Minecraft Build School: Bridges!

Hello my name is green and today we’re back with another build school this time going on bridges i have created two cliff faces and a chasm which is going to simulate where we’re going to build our bridges i’m going to show you a few different designs and hopefully that will give you

The techniques you need to make your own bridge let’s get into it here is the first design this is a very simple bridge it just hangs over the edge so important you need to make sure that both sides are the same y coordinate you need to make two small ruts using log

And in between them you simply use half slab going down at regular intervals until they meet in the middle using two different colors is very effective way of detailing it although it’s very small and this is a great design that you could do at an angle

Once you’ve done that you can then use fence to just make it look like it’s being suspended in some way rather than just free floating or if you are not a fan of the fences you could alternatively go and try something like this with log and using some staircases

Or something like that it’s not a big deal this is a very simple design for a small bridge you probably wouldn’t use it if you were doing a grand design but it is a nice simple easy and cheap bridge nonetheless now let’s get into some of the more complex bridges

It’s always important that you make sure that your two sides are at the same y coordinate or you’re going to end up with a wonky bridge you need to make sure you make a curve over the top and it needs to be equal on both sides and then replicate

It to the other side of your center point that way you have a completely arched bridge i’m using log here and i will be using very similar blocks throughout the tutorial but you could use whatever i’m just trying to teach you some of the techniques right now i’m using half slab

And just making the connections over the arch a bit smoother now i’m going to take half slab again again using that wood and go over the archway on the inside making sure that i have a lip over the sides i’m then going to take weld at it and just stack it

Over but you can do that by hand easy peasy and there we have sort of a free floating arched bridge but you may think to yourself quite correctly that that really isn’t enough it doesn’t look natural there are multiple things we can do to improve this the first one is

Taking the half slab and just improving the actual bridge itself just by giving it a curved shape and then replicating it on the other side this effectively just makes it look less square although that’s a little bit odd to say it actually makes it look a lot nicer

But most importantly the thing we have to edit to improve our bridges is the underside it looks so thin and correctly so so what we can do is add some extensions on the top but for this design i want to completely make sure i’m in the center

And replicate the same arch that i did in the middle underneath and you’ll see why in a second i’m now going to take my block block and make it look like it is being supported by this undecided beam and hopefully the video can talk louder than my words because this is actually

Quite difficult to describe but it is a v-shaped support beam system with that overriding arch and all it does is detail the underside of our bridge to make it look more realistic and it looks a lot better just in general because it’s not free floating and just to

Finish off this design i’m going to add another support beam right at the top to make it look like it is finally supported in the middle as well and i’m going to use weld edit to completely turn them all into six sided log and that completes that

Design but what i’m going to do now is copy paste that over and i’ll show you another few designs that we could use with this bridge so the first one is again making the arch underneath but two blocks back instead of in the middle and only slightly beneath it and then

Putting stone behind it and as you can see that just gives it that extra level of depth and detail that would make the bridge look better on the other side we’re going to take a slightly different approach and try out a different design again we need to create that arch but

Directly below our original one but a bit further down and once we’ve done that connect up the two sides one block behind with anything of your choice i’m using stone here just for the purposes of this video and then fill it in with whatever pattern you want i’m just doing

One off the top of my head at the time with log and some fences very simple then again changing it all to six sided log and there we go we have our completed bridge and i do give it a little bit of a texture adding some ambenzai in there as well but

Those bridges only cover a very small area and you wouldn’t find them very appropriate for a big area like this so now we’re going to tackle huge stone ones which is probably what you were after with bridges because you are often confronted with large spaces like this

So as you can see i’ve got a big rectangle and i’ve found the center very important that you plan out where you’re going to be building your bridge now i’m going to make just a simple archway you can do whatever you want with this build

I’m just going to try and teach you some very basic techniques so that you will have the skills necessary to make your own so as always when we’re dealing with the frame we build one block back and we’re going to fill in the rest of it

With stone i didn’t use welded it for this little part because i thought there was something oddly satisfying about watching me place blocks all the time but obviously i’m not going to do that the whole time i just thought it would be nice to see me suffer

Anyway we’re going to continue on and finish off the rest of that just copy paste it over the top and we have a complete bridge with a archway but as you can tell there’s huge expanses of stone which are not okay and we can also detail this arch a bit better by

Thickening it up with some staircase and some half slab and it just improves the arch in general but the biggest thing to detail is this giant stone slab that we’ve got so there are a few things that we can do one of them is to decorate it with

Further arches so we can actually add two smaller ones either side or one either side and have these extra arches that just sort of segment up the entire bridge i’ve made mine different sizes to kind of demonstrate what you could do but you could have equal sizes and indeed in

Real life i’ve seen plenty of bridges which just have one after the other same size so now i’m just replicating it over the top and i’m just extending the stone to complete the archery on in the middle not doing that by hand because it would take absolutely ages but you get the

Idea very simple stuff so now i’m gonna go back and teach you a few more detailing techniques very very simple stuff i’m not one to over detail everything but this is something that you can do and make up your own little design i just did this off the top of my

Head so all i’m doing is knocking in one layer and then decorating it with half slab and staircase and creating a colored clay layer behind it and it just gives that extra perspective that extra little detail of depth and a color change as well which is always important

Although i’ve gone completely gray on this because i’m going entirely stone you can do whatever color you want so now i’m going over to address the issue that the entire top bit is flat so what i’m doing now is creating these bits that go in the air in a sharp point

And they also look a little bit like diamond shape but again you could make any shape you want i’m just trying to show you that a good way to decorate your bridge is to add a variety of shapes along the edges you could for example at the two ends do an archway

And have sort of like a gate and barriers stuff like that i’m just sort of coming up with some random ideas for my little bridge that i have made and you can mix and match all of these different design ideas that i’ve kind of thrown at you today with the variety of

Stuff that i showed you earlier as well and you can make it work for your bridge you have to adapt to the size that you need to cover with your bridge that’s very very important and that’s all that i really wanted to show you today and i

Hope i’ve addressed some of the issues that you wanted with bridges because this was a recommended video and so if you’ve made it this far into the video i have to thank you so much for watching the entire thing i often forget that people don’t watch the entire thing

So they never reach this message at the end so if you are here you are the special few that actually really enjoy the entirety of my videos so i feel really grateful that you’re listening to my voice right now thank you very much for watching i hope you’ve

Enjoyed this video i will be working on a castle one but i haven’t quite figured out how to make it work for me i sort of did this bridge video first because i had an idea on how to do it and i really really hope that i got my message across

With the different techniques you could use and how you can mix and match them together to suit the bridge that you need to make so anyway that’s it from me i will also have in the future a vlog video coming out of just a small update and conventions that i’m attending and that

Kind of thing so as usual if there is any more video suggestions that you would like to tell me about i am all ears thank you very much for watching goodbye