The 5 B’s of Building [Minecraft Building Advice]

Hey there stevie oh jeepers mister you scared the creepers out of me how would you like to take a break from that fine dirt based wall and learn about building boy would i where am i mister why you’re an alpha stevie alfajuno alpha building started all the way back

In 2009 by filthy casuals who had just discovered minecraft but it would be a long time before normal people would make anything decent now people make mega structures every day wow i can’t wait to make a house of my own whoa whoa whoa hold on a second there

Chuck patches are agree on that’s right stevie five year strong builder patches o’grion is here to take you the rest of the way actually it’s just green if you want to get better at building you’ll need to learn the five b’s of building build break block borders and build

And remember building is a skill of creativity talent and most of all plagiarism if you can’t build just download something off planet minecraft and pass it off as your own that way all your friends on the server can call you out and tell you what literal trash you are

And remember the more time you spend building the less time you’re outside exercising okay so there aren’t five b’s of building please do not take that seriously it was a joke if you didn’t get it there are however five things that i do want to talk to you about which i

Consider sort of five universal rules and themes that you should incorporate into every building and the first one i want to talk to you about is palette now palette is the colors that an artist would use on paintings but we use the same word to

Describe the type of blocks we use on a building and as you can see i’ve got a fairly normal one here using cobble wood and log and that makes a fairly simple house i tend to use this quite a lot because these colors complement each other the beautiful thing is people

Choose blocks that work together on their own we sort of have this inherent artness about us that would not enable us to create something using dirt and sponge and everything else but there are some more complex palette tricks that you can use that would improve your builds

Most of you for example may not have thought about using colored clay as a roof and more importantly you may not have thought about using coloured clay in conjunction with another coloured clay so i here have a list of different coloured clays that work together a light colour and the complementary darker colour

And i can turn this green one into another one with the pinks and the purple and it still looks good because those two colors complement each other although the palette doesn’t quite work with the rest of the build because those complement each other it doesn’t look out of place however if i

Do change it to a different set of colors like a green and a pink it starts to look a little bit odd because those two colors don’t quite work together so choosing colors that work is really important when you’re doing a build and i can give you a bad

Example by showing you what it’s like with some light colored clay and a dark colored clay just using world edit here to change it up so as you can see these colors really don’t go together although some of you might with a more abstract i say

Actually that looks kind of nice i like it but again it’s up to you and here’s a few more examples like all the sands will work together the quartz blocks kind of work together and that’s something that you know inherently all these stone brick blocks work together

I myself am no expert on colour and i’m not pretending to be but everyone knows that this palette isn’t going to work that is exactly the same house we started with at the beginning and all i’ve done is changed the blocks that we’ve used and as you can see it’s

Awful in comparison i don’t think anyone would say oh that’s actually a really nice house you’d think uh what is that so pallet is a really simple thing that everyone does but it is something that you need to consider as well if you want to achieve a very nice build

Back at the first one you can see that using very simple blocks i’ve achieved it and even in the second one i’m using a different set of blocks but at least these complement each other in some way unlike the last one which is just an array of random blocks

Okay so that kind of covers palette one of the more boring bits and is fairly easy to do so next i want to cover depth and i go on about depth all the time and i just want to show you what i mean just in case some of you didn’t fully

Understand so some people’s side of their house may look something like this completely flat and you see all these little connected textures they really don’t go together they’re really abrupt changes that really are displeasing to the eye so what i want to show you is how we can just add layers along the

Side to improve the way the house looks so i’m just adding an overhang using exactly the same block as the roof just to give that one little layer of depth on the roof and already it’s starting to look a little bit better and then i’m going to go round the back and

Add a layer back a block so we are utilizing three layers of block here in the depth so that it gives that extra level of detail i’m going to do it for both the top and the bottom there but please note that i’m not touching the frame that is

The log blocks because that’s the sort of precursor that’s where it sets the gauge of where everything else is if i started messing with the frame then perhaps it wouldn’t really display where the depth starts and ends so the frame tends to be in the middle

So now i’m back at the front i start knocking out whoops i start knocking out all of the sides of the house where i’ve just created some depth leaving that frame one block in front and that’s really important because what this allows us to do and is probably the most

Important thing about depth in general is that we can now add detail to a flat wall you can’t add detail unless you actually integrate it into the wall itself and it would still be flat so now we have a little bit of depth we can actually do something with it so

I’m going to add an underside which we couldn’t do previously to the overhang using stair blocks and once i’ve done that it’s already quite a small improvement to what was initially just a flat surface but what we can also do is now that we have this extra layer we can improve our

Framing and we can add these beams and these structures to the frame itself and those holes that it generates actually allow us to have these segments which we can then detail but this is about depth and not detail so i’m not gonna do that but you can see

That i am continually placing the frame and it just improves that depth layer even more so that’s kind of all i wanted to show you with that is how you can turn a flat wall into something that has depth and i’m not changing any of the blocks all i’ve

Done is utilized three layers instead of one so hopefully anyone that didn’t fully understand depth before we’ll get it now next i want to move on to something that i’ve never really mentioned before and it’s quite difficult to describe lots of people struggle with this because there are no set rules and that

Is scale so here i have three pretty much identical houses from the start of the video but each one has a different scale now this is the original here and as you can see this is kind of a normal sized house it’s not actually very practical because it’s one block

Inside but you can see in relation to me this house looks pretty good but if we go inside we see that it isn’t practical at all because the shape is off this that and the other but that’s not the point but if we go and have a look at the smaller scale one

It’s so small that it might as well be like a miniature model it’s not really practical at all so you have to weigh up practicality by your scale and then at the other end of the spectrum we have the biggest one which is pretty good it’s like a good size it’s very big

