Hi BullKang.
Thank you for asking this question, I believe it’s a very important question because I believe that much of the work involved in a build lies in the development of a good floor plan. Once you get that right the rest of it just seems to make sense. See my “How I Build Castles” post at
https://forum.minetest.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=17542But I sense this is not quite the answer you are looking for.
I’ll dig deeper. I’ll use the Star Dome as an example.
Before I even start, I want a flat level area of grass and I want a road 5 nodes wide around the edge of it so that no grasses or flowers start to intrude into my build area. This is a lot easier since OldCoder rewrote worldedit.
I use the Flat mapgen, but I have lakes enabled, these options are available under All Settings in the graphical interface. That way I get large flat building areas and a little bit of pretty. Best of both worlds sort of thing.
For my style of building you need debug information showing in the upper left hand corner of the screen because it shows coordinates of where you are, simple maths is used to make things properly square and make them all line up. Use the
F5 key to turn debug info on.
On start of a new world, don’t waste any time flying around and exploring, just where you stand, very first command:
/grantme allVery next thing, open worldedit (coderedit) and set Position 1 to
200, 8, 200.
Set Position 2 to
-200, 8, -200.
Use the Set Nodes function to set all those nodes to:
sandstonebrick.
Change coordinates in worldedit, forget those silly shadows, don’t waste your time with mapfix, there’s an easier way to get rid of them after.
Set Position1 to
195, 8, 195.
Set Position2 to
-195, 8. -195.
Use the Set Nodes feature and set nodes to:
dirt_with_grass.
Now to get rid of all the weeds and trees and stuff, and get rid of all them nasty shadows in one hit.
Set Position1 to
200, 9, 200.
Set Position2 to
-200, 23, -200.
Use the Set nodes Function and set those nodes to:
air.
That gives you a nice clean slate to start building on. For laying out my floor plan I always use whatever material I intend to build with. It’s not just a floor plan, it’s a template that worldedit can use to do much of my building for me.
For the Star Dome I already knew that I wanted to use a darker stone –
stonebrick. I had already decided that I wanted a large dome (created by worldedit) with 4 towers. My clean slate has it’s exact centre at
0, 8, 0, I usually mark this spot with a torch.
I placed a single node of stonebrick at 50, 9, 50, this would be the outer corner of my building. For no real reason I decided to make the corner towers 13 nodes wide so I made a square 13 x 13 out of stonebrick. I put the rotated stairs for cornices in the four corners of this square, and I put the sandstonebrick floor in it.
Now for the simple maths. My building is going to end up 101 nodes wide, my tower is 13 nodes wide. 101 – 13 = 88. So I copied my small square and it’s floor 88 nodes away in 2 directions, then copied one of those 88 nodes to make the plan of all 4 towers. Double check the coordinates of all 4 outer corners to make sure you got your maths right.
Then I stood at the exact centre of the map and I used the Create Dome feature of worldedit to create the dome. I then put a row of blocks down to define the walls and removed bits of the dome that were hanging outside those walls. I put more pieces of cornice in where the walls met the towers, and I removed the very bottom layer of nodes from the dome.
I set Pos1 and Pos2 to two opposite corners of the building, looked straight up at the sky, and copied, 1 node, 2 nodes, etc, until I got a wall height that I was happy with. Doing this removed unwanted parts of the dome at the same time. I settled on 12 nodes high.
At first I tried to build large arched doorways in the centre of the four sides but it didn’t look right, so I copied one of those tower sections to the centre and decided I liked that more. I repeated that for all 4 sides. One at a time I copied tower sections straight up, 12 nodes, and 24 nodes to get tall towers, did the same for the middle ones but only copied 12 nodes to keep them shorter.
It was at about this stage that I decided that the building was looking too plain and needed a little decoration, so I used worldedit to change stairs:stair_stonebrick to stairs:stair_sandstonebrick.
Creating that building with stairs and floors inside the towers, tower rooves, etc, took about 2 hours. The floor and the ceiling took considerably longer.
If you have a specific floor plan that you want to use there’s also a mod called
imageloader that should be integrated in to Bucket Game soon, that’s how I created the floor plan for Angkor Wat –
https://forum.minetest.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=17440.
I copied a map from a university website and imported it. The map turned out to be quite inaccurate but still...
Hope that helps.
Cheers,
Andrew.