Minecraft Building Concepts from a Self-Declared Pro

Minecraft is one of the most powerful creative tools of the past decade you can build quite literally anything you want but if you’ve ever tried to build a minecraft you’ve probably learned pretty quick that it’s harder than it looks if your builds look like this but you

Really want them to look like this then you’re in the right place So the first step is your minecraft settings so the first thing you should be aware of is your mouse sensitivity so i like to lower my mouse sensitivity because it actually forces you to focus more on the details it’s gonna feel a little bit weird at first but trust me

You’re gonna get used to it if you’re anything like me your brain wants to put out a million ideas at once and it skips over the smaller details so this is really a necessity the second is your field of view so your field of view should not be too wide or

Too narrow i like to keep mine at around 85 and i’m working on a 27-inch monitor if your monitor is smaller like if you’re working on a 13 inch laptop you might be better off at about 100 the third thing is your fly speed if you can’t control it in single player this

Might not be possible but if you’re on a multiplayer server you can just use the forward slash speed command Okay so let’s move on to shape and size so you’re going to have to pick a scale for your build i typically build in 1.5 to 1 where everything in the game is 50 bigger than in real life so how you’re gonna do this is i take gray wool and i

Take green wool and the gray wool here it represents the open space in your floor the green represents the ceiling and the floor above and all you’re going to do once you have this is you can stack it upwards so you have a couple of different options these are the ones

That i typically use so i sometimes use a 4 2 split sometimes i will use a 5 2 split and other times you can use a one two three four five open and then three split so your open space has five blocks here and then the upper parts here you

Have a lower ceiling you have an upper ceiling and then you have a floor so usually the only time you’d use this is if you’re trying to make your ceiling a lot more detailed and this way you can have a double layered ceiling which makes it so that you can have molding on

The bottom and then you can put your actual lights up here another thing too with your scale is that on first floors you can typically go a little bit bigger than the normal ones so if i was building a skyscraper and on the upper floors i wanted four open and then

Ceiling floor for a total of six maybe on the ground floor i would use one two three four five six open so this would be six gray and then i would have two green on top Your build should have a distinct base middle and top section so to distinguish between these sections you should either have a material change a facade design change or a setback change okay so for the actual proportions i like to use the two-thirds rule which means a minimum of

Two-thirds of the height of your tower is dedicated to the middle section of your tower you should also try and match the context of the city don’t try and stand out with your build because a city is a system that works together the tower base here is approximately the

Same height as the surrounding builds which is represented by the cyan wool you can also see over here that i use the two-thirds rule for this mid-rise here and you can see that there’s a distinct base middle and top section okay so let’s talk about the slenderness

Of towers so slenderness is defined as the height to width ratio so in this case we have an example here so we have one two three and one two three so this is three by three and it is nine blocks tall okay so you’re going to take nine you’re gonna divide it by

Three which gives you three so the slenderness ratio of this tower is three to one okay so what about this example so it’s nine blocks tall one wide and three deep so in structural engineering for the sake of calculations we take the smallest side so it’s nine tall and one

Wide so our slenderness ratio is going to be nine to one okay so let’s move on to a real life example so this here represents the slenderness ratio of 432 park avenue in new york city so the slenderness ratio is 15 to 1. and here is the current most slender tower in the

World which is 111 west 57th street in new york city this has a slenderness ratio of 24 to one and these look unimaginably tall and here’s just a little model that i made the other day because i got bored so a question you might be asking yourself is how do these

Things actually stand up because they look impossibly tall well good news for you is because i have the answer coming up in section 8. Okay so let’s talk about layouts so this is the color scheme i’m going to use and all the yellow is is just for elevator shafts or stairs okay so in any type of build you should first decide what type of rooms you need and what type of rooms

You want and you should write this down somewhere because it’s really going to help you so i’m going to do two examples here so this is the base of a bank tower and this one here is the base of a residential tower okay so for our

Planning example we are going to make a list of the required rooms so i want to have a lobby i want to have an elevator waiting area a mail room a vestibule which is just an entryway with a keypad and an entrance to the underground parking for the optional items i want to

Have a bike room a party space a reception desk a coffee shop and maybe a couple first floor shops if we have room so a key point here is use real life references there are so many free floor plans available and if you just want to

Look at them just for reference that is a great idea okay so let’s move back to our bank tower here so what i did here on the first floor is that i have glass on all sides and then you have two entrances here now you will likely need another

Entrance here which i forgot so i’m just gonna put that in right there and then maybe we want another one back here okay so right here you have four elevators one two three four and then you have two staircases back here so this is not up to code just yet so if

