Avoyd Voxel Editor - Minecraft Map Viewer, Editor, Renderer, Exporter to Polygon Mesh

Avoyd Voxel Editor is an art tool. It enables you to load the largest Minecraft worlds and display them in their entirety, explore, edit, render and export to mesh.

Features

• Extremely long view distance
• World size up to 260 000 voxels in any direction
• Create voxel art from Minecraft worlds
• Cameras
  • First person and arcball cameras
  • Save multiple camera positions
  • Orthographic projection with isometric presets
• Edit Tool
  • Add/remove individual voxels or shapes (sphere, box, etc.), paint, copy/paste, undo/redo, brush modifiers (random size, randomise materials) etc.
  • Constraints and symmetry planes
  • Materials and palettes
• Light and Atmosphere
  • Physics based
  • Procedural generation
• Render
  • High quality CPU path tracing with OIDN denoising
  • Emissive and transparent voxels
  • Depth of field
• Import
  • Minecraft maps • convert Overworld, Nether and End worlds to voxels
  • MagicaVoxel .vox • import models, multimodels and their palettes
  • Images • convert to heightmaps and palettes
  • Raw 3D Binary Array
• Export
  • Export to polygon mesh in the Wavefront Obj file format for use in tools such as Blender 3D and game engines which support directly importing the format such as Unity.
• Online Tutorial and Documentation

Updates log – new in Avoyd 0.8.0 to 0.9.3:

• 0.8.0 - High quality Renders with CPU path tracing and denoising. Over a thousand Minecraft blocks and their variations mapped to Avoyd materials. Added support for emissive lights
• 0.8.1 - Fix for "VCRUNTIME140_1.dll was not found"
• 0.8.2 - Orthographic and Isometric projections
• 0.8.3 - Minecraft import support for extended world heights between -2048 to +2032 blocks (previously 0 to 255). Edit tool brush modifiers random size and random material, custom palettes
• 0.8.4 - Sticky voxel edit tool: editing can work in a similar way to Minecraft where voxels can only be added next to existing ones
• 0.8.5 - Paste as single material edit tool
• 0.8.6 - Fix export to polygon mesh .obj (for use in e.g. Blender3D)
• 0.8.7 - Import colour palettes: import colours from images and palettes as material types, and auto-create palettes from material types; Improved Replace Material UI; Fixed lack of warning when saving a file with the same name but no extension, resulting in a file overwrite and more.
• 0.8.8 - Transparency in CPU path traced rendering: physically based material parameters with mapped materials for glass, stained glass, water, ice, fire, and also support for clouds and smoke. Full voxel shapes in the edit tool for block style spheres, cylinders and other shapes. Improved Materials and palettes management and more.
• 0.8.9 - Rendering: Firefly clamping and Denoising improvements. Fix for crash when loading Minecraft maps with an unsupported version (1.18+). File saving fixes.
• 0.8.10 - Minecraft 1.18 support
• 0.8.11 - Minecraft 1.13 to 1.15 fix: columns of incorrect blocks no longer appear in imported worlds
• 0.8.12 - Minecraft import and path tracing optimizations and fixes
• 0.8.13 - Export to .obj option to use a single material with info in texture for game engine use, with support and docs for Unity style metal, smooth and emissive (detailed documentation for the export process). Changing the direction of the light (sun) is easier; Undo/Redo issues in the editor which affected copy/paste are fixed; PNG screenshots and renders are smaller; and the Avoyd documentation is online.
• 0.8.14– Fixed the orthographic camera level of detail (LOD) and shadow culling in the real time GPU renderer.
• 0.8.15 – Shadows improvements and new materials: added graphics quality presets, improved real time GPU shadow maps and UI, added Minecraft materials, tutoriel en français.
• 0.9.0– Fixed stall when working offline, import MagicaVoxel .vox 0.99.7.0 (Beta) and raw 3D binary 8bit arrays. Known issue: files from MagicaVoxel may not import correctly, we are investigating.
• 0.9.1 - Fixed import MagicaVoxel .vox files with group references.
• 0.9.2 - Improved graphics level of detail, export mesh transparency, enhanced file dialogue and more
• 0.9.3 - Fixed exiting the editor with changes and then selecting "Yes" to save changes no longer causes editor to be unable to exit.

Limitations

• You cannot re-export any edits made in Avoyd back to Minecraft nor MagicaVoxel
• Avoyd only supports Minecraft Java Edition maps. It does not support Bedrock.
• Avoyd doesn’t currently support schematics import
• Avoyd does not use textures nor block models so all the Minecraft decorations, half-blocks, steps, objects such as torches etc. appear as full voxel blocks made of a single material in Avoyd. The materials used in Avoyd match the Minecraft default materials as closely as possible using textures averages with added reflective and emissive properties. You can modify the default materials properties in Avoyd by opening menu Tools > Materials.
• It is currently not possible to hide block types in Avoyd: you have to delete them manually using the Edit Tool, or make the block type invisible (see tips section) before you render the scene. We intend to add block hiding in the future.
• Avoyd only runs on Windows PC

How to import a Minecraft map into Avoyd

• Download and install Avoyd
• Avoyd can load your own maps (stored in %appdata%\.minecraft\saves\ ), or download and save the Minecraft map to disk (extracting it if it is a zip file).
• In Avoyd, open the 'Voxel Editor', go to the menu File > Import > Minecraft Map (*.mca)... and select the region file directory (containing .mca files) and ‘Open’ to import it..
• If you have 'The Nether' or 'The End' dimensions as well as the normal 'The Overworld’, a pop-up will enable you to choose which dimension to import.

