Block Builder

Inspired by watching my five-year-old daughter play a game called Minecraft [1], I created this Demonstration to let you manually and easily create and view arbitrary structures composed of cuboids. The user interface requires only mouse input.

This 3D user interface uses standard Mathematica controls to pan, zoom, and rotate the object via mouse dragging and command keys (Shift, Alt, Ctrl, and so on). In "add cubes" mode, single-click near an existing cube to add a new cube. In "remove cubes" mode, single-click a cube to remove it. In either mode, to preview the result of clicking, temporary cubes are drawn as you mouse over the object. You can select the color of new cubes with the color spectrum tool.

The bounding box is limited to 5×5×5 to ensure good performance on lower-end machines. You can turn off the bounding box image with the checkbox selector.

Things to try:

1. Build an object from scratch, starting with a single cube.
2. "Mine" an object, starting from the "block" preset and removing cubes.
3. Save a picture of your work with a screenshot.