You wanted to have it’s up to code you would have to pull this up here and do something like this and then you could do something like this because it has to go all the way out to the side another option too is that you can just pull

This staircase and pull it all the way over to the other side so that’s pretty much it for this this one is pretty simple if you did want to add some bathrooms or something you could maybe add them back here or if you wanted to

You could kind of stick them in a corner or something but you just have to be careful of your window space if you want me to make a video exclusively about layouts then hit the like button to let me know because if this video does well

Then i know people like this type of content Okay so let’s move on to building placements so i want to talk about two different types of towers to start point towers are basically you have a base and then you have a tower that is on top but it is set back a little bit this just

Makes it so you have a little bit more light and it’s a lot less intimidating for the people walking around on the street towers that are not point towers and just have a flat facade from the top to the very bottom are used more for

When you are lacking space this is a lot more common in new york city although new york does have both okay so let’s jump into the city of india real quick so this tower here is my very first tower in the city and you can see that i used round corners so all

Round quarters do is just deflect the eyesight in this direction here you can also see that it’s on a corner here so i wanted to kind of emphasize the corner by having one of the points on the corner now this tower isn’t necessarily a point tower although it doesn’t have a base it

Is only one floor and then you can see it comes all the way down right here so it is a bit of a blended tower so one thing you can do if you are building in a city and you have a pretty big lot is that you can actually make multiple

Buildings so i originally built this one and this one together but i didn’t want to use the whole thing for a tower otherwise it would just create this giant ugly thing that’s just kind of blocking views the fun part about building in a city is that you can actually integrate it into

Other builds so this here you can see that the second floor of this tower actually connects through a sky bridge onto this one here too so if you work with others when you are making your buildings it’s going to make your city a whole lot cooler okay so let’s look at another example

Here so this is a condo building also in the city of andia in southern marina and you can see that it’s kind of on a diagonal here so what i wanted to do when i built this is i wanted to respect the water line and this path going along

Here so you can see it fits the city rather than just sticking out like a sore thumb this building is also staggered upwards which just makes it a lot more interesting to look at and a lot less intimidating i also didn’t want to build it right on the water because i

Wanted to have a couple of community amenities like a bike rental shop and then some public washrooms here and an information stand this just makes it so that the waterfront feels a lot more engaging to people visiting okay so our next example is a brick tower that i originally built for

Instagram and tick tock if you want to see it and see the cool animation that i made with it you can check it out using the links in the description so originally this building including this space came here and it went around back and then this same facade design was

Just extended in the place of this building one detail i want to point out is this area down here so you can see that going from the sidewalk you have to walk up here so this is elevated by two blocks this area here you can’t really have full windows otherwise if you’re

Standing inside and looking this way this is going to be your view so what i decided to do instead of just having a blank wall i decided to extend the columns down and then in place of where the windows would be i just used brick walls instead so even though if you were

Building this tower this space is technically not yours and somebody else may have built it it just respects the other space and makes the space more interesting okay so our last example is this car dealership so this is really interesting because we have a rail line that follows

Up and around this curve here and then you see the building it’s down here on the first floor but on the second floor it’s actually pushed back in there so it respects the actual context of the city you can also see the same thing happening on the front here you can see

The road that’s a bit diagonal here and then the facade it also matches that diagonal this is a realistic way to design because in real life big cities property values are so expensive that you want to use every single inch of space that you have so the key takeaway

Here is build quality over quantity and don’t try and build to be the center of attention build your buildings to enhance the space around it okay so let’s talk about facades so for these examples i’m going to be using cutepak which you can check out using the link in the description which is

Available for java so here’s the color palette that i’m going to use and all the materials that are involved okay so for these examples i am going to use one two three four open one block for the ceiling and one block for the floor all right let’s talk about depth

So you want to avoid having too little depth so this just means that there is nothing here so it’s all just a flat facade another thing you want to avoid is having too much this here is one and a half so you have your full block you have another half

Block here and then you have your glass panes here so this personally i believe to be a little too much i personally believe that the best way is to have a balanced facade so this example here uses half a block so you have your full block and you have your glass pane as

You can see here you can also use walls and glass panes here which just gives you a little bit more fine control over it okay so that’s a good start with depth so how do we actually build it so here’s a couple examples of how to decorate your facade so something that i

Like to use if we are using glass all the way up with no breaks in between i will usually put a different type of glass either on the floor level or on the ceiling level so in cube pack i’m using glass and then this here is lime stained glass so with optifine with

