How to make a basic render easily

Tools:
Chunky
Magica Voxel
Photoshop (or similar)
MCEdit

Today I will be showing you how I make some basic but nice looking renders like the cover photo. I need to make a new render because there was more added to that build, so I decided I'd show the process in a tutorial. I've never done a tutorial before so bare with me if it's sloppy. It helps if you already know the basics of these programs, but if not, I will try to explain stuff I do, just follow along. (-;

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Step 1 - Preparing your build

Acquire your build from whever you built it. In my case, I was building it on my own server, so I will use filezilla to download the whole world. It's a pretty large build so I can't make a schematic of it in-game unfortunatly.

Load the world in MCEdit. I'm using an old version, because the new version is buggy af. Locate your build and crop to what you need. I'll be pruning all chunks that I don't need, so it's cleaner to use once I bring it in to chunky.



I'll also be exporting a schematic to use in Magica Voxel



ctrl+q to quit mcedit

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Step 2 - Magica Voxel

Open up the program and drag and drop the .schematic into the program.




Set up your angle and what not for your picture. This program is extremely simple to use, there are tool tips that tell you what to do near the bottom. I'll be recreating the render in the cover photo but with the new builds on the map. I'll change the number of light bounces to max (8), make the DOF super shallow, and increase the sunlight.



Now just wait for the blue bar on the top to finish moving and press F6 (export).

For chunky, do the same, get your angle, etc. And export it.

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Step 3 - Photoshop

In the build, I used acacia and dark oak trees. They are gray and dark brown in-game, but magica voxel makes them orange, like an acacia plank. This is a slight problem, but we can fix that!

Open the render in photoshop.



First I'll do some color adjustments and stuff.



Now add a black & white adjustment layer. This will make the whole image black and white, obviously. But we only want to target the orange trees, making them gray like the color of the acacia log.



Fill the mask with black (black = hide, white = show). Then start masking only the trees so that they are gray instead of orange. Change brush hardness and flow accordingly. You can do a color range selection to fill in most of it for you and just do the rest by hand.

Should look like this:



Now to do some other adjustments. There should be some dark shadows on the bottom right of the build, under that cliff area, so I'll go in add some some there and other places that I feel that need more dramatic shadows. As well as add some more dramatic light and highlights.

Add your watermark, and you're done!



Magica voxel can also be used to make 360 gifs like below. If anyone wants to know how, hmu.





Credit
Ephtracy for creating magica voxel