Minecraft Timelapse - Antwerp Central Station - MUSEUM

This is downright epic. I'm quite sure I can never beat this ...

Build progress

Just because I didn't post anything lately, doesn't mean I didn't do anything (although I have been mining a lot :-))

Some comparison pictures

South-west corner

This is a view of the south-west corner. The center building still needs some work, and in the Google Maps picture you see a yellow fence for roadworks (also on the left of the picutre, on the tramrails).

Facing north

 A view from the south end facing north. The Cathedral is missing (is now shown as a needle for reference). The cutest thing in this picture is the statue of Rubens, shown on the right, which marks the middle of the square. In MineCraft, a mob that is higher than 4 blocks of the ground will not jump down. That's why the Villager neatly stays in place.

Facing east

Looking east, you can see the Hilton hotel. The reference needle is the Boerentoren, a famous bank/office building, but I still have to look into that one. The pinkish building on the right was a bar, but it has been closed for many years now. I decided to make it a bar again :-)

Video 2

Better quality, but I keep forgetting to not maximize my window. Anyway, the statue of Rubens in the middle now actually contains a Rubens figure (citizen), some façades at the North side have been completed (but not the buildings), the furniture of the terrace next to the hotel has been improved, a second façade on the south side is constructed, some improvements at the subway entrance (but not much), and a lot more landscaping. Enjoy!

Nice view

And as a bonus: a nice view. I personally think that the MineCraft version is starting to look like a city. Whether it's Antwerp or not, I'll leave that up to you :-)

Groenplaats by Night

The first video!

Finally I succeeded making a video with EZVid. not the best quality, and not really what I hoped for, but I'm sure that will improve in the next video.

Enjoy!

Some updates

I've been very busy lately with landscaping. Using a regular map has the disadvantage of irregular landscapes, especially when building a flat city such as Antwerp :-) But hey, I'm not complaining, it keeps me busy. And besides, I refuse to use something like MCEdit, just plain vanilla, so I'm looking for trouble.

One view I became very proud of last night was the north east corner, where the Hilton is:

I hope you see the similarities :-) Still have a lot of work on the terrace, some more trees have to be added, and the hotel itself has to be filled, so it isn't transparent anymore, but it's getting there.

Particularly the terrace is difficult, since Minecraft does not have a lot of horizontal "plates" to build a glass roof for instance. Also, the iron frames for a terrace for instance are not available. 

Something else I noticed in Minecraft is the lack of a correctly colored block. "Grey" for instance looks as purplish on my screen, and light and dark brown are not available, not even in stained clay. I know there's a plugin called "colored block", in which you can choose the RGB color for that special block, but as I said, I only want to use vanilla.

More Groenplaats - Buildings vs environment

It really kills me: flattening hills, deleting trees, removing grass, ruining flowerbeds ... Something I really underestimated was levelling the whole world. I just picked a regular world, so I would have underground caves, but Antwerp is as flat as a pancake, and even levelling a 50 by 50 square takes roughly 1 hour. If you look at this map:

 

 

you immediately understand what I mean. The water around is at height 64, whereas the Groenplaats (and the rest of the city) is at 67. So I decide not to fill levels 65 and 66 anymore, unless it is necessary. This means that I'm creating subterranean lakes! :-)

 

This is East of the Groenplaats:

In the center I already covered part of the lake.

The challenge I just have overcome is the kiosk in the south-east corner of the square:

 



More on that one later on ...



Progress

Progress, as well as in the building as the thing we call "progress of humanity"; the latter because I already deleted about 100 trees, and I'm putting the whole thing full with stone. No more grass, flowers, unorganized trees ...

Ah well, the result is this:

What has changed since last time?
1. A lot more trees, lighting and benches
2. Already some facades on the left of the square

3. The first blocks for the entrance of the underground parking
4. I excavated the whole parking:

 

At the far end, I already made a "secret" entrance to the underground canyon. The two pedestrian entrances and the exit are linked, as well as the subway entrance (which still needs A LOT of work).