It’s a lot more work but what this essentially does is when you make something in a large scale it means you have a lot more to details so although our house is now a lot bigger you’ll notice that although i used exactly the same style blocks everything except the

Scale it means that there’s just a wider range of space which isn’t detailed and that’s some of the problems that we face when using scale now when i talk about approaching the problem of figuring out your scale i don’t really have any set rules that will make sure that you have

The right thing every time because it comes down to what you want your build to look like if you’re doing a miniature build your scale is going gonna have to be smaller if you’re doing a grand city you’re gonna want it huge i see a lot of

People that try and make a really good looking town but they build their houses too small or they build the town hall too big so the scale doesn’t match up all i can do is give you some round advice on this one take a look at what

It looks like in real life whatever it is you’re building and see if you can match what they’ve done that would help you bring scale into focus into reality when you’re trying to do it blind sometimes it’s really easy to mess it up and that brings us on to

Our fourth one which is planning now i made sure that scale was before planning because scale is integrated into playing you need to think about your scale before you start so i’m just laying down a base foundation planning is very important and it’s very simple it takes two or three seconds and an

Ounce of creativity so although it looks like i’m randomly placing these blocks to make a base i’m actually thinking about how big i want it to be what size wanted to be where i want the front door to be i’m trying to plan ahead and i’m

Not trying to think of the grand scheme of things i’m not trying to picture how the house is going to look at the end i’m just planning what i want the very basics of this house to be so how wide is it how tall is it my frame actually

Dictates exactly how high this is going to go on the first floor and speaking of frames that’s very important at each corner i raise the columns up and connect them at the top and this dictates the overall shape of it and i have completely planned the first floor but planning isn’t just a

Straightforward array of just randomly placing blocks you really need to consider everything and this is really difficult one of the key skills you’re going to need is visualization and to help you do this you could actually look at a few pictures of fantasy art buildings or real life

Buildings and they can help you visualize what you need to make in-game i often did this before i was confident enough to go freestyle so it really helps to just take a bit of inspiration from other people especially when you’re trying to work out what your house is

Going to be but hopefully you can take all the other things that i’ve talked about today the palette the scale and the depth as you’re planning and then we’re kind of done planning the very basics of this house we could take this anywhere from here and that brings us on

Nicely to the very final thing that i want to talk about today which is shape and this takes into account all of the other things i’ve been talking about this is going to be incredibly difficult for me to explain and convey but hopefully i will help you in some way if

You struggle with shaping when you’re planning you will need to come up with not only a shape for the house but individual shapes for detailing now this might seem a little bit odd but hopefully you can see as i’ve developed the frame of this particular house which by the way i’m

Kind of doing at random but at the same time i’m planning each part of it you’ll notice that i have four different parts and one way to make it look really nice is to have all four parts of the house look different and bring something new

To the build now i’m not saying this is the best way to take every single build because some buildings need some symmetry which is also fine but you can see i’m rotating around this build constantly i have a central spire but i’ll pause right now you can see

That there’s a bit on the left which is a bit more empty there’s a bit on the right which is raised higher than the bit at the front which has a right angle each bit is slightly different and that’s really key on this type of build

Where i want the house to have a lot of variety and again it’s all about visualizing that shape in your head as you’re building now to save a little bit of time and this has already been a fairly long video for me i’m just gonna skip ahead to when i’ve completed the entire

Frame so i can get on to the next bit and now i want to talk about how you can plan and shape with your roof i’ve talked about roofs in a previous build school video and you need to decide when you’re planning what kind of roof style you

Want i for the sake of this video i’m just going to use a very simple 45 degree angle stair roof that you’ll see on most typical houses especially like the vanilla ones in the village now in terms of planning for this stage all you need to do for this stage is decide what

Part of your plan is going to have a roof and which parts aren’t it’s fairly easy and for the most part you want to take the bits that i am like the bits that jut out and add a frame on them and i don’t do the full roof all i add is

The overhang because that really helps you visualize the rest of the build and i’m just going to skip ahead so you can see like which bits i chose and which bits i didn’t choose to add a roof to and as you can see the planning and the

Shape really came together now that i’ve got the frames and the overhang together just by looking at what i’ve got there you can almost picture exactly what the house is going to look like and this is what i’ve really been trying to drive home in this last bit but have perhaps

Not quite managed to explain it properly i really hope i have and from here this is where it becomes incredibly easy you just fill in the rest with walls and the rest of the roof and then you detail it and it’s done really visualizing and reproducing your

Vision is the key part of what i’m trying to say for this final part of my universal building tips and just to prove it and maybe to prove to you that you can visualize what this would look like i will just fill in the walls and

The roof and kind of show you exactly what it would look like in the end and there we have it it looks like the start of a really nice sort of victorian house and it all came about because we thought about the base we thought about

The shape the size the scale what blocks we were going to use and it accumulated into a house that is eventually going to look good once it’s got a bit of detail behind it and that’s kind of what i’m trying to teach you these basic concepts

Of building i’m not trying to show you block by block dimensions but for dimensions people always ask me hey how big is that how would i place this and this and this and it’s like i’m not trying to teach you that what i’m trying to do is improve your building skills

And you’re building knowledge and i’m trying to get you to be more creative i really hope this video has sort of cleared up any inconsistencies throughout my videos or maybe the things that i brush over a little bit too fast and i’ve really gone into depth on these very five key

Features of building there are way more to talk about and maybe i’ll address those in a later video but for now that’s all i’ve got thank you very much for watching if you’ve enjoyed this video please let me know in the comment section below i put an awful lot of

Effort into this one more than i usually do i can tell you that thank you very much for watching see you in the next video