Grian – Minecraft Build School: Diagonal Houses

Hello my name is green and welcome back to another episode of build school i know it’s been a long time since we did one but i want to talk about something today that’s not frequently talked about by building videos and that’s diagonal houses so i’ve got a few examples

Prepared here today and i’ve got an example that is a square build so to speak so we’ve got the diagonal build and we’ve got the square one these two are identical not to a t but fairly close you can see that they use the same palette same shapes etc etc and you can

See quite clearly just from a glance that this one looks distinctly awkward and this one looks a bit more at home despite it being diagonal now what do we mean by a diagonal house well that’s quite easy to explain let me just grab a block to show you so normally when we

Build we build square let’s call it i don’t know if there’s a an actual term but we’ll call it square building we normally place our blocks like that so we’ve got straight right angles corners lots of flat faces but when we build diagonally we do something a little bit different with

How we place the blocks and if it wasn’t obvious we place it with the corners attached and not the flat faces so we get a very different style of house in general from it it’s still square technically speaking but what we get is no flat faces at all

We get lots of little right angles and with lots of these placed over and over again it can look at home if it’s done correctly and what i want to do this video is kind of teach you some techniques and encourage you to make your own diagonal house to see how it

Looks and if it will fit because as you can see they can look really nice and the other thing is on the inside they’ve actually got quite a lot of space to work with it feels a bit more spacious despite the size of the house so that’s something to consider as well let’s

First of all take a quick look at the two of these so you can see they use exactly the same palette same shape etc etc but this one looks distinctly awkward and that’s because this one was made first and this one was designed to copy it now there are differences but using

The same principles that we normally use in building we can produce a build like this but there are just very slight variations on building diagonally that you should take into account to get the best results so normally when we build we make a framework here as you can see

Log and then we place it one block back so if we just steal these blocks i can demonstrate so normally when we build square we have two pillars if we’re going for a you know very basic build we’ve got two pillars that’s our framework and then we

Have a wall set one block behind it simple stuff and then we put a roof over the top it’s it’s just stone for now it does it doesn’t really matter it’s just an example and if we build diagonally it actually changes how we need to do

This and set this back so if i build a diagonal example and we go connect connect connect connect so these are all going in one straight line just connecting up and it’s very easy to misplace them if you don’t add these little uh guiding ones in the middle

And if we add in just a set of blocks directly in the center instead of putting it one block back we get that and that works except these aren’t really framework blocks because remember these are one block forward so indeed we would have to place it here

Okay now that seems that seems simple enough right because then we can just take change this to the wall block right now the problem comes in when we need to do another set of pillars so if we go connect connect connect another set of pillars then these are set directly in the

Middle you see and if we wanted to set these one block back it would need to go here you see so it connects up do you see it’s difficult to visualize the problem because working in diagonals is quite tricky but you see if we’ve got it set one block back diagonally on

These frames it works one way but then we get here and it it doesn’t work because if we were going to do it again it would need to go here essentially we’re one block off and that’s frustrating so there’s a little trick that we can do to make our framework work

So instead of doing uh you know putting these blocks directly in the center which is the equivalent of doing this on a square frame which is not what we normally do because although you know sometimes you can so what we can do here to fix this

Little issue if we just remove all these that don’t work in the center there’s a very simple trick that can make your house look a bit more segmented and fit together so instead of placing it in here we kind of compromise we place it one here

On the flat face so i know it’s not exactly diagonal but we will still be covering this area and then we go one two so essentially we just connect it on the flat face and then in the middle and then that should work for the same

Here so it’s almost like placing it just one block it just offsets that one block problem that we had before and then that should place there and there we have a working framework now obviously if you’ve got really long walls this is going to get slightly more complicated but if you’ve

Got a section of wall that just frames up like this one where it has a repeated pattern so let’s take a quick mosey over here you can see that we’ve collected it up exactly as described and then we’ve got two in the middle so if we come over

Here and we just build up these walls all the way up and we’re just going to make a little mini example for this diagonal house there we have our framework now it does look a bit odd actually but that’s because there’s you know nothing there obviously another problem with building diagonal is that

You don’t really have anywhere to put your doors now obviously placing doors is a bit tricky we’ve got a huge space here but if you just mark out where the doors are going to be see these would go we need to cover this space so if we

Right click here and we right click here it has to be in these corners then we get a door that opens up in the middle and then we can do some detailing here to kind of cover up the door a bit later on and that’s some that’s the similar