Normal glass it all connects but then your lime stained glass does not which makes it so that you can make some pretty cool designs and goop back again you don’t have to use cute pack to make cool designs but it just makes it a little bit easier for you okay so you

Have your bottom here this one’s a little bit flat this one’s a little bit more balanced but you know it’s still a little bit bland okay so this is all well and good but what if you want a little bit more detail so let’s come over here so you need world edit for

This but if you have world edit then you can extend the glass on one two and three sides so that this here you have a line that draws your eye upwards so if you have world edits then you can use this command here and then you can

Change the west east north or south if you need to so this here this is just indicating the direction that this way is north okay so this isn’t a bad design but if you’re repeating it up all the way on your tower and side to side it might get a

Little bit repetitive so this is where stuff like this comes into play so you have the same thing but instead of having them on each one going across here you might have one on the side here and one on the side here you could also

Just do one in the middle if you really wanted to and then delete these two so this here is a brown stained glass pane but you don’t have to go with this this is just in cube pack this one is also in cute pack this is an acacia fence but if

You’re in default and say for example you are working with a white color theme then you might want to go with something like a white stained glass pane and you can just replace them going up the side just like this you can also use end rods

And the thing about end rods is that if you’re going for a dark color theme in cube pack or if you’re going for more of a lighter color theme in default then these emits light so then going up your tower especially at night it’s going to look really really cool okay so now

Let’s take this design put it over here and then we’re going to stack it a common mistake that i want to point out to you is being able to see your floor and your ceiling right through your windows one way to avoid this you actually take either the material that

You’re using for the vertical part or a similar material whether it be lighter or a little bit darker and then you just cover the first layer here instead so if we compare it you have this layer of flooring normally and then you have this one here going across this side and these walls

Here this is just another detail i like to use if you think it’s a little bit weird looking like this you can add walls that go up the side here just to give it a little bit more depth coming around the side okay so now that we have

One side we’re gonna take it and then we’re gonna stack it upwards because it can look a lot different once you actually have it in place when you’re building towers you should be aware of what your design is actually doing to the people that are looking at it so if

You’re standing down here usually your eyes would be going upwards right because you have this column here and you have these things sticking out on the side if for example you were to take this and you had this here going across and then you stacked this all the way

Along i know this is just an example and it looks really bad but if you had this on each one of these then your eyes would be likely drawn side to side rather than up and down so something you might notice as an observer if you’re

Standing at the base of a tower and let’s pretend this is 50 floors tall for a minute and the facade is identical all the way up you’re gonna have a really hard time telling how tall the tower actually is the thing about people is that they like to know things the thing

That makes architecture interesting to look at is when you can recognize patterns or understand the building so this is what we’re going to do here we are going to introduce brakes so this one here this is a double floor of the identical glass and then you’re

Going to just take out the glass here so if you took this and stacked it upwards a bunch you’re going to be able to tell roughly how tall it is because they’re in two block increments you can also do the same thing here where you take three and say you stacked

This upwards a whole bunch and you had four different distinct sections of this and each of them were three tall you could immediately tell that it was 12 floors tall brakes are used all the time in buildings whether it be skyscrapers or small details like this so this is

What we’re going to talk about next whenever you have a transition of materials you need a break so this here it does not look good you have say for example a first floor and a second floor okay so let’s get rid of this awkward transition so the first way you can do

This is by using a setback so all you do is you go up you go back one or two blocks and then you keep going upwards i would also highly recommend just having one or two blocks or maybe even a trap door in this case signaling that this is

The top of this section okay so our next option here is a cantilever so this just means that there’s an overhang so again instead of just having this weird transition between one block to the next one you’re going to go up and then it’s going to be a one block difference and

Then you’re going to keep going up you can use more than one block if you’d like but try and keep it as small as you can okay our last option here is an actual break so you go up to the top of this section here you have an indent it

Goes up and then it comes back out okay so let’s talk about some important design elements the thing about your designs is that people like to know things they want to know about your building they want to know how it works so there’s different ways you can do

This you can draw the eye upwards and then you can introduce different breaks to show them how tall it is so let’s start with the first example so this one here it only has these elements that go upwards and it’s really hard to tell how tall this building actually is if you

Are standing on the ground right here if we take this building we copy it and then we just delete these two floors here it gives us a bit of an indication of how tall it is so this would be considered the base and then this would be considered the upper floors you may

Have also noticed that this tower follows the two-thirds rule so from here down is seven floors and then the rest of the 21 floors are made for the actual tower portion itself so if we move on to example three here you can see that the eyes are immediately drawn side to side

