Mind-Blowing Minecraft Builds | WBC’s Epic Inspiration

What’s up guys and welcome back to wbc builds and welcome to a video that has been requested for quite a while now and that is how do i get my building inspiration so most of you know a lot of the buildings i actually add to the game of minecraft

Are mainly based within reality now i get about getting this inspiration through various means and resources but it’s mainly google street maps and google street view in the video you may say but no what i’m going to do today is i’m going to show

You guys how i read an area of town how i understand whether a building is victorian georgian and how i go about looking for various other buildings within towns and cities that may sort of just fall under the radar you may never know about or you may

Just find interesting so i’ve got an example town to show you today and that is the city of winchester let’s jump on into that with some google street maps and google street view so let’s go so i’ve come here to my first resource that is google maps

Along with google street view i have chosen the city of winchester because of its rich history it’s been settled for over 3 000 years the romans used it as quite an important site along with the anglo-saxons having it as the main capital for wessex speaking of history architecture especially when we’re

Looking for inspiration around victorian and edwardian always leads to history and winchester is absolutely full of it so when you come onto google maps you can see mainly especially in well-established towns and cities you get this area highlighted in yellow which shows the main shopping area the main center now if you’re looking

For buildings specifically let’s say a georgian building this is probably the best place to start looking for it in any town now we’re going to go over to the satellite view so we can start getting a look at the roofs roofs you say why are we going to be looking at roofs well

Roofs are really interesting because there is a clear distinction in the uk between time periods when it comes to looking at roof tiles yes i assure you that i’m not mad i’m not just going to rabble on about roofs for a while but we are going to rabble

On about roofs for a little while so if you look at these roofs you can see two distinct colors we have a sort of brownish color especially in this area around here this is around the old medieval cathedral as well and you can also then see a slightly

Darker grayer colored roof tile around this section here mainly and what this is showing is the difference between slate and clay roof tiles this is just generalization of british history but before the industrial revolution and before canals and railways were thing it was hard to move slate which mainly comes from wales

Down to the rest of the uk so you can see winchester is down here in the middle of hampshire which is nowhere near wales now what happened was once canals and railways were built it became easier to move slate and slate tiles out of wales meaning the roofs could be

Made out of them now you’re going to ask me a question why how do you know they’re still victorian because slate roofs aren’t really used in the same hipped fashion as they are here so you again hipped roofs what what so this is a hip roof here you can

Probably just about see behind all of this lettering let’s have a look at this one over here it has four sides to it modern day houses if you look at these ones here tend to be pitched now this is again generalization of british architecture but what we’re looking for here mainly

Is the victorian and the georgian buildings which is obviously what i specialize in myself when i look for inspiration so i can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that when i zoom into this building here it is going to be a georgian building probably from the later part of the

Georgian times maybe 1750 onwards and yes i can tell you that is that very much a georgian building which is also suffered from the window tax which is what’s going on here now we can already see there is a ton of inspiration along this road

And there is just even more this way as well my mind is already starting to boggle i’m looking at this going well that that could be birch planks this could be quartz down the sides here also this could be even red sandstone oh who uses red sandstone these days

But anyway so that is one way of telling from the sky how old a building is and whether it’s going to suit what you’re looking for whether it be a georgian victorian or an edwardian house so let’s say if we come over here and look at these buildings now

You can see these are clearly a lot older they don’t really follow any form this one is probably an early georgian house mainly because it hasn’t got three stories it has a very low pitched roof the same with this one here this is very much an old building

And it doesn’t surprise me because when you look around here we have a bit more of a medieval architecture going on so that’s one way of looking to see whether a building is old and whether it will be worth using as inspiration as i’ve done around here now when it

Comes to towns like winchester or anywhere else in the uk that have train stations they tend to be built between 1825 and probably 1930. i can tell you that winchester’s train station was built in 1837 and since then the town has grown quite a bit for that

Most of the city existed down here now you’re going to ask me a question how do you know that so i’m going to come on to show you the other resource i have at my disposal and that is the old os maps from the late victorian times that the

National library of scotland have now uploaded to be able to be used as a geo-referenced map so if you come over here onto their website i don’t know if their website is available throughout the entirety of the world i imagine it probably is but if you go down to the digital

Resources and click on map images you get it to a choice of like this sort of selection here so you can do a side by side viewer or you can go on to this here which is the geo reference maps and it acts just like google maps but

