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WildWestDan

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05 MK Satellite LowRes

Finding Scale Part 1 – WDW’s Magic Kingdom in Survival Minecraft

Google Maps is an incredibly powerful tool for many things. Finding the nearest Taco Bell (#NotSponsored), figuring out just how long it would take to drive to your streamer friends out of state, and of course… Checking out the backstage areas of Walt Disney World in Florida! And we used it a lot for the Kings Cross Station design build last month too.

Step one for prepping this Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom Mega Build was using Google Maps to simply move around the area and get a better idea of where everything was. It’s funny, there were certain parts of the Florida park that I always think of as, “to the right” that are actually on the left side is the park as a whole, but the right side of their respective “land.”

Importance of Scale

The original uploader was Speedway at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons

But the most important part of recreating something, whether it’s in Minecraft, a 3D printer, or just carving it out of wood, is scale. A house in Minecraft can look quite nice at 30 blocks wide, and in the real world, that could translate to 30 feet (9.1 meters) or it could translate to 50 feet (15.25 meters). A bigger scale in Minecraft means you can add more detail in, with stairs, slabs, fences, etc., But for something that’s almost 1 square mile (2.5 square kilometers), picking the proper scale from the beginning is super important.

I decided to start with two of the most iconic parts of the Magic Kingdom, Cinderella’s Castle and Main Street, USA. I want the castle to be super grandiose, huge and impressive… but if I make the castle too big, then suddenly Main Street is almost 30 blocks wide, and that just looks ridiculous. Nevermind the fact that the buildings will be 30-40 blocks tall with 8 block tall doorways or some nonsense!

But how do we figure out what a good scale is?

I can zoom way out and get an great overview. I can even use Google Maps to right-click and measure real-world distances so I know how much space something takes up. But what I can’t do is figure out how many blocks something will be. That’s where drawing tools like Photoshop and Affinity will come in! But first… the map!

Combining Hundreds of Screenshots into one Giant Map

So I hop on Google Maps, zoom in to the absolute maximum zoom distance which is about 400 feet (122 meters) across depending on your screen resolution, and I started taking screenshots like this one here. Using the arrow keys on my keyboard, I would move to a new location and then run a recorded macro that would, “capture the screen, switch to the other view (map vs satellite), screenshot again in the exact same location, then save both identically-located screenshots.” That macro saved a bunch of time, and really helped with accuracy!

I worked in a grid, 18 screenshots tall by 9 wide for a total of 162 screenshots per map-type. Now all I had to do was put them together! (He says, like that was easy in any way.)

Map Image of a portion of the "Big Thunder Mountain Railroad" roller coaster
“Big Thunder Mountain Railroad” roller coaster doesn’t quite fit in one screenshot when zoomed all the way in.

The first step was to crop each image slightly so we wouldn’t see the Google Maps icons and stuff. Photoshop can automate that in bulk, so that didn’t take long, but then I had to line them all up. First I tried using Photoshop’s “Photomerge” feature which will automatically line up images together to make panoramas or collages, but 162 nearly full-screen images is apparently too much for it (I even let it run overnight, but it just froze), and too often Photoshop would stretch or skew the images to get them to fit when I tried smaller batches, even though they were clearly taken in a grid pattern and should have lined up. So I ended up taking each image and lining them up by hand, pixel by pixel, for the satellite version. Not too bad on the parts with roads or buildings, but some of the mostly-tree sections were tough! Took about 3 or 4 hours to do the whole thing. Then I could take the regular map images and just line them up on top of their satellite counterparts. That part was actually super easy! Here are the finished versions:

Now we have two super high resolution images of the entire Magic Kingdom, but I still have to take those two images and actually figure out how this scales into blocks on Monkey Mines itself!

If you want to see the full size versions, they’re in my Google Drive here.

As always, you can follow along on my Twitch channel as this project progresses: twitch.tv/monkeydks

Up Next: Finding the Right Scale Part 2: Creating a Grid to get Block Scale

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Planning a Mega Build – WDW’s Magic Kingdom in Survival Minecraft

I’ve been playing Minecraft since the first few months of its existence. I’ve built a LOT of things, but many of them were just machines, contraptions, farms, and simple structures. I’m better at living underground than designing something that looks really great. And a lot of time, when I start a large design project, I get frustrated and never finish it. BUT, one of my favorite builds recently (which I should really finish someday soon…) was recreating London’s Kings Cross Station. And from that I realized that maybe what I am best at in Minecraft isn’t being original and creative, but in rebuilding things that exist in the world! It’s essentially the same as recreating redstone machines/farms all the time, so why not other buildings and locations?

Well, enter MrsMonkey and her throwaway comment that “You should build Walt Disney World,” and me laughing it off as a ridiculous idea… until I thought about it more, and realized that yes…yes it is a ridiculous idea… but is it possible?? Is this something that I can do? So it’s off to the interwebs!! I start looking for pictures of the castle (cause obviously that’s where you start) and I managed to find floor plans, footprints, and even blueprints!

I spent a whole lot of time on Google for both images and information on the parks in general. And after looking at a lot of Google Maps images, I realized just how big of a project this was going to be.

So before really doing a lot of planning, I had impulsively picked a jungle biome on Monkey Mines that I thought would be great because jungles really do have the best grass color, and started clearing and leveling a giant area. And in doing so, I rediscovered how much I hate clearing jungles. Give me any giant digging/leveling project and I will happily do it for months (End project anyone?), but those trees…. *shudder*

Cinderella's Castle Blueprints
This image appears to have originated in the Fall 1996 issue of Disney Magazine, which stopped circulation in the early 2000s.

Fast forward about two weeks, and with some more research under my belt with the maps and the plans (more on that in the next post), I realized I had made two rather large and embarrassing mistakes…

The first mistake, and one that is so common to Minecrafters everywhere, was that I severely underestimated the scale of the project. This was going to take up a lot more space than I thought. The second mistake was that the island I had impulsively chosen, and started clear-cutting and leveling was not, in fact, unoccupied (Sorry RrustyBell!).

Well, now that I have more actual planning done, I have decided that this island is not where I should be building, and I did what I could to fix the mess I had made out of the jungle. Monkey Mines is not as 100% vanilla as I like to say it is, but really there are only two (non-datapack) plugins on the Paper-modded server: Dynmap (the reason we’re a modded server in the first place), and Core Protect.

The restored Jungle on MonkeyMines with "broken" trees
Restored Jungle on Monkey Mines with “broken” trees. Some members think it looks more interesting this way?

I have Core Protect so that I can roll-back and restore any problems we may have in the future, as we really do keep the server a bit more unmonitored than perhaps we should… But I like having friends to play with, dangit!

Anyway, on my main account, I spent an hour or so moving all the chests of materials we had dug up into the Nether right next to the portal we had created, and then restored the area using M0nkeyCam in creative mode.

Unfortunately, it didn’t quite restore all the leaf blocks? I suspect this has something to do with the fast leaf decay datapack that made clearing the jungle such an easy time, but who knows.

Anyway, now that I realized that the first thing I really needed to do is find the right scale, I am working with maps, pictures and the Monkey Mines Creative server to mostly “start over,” so that when I really begin on Monkey Mines, I’ll be in a better overall place!

Thanks for following along on my journey so far. Turns out I already lied about not writing too much… Shocker, right?

As always, you can follow along on my Twitch channel as this project progresses: twitch.tv/monkeydks

Up Next: Finding the Right Scale Part 1: Using Google Maps to Create a High Resolution Map of Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom (With Varying Degrees of Success…)