Hey guys, It's been a while since I last posted. I'll try to post more frequently from now on. Today I bring you "The Hub" - a student housing complex in Calgary, AB, Canada.

This building is known in Calgary for it's wacky "Mismatched" windows. When I saw the windows for the first time, I thought "That would work very well in Minecraft," so I decided to take on the challenge of building it. The real building as of now is still under construction and will probably be finished by the end of the year.

This project was made in a 1.5:1 scale using the Blueprint Creative Resource Pack (plus a few custom textures).



My approach to building this was to first recreate the windows out of wool. While doing this, I learned that the "mismatched" windows aren't actually mismatched and that they follow a pattern. The pattern is - from floor 6 and on, 1222112232231222322132. After doing this for all 4 sides, I used them to build the main tower section.





After finishing the tower, I moved onto the podium. The podium is mostly made out of spandrel glass, which the Blueprint pack doesn't have. I tried lots of different things to simulate spandrel glass such as using trapdoors and glass panes but unsatisfied with the results, I created my own textures for it. This took me a few good hours but turned out incredibly well.



The hardest part of building the podium, though, wasn't making the new textures - it was knowing what the podium looked like in the first place! As I was building this, Google Streetview hadn't updated their picture to show the building and there weren't many photos of the podium. I found a video render that showed the entire building, but it was outdated and had a different podium. (It did prove very useful in making other aspects of the tower though). In the end, I found a construction cam of the site which had the view I needed and I finally finished the main building.

After finishing the main building, I thought the build looked a little plain. I noticed there was a Mcdonald's right next to it irl so I decided to make that as well. The Mcdonald's was on an angle, so I started by outlining the shape with wool and building up from there. The Mcdonald's parking lot was probably the most time-consuming thing in this entire project. Every single line was on an angle, so it took ages to plan out and put together. It was worth it though, as that's probably one of my favorite parts of the build.

After putting everything together, I thought the build still looked a bit plain. That's when it dawned on me - This looks like a ghost town right now. I needed cars. Luckily for me, the Blueprint server has a HUGE world just for vehicles. You can find everything from aircraft carriers, to motorcycles. I got a bunch of cars from Blueprint Builder Yettai and pasted them in. After adding the cars, I did a few finishing touches such as landscaping and powerlines and just like that, the build was now complete.

I'm very happy with the finished product. Before this project, I didn't know a thing about how textures or resource packs worked. Now I've learned not only how to make textures, but how to implement them into resource packs. Overall, this project has been a learning experience for me and all the time spent was worth it.

Thank you for taking the time to read this (if you did). I'll try to be back soon with another project!

Special thank you to jumping_steve, for help with the textures and Yettai (again) for the cars.



-Chinese_T