An addon for the Replay Mod that allows you to export your replays into Blender.
This mod is designed for experienced Blender users! It is designed to export your Minecraft scene, and nothing more.
To begin, open Minecraft and record the replay you wish to export. If you don't know how to do that, this mod is not for you. Then, open the replay editor and add at least two time and camera keyframes. These will determine the start and end points of your animation.
Warning: nether portals and other forms of cross-dimension travel are not supported. Use multiple exports you intend on doing that.
Once you're happy with your replay, open the render screen and click "Export Replay File":
This will open a screen for you to select an output file and configure some replay settings. Adjust your bounds to be as tight as possible. Raise the lower depth as high as it will go before it cuts off the visible landscape, and reduce the perimeter depending on your planned shot.
The "Block Updates" and "Entities" regions add significantly more overhead than the "World" region, so it's recommended to tighten those even further.
After exporting from Minecraft, you should be left with a .replay file, which can be imported into Blender using the
provided addon.
Once you've ensured the addon is installed, create a new project and go to
File > Import > Minecraft Replay File (.replay). Navigate to your file, but before you import it, note the settings on
the right:
The main two you need to worry about are World and Entities. While you usually want to import both,
they each can take quite a bit of time, so it may be useful to disable one or the other.
Everything else can be left as default.
Once you're ready, click "Import Minecraft Replay" at the bottom. Blender will appear to hang for a few minutes. Don't worry; this is because the contents of a Minecraft world is quite large, and Blender provides no (reliable) way to update the UI while it is processing. (It might do to enable the system console to monitor progress.)
Once it is finished importing, you should have a Minecraft world and most of its entities in your scene! If something goes wrong, make sure to submit a bug report!
Replay Exporter is a Fabric mod, so building it follows the same basic principles as any other mod (which will not be reiterated here). However, due to it's nature as a "companion mod", Replay Exporter ships with slightly more complex build features than others.
Mod integrations are split into separate source sets: main holds only the common code for encoding replay animations,
and replaymod is responsible for actually triggering the export process while using Replay Mod. This is intended to
support for other mods such as Flashback and ReplayLab in the future, but only Replay Mod is implemented for now.
This segregation of disciplines ensures that no code dependencies from integrations find their way into contexts where
the target mod might not be present. If you were to try and depend on code from Replay Mod (or anything from the
replaymod source set) in main, you would get a compile error. However, this is purely a compile-time construct. At
runtime, Replay Exporter is still packaged as a singular mod, avoiding code-paths depending on mods that are not
present.
The exception to this is the debugger source set:
debugger is a separate "test" mod which provides an imgui-based UI for inspecting exported replay files. This is
useful for debugging entity model adapters, but it's not of any concern to the average user, so that code isn't shipped
with the full build.
Keep in mind that the debugger isn't exactly the cleanest code. It relies on native libraries that might be fragile across different operating systems, and as a niche development tool, maintaining it not a priority.
It can be launched with ./gradlew runDebuggerClient
Version 2 of the addon is structured very differently than Version 1. The primary change is the addition of a
prefabs.blend file.
Unlike the first version, which generated all its shaders in code, the new version includes a number of manually-created assets that get appended as needed. This makes it much easier to ship stock effects such as enchantment glints, as the node-tree can be created using the Blender interface, rather than having to do it in code.
./gradlew buildAddon will compile the addon into a zip and place it in build/libs, updating the version tag to
whatever is defined in gradle.properties. Note that this requires Blender in your PATH, for that's what's used to
build the extension.
The addon is slated to support Blender 4.4 - Current. Do not save the prefabs file in any version newer than 4.4!