Rather than upwards if this is the goal that you’re going for then go for it otherwise i would recommend sticking to vertical elements if you want to give people a little bit more context as to how tall your tower is just like the example that we were talking about back

Here you can use different sections here so you can have one two three of a facade design you can take a break one two three a break and then you can keep going upwards if you’re building a facade don’t necessarily agree with the height then you can make your top

Section a little bit taller so this one here is one two three four five whereas the rest of them are three for our fifth example we’re gonna look at a point tower so this one here has the same effect as number two here except it’s just adding a base rather than just a

Cut right there between floors six and seven so all this does is that it gives you a little bit more daylight when it comes down here because when you’re standing on the street if you have towers going all the way up it is going to block quite a bit of daylight and

It’s going to be a lot darker if you really want to show somebody that you know what you’re doing when you’re designing a tower you can do something like this by introducing setbacks as you go up you’ll probably notice that the tallest skyscrapers in the world do this

Anyway that’s because that the load has to be transferred down through the tower and if you have more of a heavy load on top it just makes the systems more structurally inefficient so if i fly up here i’m gonna stop right here and i’m gonna put a couple lines on the screen

So you can see that there’s three lines and that as you go up they become more and more vertical this is a very subtle design trick that makes it so that people will look towards the top of the tower there is no one solution for building towers because every situation

Is unique you just want to choose the one that fits the context of your city the best okay so we have these design solutions but what about shells and complex patterns well let’s look at some examples this is a tower that i’m working on for another video and you

Might think it looks complicated but it’s a lot easier to build than you think all you have to do to build complex facades like this is start with a base so if we go into the middle here we can see that the inside is just a perfect rectangle there’s nothing special about

It you have your stairwells you have your elevators and you have more elevators here and then if you want you could add washrooms around here but you can see that it’s all on a grid same thing here so you have your columns and then over here you have your

Exterior columns and then you have your curtain walls so if you look very closely you can see that this here is actually the exterior wall and then this is just an extension so i made this cool design and i stacked it up and down and then i made all these cool angles here

Okay so if we jump back into the city of andia here let’s check out this tower that my friend made so all they did for the actual tower portion is they made one floor they made two floors and then they stacked it downwards because you have this white element then you have a

Break and then you have it again so this floor and this floor are identical well actually they are two floors so you see he used a double just like we were talking about earlier and one last example here before we move on is this building here so all they did is they

Made these cool hexagons except they’re elongated i’m not actually sure what the shape is called but you can see that they used rails here in cubepack and they made this floor and this floor the exterior facade identical and then offset it a little bit inwards for this

One and this one and all they did is they just stacked it upwards Let’s talk about windows and doors so for these examples i’m going to use this to represent a window i’m going to use this to represent a door and then this black here is going to be a wall okay so let’s first look at what not to do so

The thing that’s wrong with this is that this door is way too short right if you’re building at a bigger scale you’re gonna want your doors to match so this is just way too small okay so if we move on to the next one let’s race the door

Height a little bit but now it looks a little bit weird right you have your door that’s one block wide and four blocks tall so the ratio is a little bit off so your door’s a little bit too narrow if we move on to this one we can

See that our door is now the same size as our windows which is now two by four and it just matches a lot better too because you can see that you have a column you have a gap of two column gap of two column gap of two and

Then another column but here’s something to consider what if you don’t want your door to go all the way up so this is what this next example is so all you’re going to do is you’re going to have your same size windows on this side and this

Side and then this opening is still going to be the same size as your window openings except on the top here you can replace this with a window and then your door is now two blocks wide and three blocks deep so let’s look at an example

Okay so we’re back in the city of andia and we are going to check out this brick tower once again so i used this trick down here so you have your window of this size and then the opening for the door the opening here is five blocks

Across and six down which is identical to this one here and this also makes it so that it’s easier to translate upwards so that you don’t have to create an entirely new design for this side so you can see that i used this design trick with this front entrance so i didn’t

Want to go all the way up here because then it would be five blocks tall and then one and a half blocks wide and i felt that was a little bit too narrow so to make it look a little bit better i decided to extend this down by one and

Then just have the door like this and as i just mentioned you can see a representation here but when you have the opening for your door even if it isn’t the entire door if you want to use glass here if these openings are all the same size

Which is two by four in this case if you stack it upwards your windows and the top section of your building it’s going to be a lot easier to make the last thing i want to talk about related to doors is the depth so if you have a

Balanced approach like this so you have it too deep that means that you can have a facade here and then if you really want to you can either have a detailed facade on the outside where you can add some depth or you can make it so that on

