Followers of this blog will have seen me mention the Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis (VASA) package (you can find all the posts about it here). VASA is a toolkit that allows you to voxelise and analyse 3D geometry, whether for pathfinding, visibility or daylight analysis.
The big news of the day is that Autodesk Research has managed to port VASA across to work with the popular voxel-based creation environment, Minecraft. This actually was pretty easy, as we could completely ignore all the code needed to voxelise a 3D environment from the codebase and focus on the analysis side of things. A straightforward port, all things considered, even if the conversion from C++ to Java presented a few fun challenges.
Here’s a view of a VASA path inside Minecraft:
Now for a video showing how VASA’s pathfinding works inside Minecraft: you place your VASA placemarkers at the start and destination locations, then use the “initiate” tool to create the path, which leads to the path voxels being converted to a transparent material, as you may be able to see in the above image.
We think that Minecraft is a fantastic environment not only for creating new 3D models but for analysing existing ones. Expect further work to support additional types of analysis, as well as to streamline workflows for taking geometry from Autodesk products into Minecraft.
If you want to give VASA for Minecraft a try, head on over to CurseForge and search for “VASA”. We’ve published versions for both Fabric and Forge, so as long as you use one of these mod-loaders, you should find it easy to get going. Let us know what you think!