Thing that we did over there indeed we added another bit of log here and then we added a bit of uh framework over the top but that’s just another issue that you need to overcome with working with diagonals so it’s quite easy then to add lots of details

Using slabs they’re your best friend when you’re building in diagonals you can indeed place your doors the other way around if you want so you could have them uh here and here and they open outwards instead that sometimes looks a bit more natural and what i want to point out is

That we’ve got sort of this jagged area so instead of just building it straight up it usually start you know starts off a little bit out and then it goes up another layer and indeed you can’t really notice it but there’s several layers in there this bit for example is

Actually one block over the top so that’s something definitely to consider when you’re making it so let’s continue with this example i did make this a little bit too small so some of the things that i’m going to make might look a bit weird so let’s just fill in the windows you do

Have to use white glass uh block instead of panes because uh well we can use panes but it does actually you know make life a bit trickier because of this little problem here you actually end up creating a jail cell instead so if we connect them up like so

Then we kind of get an you know a weird looking problem where we’ve got these holes here in in general it’s easier to use the glass block but you can still use panes if you want to and indeed you can get a really nice effect with them but on the whole

I’m going to use some glass blocks and it feels good to actually use these because normally glass panes are the block of choice right so let’s continue with our little house here now let’s go on to the roof because the roof is something that i think everyone

Will dread when it comes to building diagonally and we’ll go and have a look at our quick examples first so let’s have a look what we’ve done over here now these are using the same technique but have a different shape basically we’re placing blocks diagonally surprise surprise and we’ve

Got a a-frame front now this one’s got a bit more of an accentuated one and we’re using full blocks just to fill in that space and it’s done almost organically now this brings me on to what not to do or perhaps you shouldn’t do people get

Upset if i say you shouldn’t do it in my opinion this is a bad idea so it might be um your instinct to do exactly what we do on square frames which is place staircases over the top because we get a nice easy effect with minimal effort on

Our part and then we can do a little overhang etc etc you know how to do roofs and that looks fine that’s exactly what we do normally but if we do that on a build like this we start to get a bit of an issue because it doesn’t look the same with

All of these little turns at every corner it ends up looking a bit strange and let me just finish this off so you can see okay so i’ve completed the diagonal roof using staircases and as you can see it’s these repeated patterns you can clearly see this zigzag pattern over and over again

And that’s something we don’t see over here where we’ve used the full block it looks a lot more natural using this technique here and it just it becomes so obvious that we’re trying to make a diagonal house and it’s not like we’re trying to actually hide the fact that

We’re making a diagonal house it just looks clunky and awkward now i’m not saying this looks terribly bad in fact i was a bit surprised to see that it actually works quite well it doesn’t look terrible but it does look like a massively repeated pattern and not as

Natural sitting as those over there so this is an option if you’re making your diagonal house especially if you’re struggling and you can just you know place lots of slabs over the top to get a little archway but you do have to create a big overhang to make it meet in the middle

Naturally but what i recommend you do if we remove all of this the way i would do it and indeed has been done over there and over there is instead we place ourselves another set of frameworks and then fill in the gaps so the middle here is going to be up so

Indeed if we take some logwood want to make sure it goes high enough that we’ll make it work and then we create a little overhang again going diagonally and we make sure that it meets exactly where we want it to so if i work my way up here maybe bring this

Down a bit something along those lines now it’s going to be a bit awkward when you get to this point so you might want to do something like taking your spruce staircase now remember this house here is incredibly small meaning that it is going to look a bit

More awkward than some of the larger houses the larger you go on any house the less nitty-gritty details you have to try and force into it now what you might need to do on a build like this is actually use both layers of diagon diagonal diagonal layers so it might be

Better to sort of do that so you can see it kind of works and it might take a little bit of fidgeting to try and get the perfect angle and remember it might not look perfect at this point but you get the idea of what we’re trying to accomplish here so

You need to you need to just practice a bit with it fiddle around try and work out where it’s going to work the best and there we have our framework and indeed i think i’m just going to put that on the top and we’ve got an a-frame and it’s

Certainly better than what we just had with the diagonals which kind of just went over like that it was a bit more it was less natural so we’ve got our bit there now how we deal with the side is also important because if we just make it

Straight like this we’re going to come into the same problem of the repeated pattern and it’s not going to work we need to create some sort of organic shape now whether we want to bend it downwards like so i think that’s what we’re going to do for this build but you can also

Bend it upwards so to speak like that and that accentuates the window the other one accentuates the roof by going down this one accentuates the window so i think i’m actually going to stick with this i’ll i’ll take back what i just said and this is what we’re going to use for

