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The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

Find it at Amazon Finished 'The Return of the Native' by Thomas Hardy. It is, in many ways a very conventional novel. Set in the 19th...

wrodawalt

Mar 4, 20252 min read

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The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

Find it at Amazon Finished 'The Return of the Native' by Thomas Hardy. It is, in many ways a very conventional novel. Set in the 19th...

Mar 4, 20252 min read

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Find it at Amazon Holmes investigates the death of Sir Charles Baskerville who died of an apparent heart attack while walking upon the...

Feb 16, 20252 min read

Cathedral Tutorial : Episode One - A New Hope

The first in a series of videos showing how to build a gothic cathedral in Minecraft.

Feb 14, 20251 min read

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This is essentially the story of what happens when you throw a truly good man into the society of self absorbed aristocrats. Lev...

Feb 14, 20252 min read

Cathedral #13 : Window Designs

This is some introductory content for a planned tutorial on building a gothic Cathedral. This video shows a number of designs for "rose"...

Feb 10, 20251 min read

Spring Flowers, Spring Frost by Ismail Kadare

Find it at Amazon https://amzn.to/3WQyRCV It is rare that I read a book and find it as completely incomprehesible as this story, if it is...

Feb 5, 20252 min read

The Comfort of Stranger by Ian McEwan

Find at Amazon at https://amzn.to/42KSKiy 'The Comfort of Strangers' by Ian McEwan. It is a skillfully written short novel about a couple...

Feb 5, 20251 min read

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This is a time lapse of the first in a series of tutorials on how to build a gothic Cathedral in Minecraft. I am hoping to release one episode a week until it is finished.

The full tutorial can be accessed at either https://www.billswhimsyworld.com/post/cathedral-tutorial-episode-one-a-new-hope or at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE9CYQEdl0Y&t=4570s

This might be proof that I am completely obsessed with the cathedral build. I started working a bit on the interiors, specifically the parts under the roof where I thought some offices might be. Not that the outside is done... I just wanted to change gears a bit. One of the things that was bugging me was the enormous amount of head space towards the peaks of the roofs. It was just visually really boring. I went to bed then woke up at about 2 am and had an idea. It is something i've never really seen done in Minecraft, though I am pretty sure that someone MUST have done it. In Minecraft, a typical way of building a roof is to place a series of stairs of some sort in a row and it forms a bit of a roof shape. Also, people will put upside down stairs on the under side of the roof to fill in gaps. Because there are no real "physics" to the things you build they done really REQUIRE supports. In fact they can be left hanging in the air.

The idea I had was to fill that empty space with something that would approximate the structure that would really be supporting a roof in real life. This tends to lend a bit of "realism" to the build, but I also think it feels intuitively more natural and is a lot more visually interesting. I thought about it for about ten minutes, and then decided I was probably not going to sleep until I actually tried out the idea. So here it is!

I'm actually quite please with the end product and am curious whether I will find other builders have done something similar. I thing it works in this space because it is so large. Something like this would simply not fit into a smaller building because the dimensions of all blocks in Minecraft are 1 meter square (about 3 feet square for my metric system challenged American audience). For a smaller space this would really clutter up the space if built to scale. In fact rafters are generally closer together than one meter, so the roof would be nothing but rafter. But at this scale I can "cheat" the spacing but still get the effect I am looking for.

I also put in a little more stained glass and floors above the main domes. Again, as a nod towards how this cathedral would work in the "survival" version of the game, I added passageways that allow access to the roof areas which I will probably turn into offices and maybe bedrooms or something (for the monks of priests to live in).

All the main roofs are on now. (Anyone else grow up with the word rooves instead of roofs? I guess both are acceptable but for some reason I always use roofs when writing)

Still working on the Cathedral. Finished the front facade and added a roof to the nave. Also built another "rose" window and designed and installed a third, though the final details on that one still need to be completed.

Did more work on the Cathedral today. Was reasearching tracery which is the designing of the patterns of the outlines of the stain glass windows. I was looking for tutorials on how to build the tracery on Minecraft. I really could not find much so I started looking up tracery on Google images. Again not much there that was directly useful. But then I started running across cross stitch patterns for snowflakes and I ended up using those patterns to design my first "Rose" window.
Also continued the construction of the Bell Towers at the front of the building. Put the roofs on and started on the details of the chains that would theoretically ring the bells. I'm going to add the bells later on. While Minecraft has some bells that you can actually ring, they are pretty small so I will make some bigger ones out of blocks, though I'm thinking of building a redstone machine to play some bells. For those who don't know, redstone is a way within the game to build machines that do various things, including potentially playing music. But I need to do some research to see if I can get the game to play bells.

This is the last one for today. I put in roofs on the left and right side aisles. I also started putting in access ways to get to the various towers so that if you were playing in survival you can actually access all parts of the building. One interesting part of this process is that as I thought about gaining access to the towers it forced me to add some structure on the lower parts of the top turrets. This addition actually made the turrets look a lot more realistic.

This is stuff I've done today. Started putting in roofs. Also built turrets on the main tower.

Side entrances are now done at the front of the cathedral. Ceilings are almost all complete. I've also started building up the external walls at this point.

At this point I was working on getting the ceilings in place. Most of the progress here is on that and the back room of the Cathedral which is where the robing room usually is.

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