the first thing we’re going to do is make our oculus at the top now this oculus is not going to be perfectly circular it’s actually going to be oval shaped and what i’m doing is you see this shape here is i’m actually going to repeat that down below here so

One two one one two one one two one one two and there we have an oval shaped oculus the next thing that we’re going to do is make lancets we’re dividing this space up into uh three lancets and so if you count here we have one two three

Block one two three block one two three and that divides quite nicely which is funny because these bigger ones didn’t divide quite nicely and you can see that it didn’t make a full lancet on the side there that’s all right at this point we can bring up these lancets and i’m going

To stop just before it reaches the top of this well reach the bottom of the oculus here here we’re going to stair step down away from the oculus on either side and here is the top of those pillars so that’s one lancet done now we just need to repeat this shape over here

So now we’ve got this awkward space here that we’re going to try to fill with our diamond shapes i did play with a couple of designs and found a lot that i wasn’t particularly happy with but what i ended up doing over here i’ll just look at it briefly so you can

See it is i tried to make little little diamond shapes so i think i did no wait i didn’t do that that makes little circle shapes hey look a circle what did i do for that hang on let’s stare at it stare stare oh wait a minute these lenses are different

I did it wrong so as you can see it’s very easy to make mistakes that’s all right blink blink blink blink blink blink something that i know will note that is that anytime you have stairs leading to a wall it’s better to place a full block there just to make it

Look a little bit less disjointed move oink i love we’re letting all right so to top this shape off what i ended up doing was actually replacing a part of this oculus to kind of make this squishy diamond here and place another stair there it does this little squashed diamond here

Then we have this space up here that looks a little bit awkward so what i ended up doing was continuing this line of the curve of the lancet going up blink because again a stair facing this way would inevitably lead to a stair facing the opposite direction going upside down

Even though this is a full block here my idea is that this curve is continuing up like this so just doing that all right now we have our lancets in place now we need to do the oculus part itself i just put a couple of stairs going up here

And then we need to make our leaf shape so the way i did that is i stair stepped up a little bit and then i needed to flatten out my curve so i just put a stair nose there a slab there and since that is now

Going back down i don’t want that so i put a stair there to kind of create a more gentle curve so this is actually the bottom of our twin leaf shapes on either side now we can move up with our center here let’s move up a couple and we’re going to

Make the tops of our leaf shapes like so it’s basically the same thing but just raised up a bit and then i noticed that this section here looked really really fat so what i actually did was increase the size of that and i put some stairs there

And now i basically just put an oculus window at the very top a very tippity top just a basic circle so circle circle circle circle um here you’ll notice that in order to make this a one bull gap one block gap if you actually put two

Stairs together one on top one on bottom like this this is actually equivalent to one block so and this is technically an even numbered space instead of an odd numbered space and so this is the best option you can do is combine two stairs together to do an uh an odd number

To do an even numbered section and then just top it off and that is your window it’s done if you’re looking for more inspiration as to what you want to do for your windows i would recommend just doing a basic google search for tracery bar tracery or curvilinear

Tracery those are going to be your three main things you’re going to want to look up to try to get ideas for your windows at this point you can see i’m selecting all of this or at least as much as i can going to the center and i’m just going to say

Copy using world edit of course because world edit is your friend and then i come all the way here to the very back sit in the center and say paste and i always do minus air just in case your window is now completed at this point

The next thing that you would want to do is then fill in the gaps to make your facade i usually put another layer outside here to make it pop a little bit more or to adjust the walls however you see fit otherwise yeah fill in gaps make it look nice add a roof

Add some flying buttresses you got yourself a cathedral i think that’s going to do it for today’s video i really hope you enjoyed it and i really hope that you are inspired to make some really amazing stained glass windows here as always with my tutorials the whole

Point of this video is not to build something for you and tell you how to build it block by block but to give you ideas for you to design your own thing and i really hope that you can go out and make some really cool stained glass

Windows if you do make some cool stained glass windows feel free to send me pictures i’d love to see what you guys can come up with anyway i think that’ll do it for today and i hope you have a wonderful rest of your day bye bye