Our roof now we then need to replicate what we did here over here because it is a symmetrical house okay so i think i’ve replicated that now it is extremely difficult to replicate diagonal compared to flat faces because it’s very hard to work out exactly where each bit goes and

You’re working with slabs which can always be a pain as well so something to bear in mind that building diagonal is just a bit difficult compared to quote normal building which is perhaps why people don’t try so hard but that’s okay because you know this is what we’re here

For is trying to learn how to to make these sorts of houses right so now that we’ve got the framework we can make this bit in the middle and perhaps we want to lower this one just by half a block to give it another bit of

Shape so you can see we’ve got a lot more organic shape here rather than this sort of straight cut or even the zigzag pattern this is a lot more organic now of course we want to take something else to fill it in with and if i just take

Some brown and some gray terracotta i think that will do for for this build and we will come across some problems such as these little holes everywhere because we are working with slabs and diagonals so we’re going to get lots of little holes but we’ll just come across we’ll fix

Those up a bit later on so if i just fill this in best i can right so what i would do here is just replace that with a log in fact it might look better with just replacing that with a full bit of slab and again

Replace that with just a bit of slab now we might want to do something here because this is a bit awkward if we there we go whatever you can detail it as you like now what we want to do here is fill this in again so we want to just take care of

These little awkward areas of our build and you know there’s plenty of options to do that now probably just the simplest way to deal with this is just to add another bit there so we filled in all the little holes now it does look a bit awkward so we might want to just

Fiddle around with some of these blocks and make sure that we make it look a bit better now if you’ve got an awkward shape like this sometimes the best way is to just embrace the fact that it’s not perfect and add a couple slabs in there and that kind of just

Says yeah this isn’t perfect but i’m detailing it to make it look a bit more handmade now this one actually has come out a bit more rigid and perfect so there’s a couple of options there to do you can see that that works now like i said this looks

Really weird because the house that i’ve made is just so small if we jump over here we’ve got an example of a smaller house and this one looks a bit odd as well just because of the size when you’ve got a lot larger of a span an

Area to cover it will sit a lot more naturally that’s just one of the common occurrences so another bit of advice when you’re building diagonally is to go a bit bigger now this is a very tiny house and it actually works if you if

You sort of zoom out a bit you can tell that this is you know your a you know your a-frame and you’ve got your roof there and the walls etc and if we go inside it’s actually quite spacious got a lot of air even though it is a tiny tiny house so

That’s kind of the principles of building diagonally so let’s go over them briefly again make sure that you put your blocks to the side here and then have you know a curved wall segment try to avoid just making zigzag patterns on the roof make sure you frame your a-frame

And plenty of overhang and detailing is more than just spamming slabs in a straight line you want to make sure that you’re using both lines and make sure it juts out a little bit you don’t need to make it all rigidly along this line it will not come out good make it

Make use of both sides all three of those layers will make up the wall which means it will be a bit thicker than normal but that’s okay that’s just one of those consequences of building diagonally and as you can see the results are good you get a really nice looking build out of

It now up here you may be wondering what this is if you’ve seen it in the background building a diagonal tree house is difficult but it works better than a square one because when we build a tree we don’t tend to do this with the branches we tend to build diagonal branches to

Make it look more organic again diagonal makes it look like it’s more flowing so if we place the house on those tree branches it can look quite nice so if we go and have a look up here it seems like the treehouse sits a bit more naturally

So this is a good example of how diagonal builds can work so in conclusion building diagonal is not easy it is indeed quite tough and detailing is very similar to how we normally would so if i take some dirt blocks and wooden trap doors and some you know some flowers here i can

Make flower pots like i normally would add some you know tiny little details you can add a couple trap doors there another good detail is to use some buttons because they will work there as well and there we go we’ve got some detail on the house very easy

To add very simple and the same as you know adding detail on something like this we’re just using the same techniques over and over again on this one so they are similar they are similar in how you do them but there are just these tiny little tricks that you need to know

When you’re building diagonal because you may have tried it yourself and gone this doesn’t look right and it’s because everything kind of just twists round by one block and that’s something that you need to consider when you’re making diagonal houses so all there is left to

Say is a big big thank you for watching this video i hope that it helped and thank you to bob box who made that house and aj who made that one so that’s it for diagonal houses i’d love to see what you create remember you’ve got to practice to make it work and

Tweet me your designs on twitter and i will take a look at them i love to see what people make when using my design tricks and tips again thank you very much for watching and goodbye you