The inside here you can have a different material no i would not recommend using grass we will talk about color in the next section so if we look at the second one here this one is a two by four door but it is three deep so this one here i

Don’t really like it because it feels a little bit like a tunnel so our last example here is the most common where you just have it as one wide now this doesn’t really give you the flexibility to have any more depth in your facade but if you can make it work i would

Recommend using it All right let’s talk about colors colors are very important and it can make or break your builds so just some basics about colors you have your primary colors which are red yellow and blue and then if you combine these colors you can get your secondary colors of orange

Purple and green if i want my build to feel a little bit bigger than it actually is i’m gonna use light colors but on the other side if you want it to feel a little bit smaller and more compact then you can use darker colors if you’re trying to choose an accent

Color you should choose it based on whether you want your build to feel warmer or cooler now there are quite a few design tips that you can include at interiors but i’m going to save that for another video alright so let’s actually talk about some color palettes so this

Here if you are using dark colors you might want to use some dark glass to go with it you can also combine in some regular glass if you would like to add a little bit of depth again you can use your greys grey stained glass and

Regular glass if you want to go with something a little bit lighter then you can go with your light greys or you could just go with white if grayscale isn’t really your style you can go with some gradients here so this here is an orange gradient so

You have your red sand which is a little bit darker you have an intermediate which is your smooth red sandstone and then up top is your polished granite now you can use this for any color as long as you have a dark a middle and then a little bit of a lighter color

Just to add some contrast now you can tighten them up a little bit if you want this not to be as light then you can choose something that more closely matches this one here or one down here this next one here is one of my favorite

Combos which is red brick you have any sort of black material and then you have glass here too if you are new to the world of color palettes then i would recommend choosing one of these four here and then you combine it with one of the colors if you want to go for

Something super modern looking and clean you can use a white block and then just some glass i also like to use some dark color schemes where i use black blocks black glass and then regular glass too okay let’s talk about this one i really don’t like this because all you’re doing

Here is you’re taking a really dark color you’re mixing a really light one and then you also have this blue in here too and i just think it doesn’t really work well if you were to change this white wool to something like this then i think that works a little bit better or

If you wanted just to have this then i also think that works better but if you have really heavy contrasting colors it tends to clash quite a bit the last one we’re gonna look at is this so this is interesting because it isn’t really a color combination that you see often

But the question is does it work it looks really interesting and i actually kind of like it so there is a reason for this but i want to see if you guys can figure it out in the comments Okay last but certainly not least let’s talk about the structural realism of your builds let’s jump to this area where i keep all my secret buildings so you can see that there’s this concrete part that goes around here you have a staircase here you have a couple elevators and then you have another

Staircase here this is meant to represent the top of a tower that’s currently under construction and for those of you that are familiar with construction yes these are supposed to be higher but this is just a demonstration so this concrete wall that goes all the way up the tower is called

A shear wall so a skyscraper that uses a shear wall can be represented as a tree so the shear wall represents the trunk all of the floors that extend outwards are the branches and all the glass on the outside are like the leaves when we

Look at this you can see that all of these columns are aligned as well which means that it is on a structural grit by having a structural grid and placing columns in the intersection of the grid it makes it a lot easier for the structural engineers to calculate loads

Okay so if we jump to the top of the finished build here we can see that there are these little fan things here so all of this stuff on the roof this is called your hvac equipment hvac just stands for heating ventilation and air conditioning usually hvac systems are

Pretty complicated so you can get away with just kind of scattering it over your rooftop you can also see these staircases here that i brought all the way up because this is how you actually get to the roof usually by the time you get here this will be a locked door that

You can’t actually get through unless you have a key this right here is your elevator overrun and although it doesn’t actually stick out like this in real life i decided to add some extra details just to give it a little bit more complexity also if you look at these

Things here these are not structural but they are a little detail that you can add to your tower so what these are is that they pick up the window washing device and then they lower the workers down the side of the building safely so that they can wash the windows you might

Still be wondering from earlier in the video of how those super tall towers stand up so the first answer to that is they use a shear wall but some of them are so unimaginably tall that they have to use this thing called a tuned mass damper a tuned mass damper is a ball

That is suspended in the top of a tower that is typically filled with water or concrete to increase the inertia at the top of the tower to reduce swaying i’m in my fifth year of an architectural engineering undergrad program and i do a lot of structural engineering in my university classes

If you want to see me build a minecraft skyscraper using real structural engineering techniques let me know by pressing like on this video and you could even consider subscribing thanks for watching and i’ll see you next time You