For the late 19th century i mean look at it it’s crazy isn’t it you zoom in it changes its sort of ways and somehow i found winchester without really thinking about it but if we go over to this side here and select os 25 inch 1891-1914 it gives you a really nice high

Resolution high detailed map of most of the country of the uk so again this is all centered mainly around getting inspiration from the uk now if we look at winchester here we can see that as i said most of the buildings originally existed down this part over towards the east

A lot of the staff over on the west hand side of the railway line started to get built up over the periods now let me show you another really handy feature of this and that is the slider bar over here and what we can do is we can slide in and out

Of the modern world and the victorian world and what that shows us is all of this area here it’s probably not worth looking at for inspiration at all this area here possibly is and i haven’t seen these roads before so i’m quite interested by them

So what you can do is once you have a look at it from here you’ve got the name of the roads and you get the name of the area jump back over onto your google maps zoom on in and go oh i’m going to get in here and start using the street view

And then you come on down and you get a clearer picture of what those buildings it looked like especially since you can’t see them because pictures may not exist you won’t know what to search for but because they probably do still exist in the real world

You can come on over and go oh oh and start having a little gawk at some of the old and nice inspirational buildings i mean look at these these are really nice ignore the big blurred out image to the side there clearly something someone doesn’t want to show the house

Up now sometimes you’re lucky and you can see what that says there if you can’t maybe you can change for a different date and it might say something it says something there i can’t see what it says but yeah so that is how these two resources are really handy to be used together

But what is really nice with this as well is it gives you a glimpse of the world as it was well as uk as it was in around 1910 1912 it says here at the bottom there hampton isle of wight uh revised in 1840 1894 published in 1897 so this image is a

Snapshot of winchester as it was over 130 years ago so this is great and i love it and the idea that you get all of this inspiration from here you can even use it as intellectual like street plans and ideas and how you want to plan out a

City because what happens is once we’ve moved into the 21st century a lot of the old infrastructure and old ways of life no longer exist especially from this period you can see these two big circles here there’s gas meters now these obviously don’t exist anymore

But that was the main way that a town would house their gas their natural gas to be used as cooking or to even use to light their streets what i’m trying to say here is these are the sort of amenities you should be adding to your towns

If you wanted to feel a bit more victorian or edwardian yeah so this is a great tool to be using because it really does give you a great idea of just how buildings have changed and how landscapes have changed over the last 100 years or so i mean

Look at this villa street here so let’s jump on into this one quickly again you can come on down here and see that wow these are some beautiful villas probably built in the later part of the georgian period around about the regency period and again they just sit down here beautifully so

If i move on down here into the town of southampton you can see here that we do have the ability to look at this in 3d so if you zoom on into places you get a clearer image possibly even a better image than you would get at street view

Of just how a building might look and with this you can start glancing around looking at places and going oh that looks nice zoom all in and look at it a street view so i think that really answers how i get inspiration it’s mainly just flying around google maps all day going

Ooh that’s quite a nice looking building oh i wonder if that’s georgian jumping over onto the national library of scotland looking to see whether it was existing at that point in time or whether it was just not that’s where i spend a lot of my time looking at different things because i

Love history i love architecture i love marrying the two together in the form of stuff that i do on the channel now you may be asking yourself a question how do you bring these into minecraft well i have an entire series on that that i’ve just sort of started up for on

Episode two as the time of recording this video and that is from bricks to blocks within that series i take real life buildings as i’ve shown you here from google maps from even going to look at them in real life and i bring them into the world of

Minecraft and i give you guys an idea of how i go about doing that using just sort of the blocks we have at our disposal but of course the one resource i forgot to mention is real life there’s always a chance of you going outside and looking at a

Building you’ve never seen before in your local area that suddenly inspires you to go oh i should go build that i really should have a go at building that it’s always worth looking up i mean i’ve done it so many times where i’ve missed the building i’ve walked

Past and then look back at it on google street maps and go wow i didn’t know that was even there so it is always worth just if you are interested with any of this having a look at what you’ve got locally having a look at what you’ve got your nearest town or city

And going from there getting some great inspiration like that will really probably spark the interest in you to look further afield well guys i wanted to share this video with you just because this is how i do it and i wanted to give you some ideas

On how you may go about doing it yourself but remember guys get inspired get building and i’ll see you next time goodbye you