How to explore a map in Avoyd

• Lock the camera to the horizontal plane for Minecraft maps: select menu Camera > Align To Axes. Select 'y' and set the Axis Preference to '0.80' or above.
• To move around:
  • set the camera to "Movement" mode: press the Tab key or hold down the mouse right button
  • Move the mouse to look around
  • Press W to move forward
• More about camera controls in the voxel editor’s help menu: Help > Tutorial > Cameras and Help > Controls Documentation > Camera Controls

How Minecraft blocks are represented in Avoyd, and how to modify them

• Avoyd does not use textures, but the materials used in Avoyd match the Minecraft default materials as closely as possible: their colour is based on Minecraft textures averages and they have specular reflection and emissive properties where relevant (water, glass, metal, lava…).
  • Since version 0.8.0, torches, lava etc voxels emit light when rendered. Likewise, metals, water, glass etc. reflect light.
  • Since version 0.8.8, materials transparency (water, glass) is supported in the CPU path traced Renderer (available through Menu Render).
• Each block and most of their variations are mapped to a material in Avoyd. We've mapped the vast majority of Minecraft Java Edition blocks to the appropriate materials settings in Avoyd
• For Minecraft versions prior to 1.13 (the flattening) we now use both both block Id and data value to assign the correct namespace Id to a an imported block. For versions post 1.13 we directly use the namespace Id provided
• Since Avoyd version 0.8.0 you can view the Minecraft namespace Id of every block imported as an Avoyd material
• To edit the Minecraft materials individually in Avoyd, open menu Tools > Materials... and choose ‘Minecraft’ from the Material Type drop-down. Click on a colour swatch to edit the material properties. You can also access the materials from the Palette in Tools > Edit Tool…
• You can make specific block types (for example barrier) invisible in renders by making the material entirely transparent. In Tools > Materials, select the material and set its parameters as follows:
  • Colour = White (R=255 G=255 B=255)
  • Metallic = 0
  • Smooth = 0
  • Emissive = 0
  • Surface Transmission = 1
  • Absorption Length = 1,048,576
  • Scatter Length = 1,048,576
  • Phase = 0
• If you want to reuse your material alterations in other maps, save them as a template in File > Save/Load Templates > Materials. After you've imported a new Minecraft map, load your materials template and it will overwrite the defaults.

How to change the scene lighting and atmosphere

• Open the ‘Light and Atmosphere’ window: menu Tools > Light and Atmosphere… video example
• To change the position of the light source, modify the parameter 'Light Direction'. Note the UI is evolving: we will make it easier to use in future releases.
• Quickly change how bright or foggy the lighting is using the presets: white light, dawn, sunny, sunset and clear atmosphere, haze or fog. You can also adjust the parameters manually using the light and atmosphere settings.
• Your can save our settings as templates to reuse in other worlds in Avoyd: use File > Save/Load Template > Light and Atmosphere...

How to render a Minecraft map using Avoyd

• Once you’ve imported the map, find the scene you want to render and adjust the lighting
• Open menu ‘Render’
• Click ‘Preview’ for a quick render
• Adjust the image size, depth of field and other parameters
• When you’re happy with the scene, click ‘Do Raytrace Scene’
• Click ‘Accumulate’ to run the raytracing again and increase the quality of the render. Note that after several accumulations the result will stop improving
• When you’re satisfied with the result you can denoise the render to remove artefacts (small dots)
• Finally, save the image

Tutorial video for doing a render of a world and transript

Tips and tricks

• Once imported, save the Minecraft map as an Avoyd world file. This will enable you to open it faster and use it as a paste brush.
• To learn the basics of editing in Avoyd, we recommend you follow the step by step tutorial under menu Help > Tutorial and watch the basics of editing video. The user interface has evolved since but it's very close and it is still a good place to start.
• Tune the Graphics properties under Settings > Graphics. Increasing the 'LOD change distance' improves detail in the distance but reduces performance.
• All controls and keyboard shortcuts are listed in menu Help > Controls
• Enable tooltips from menu View > Show Tooltips
• Check the size of the world and add notes from menu View > World Properties
• Light or Dark mode UI, adjust font size etc. in menu Settings > Display
• Skip the main menu when opening Avoyd: in Settings > System, set “Start As” to “Voxel Editor”
• For further help see Avoyd News and Support forum
• If you imported Minecraft worlds into a version of Avoyd older than 0.8.10, you should install the latest version of Avoyd and import again to ensure the latest transparent materials are used.

Credits

Screenshots and renders gallery and videos feature:
Atropos by carloooo
Cuirassé DSD-401 by MrBatou
Drehmal: PRIMORDIAL by Balderich
Greenfield City by THEJESTR
King's Landing and more by WesterosCraft
Greenfield City by THEJESTR
Mattupolis by mattuFIN
Thanks to shadowESH for their feedback