Minecraft Earth Crystal/Orb of Dominance By Jaebii

*** I created this Minecraft Movie Earth Crystal replica as my entry into the Bambu “Glow Within” contest, as well as for decorative use for my Minecraft Movie watch party/dinner party during the first weekend of the contest! This “Earth Crystal” model is scaled to semi-perfectly fit the Hasbro Marvel Legends Loki Tesseract replica as the “Orb of Dominance,” and is also the most screen-accurate recreation of the Earth Crystal I’ve seen on MakerWorld so far!

When I saw “A Minecraft Movie” for the first time in theaters, the Earth Crystal/Orb of Dominance assembly instantly reminded me of my Hasbro Marvel Legends Tesseract replica, which included a clear plastic box/shell for some reason that the Tesseract slides into just like the Earth Crystal! Ideally, Mattel would make an official replica/toy Earth Crystal themselves (or at least a glowing cube for the Orb of Dominance), but so far I don’t think there are any plans to release one. I previously printed an earlier released Earth Crystal shell from Thingiverse using clear blue plastic, but it was fairly inaccurate and even had a typo in the inscription. More importantly, I rescaled that Earth Crystal to be a perfect fit for my Hasbro Loki Tesseract as the Orb of Dominance, giving me a complete, inexpensive combined prop of both parts! Now that I have a new spool of plain white clear plastic, I decided to take the opportunity to print a newer, more accurate Earth Crystal to use as a decoration for my upcoming Minecraft Movie dinner party/watch party!

While looking over my options and comparing them with the newer higher-res images of the Earth Crystal from the movie, I noticed that none of the available printable models were as accurate as I would’ve preferred. Some models were missing the Glass Block pixel cutouts, some had sides that were too thin or too thick, and all of them seemed to be using the default font of the Standard Galactic Alphabet from the game, even though for some reason the font used on the Earth Crystal in the movie is slightly different from the way the letters look usually. That was probably an unavoidable mistake for everyone who designed a model of the cube before the movie was available to watch at home, but I came to the realization that I could at least make an attempt at designing a more screen-accurate prop myself! And as it just so happened, Bambu had just begun a new contest themed entirely around using translucent plastic and lights, on the same week as I was preparing for my Minecraft party! I had already designed quite a few of my own 3D-printable Minecraft models, so as far as I was concerned, this seemed like a perfect sign for me to enter the “Glow Within” contest!

The geometry was relatively easy for the cube itself: I made a 64x64-pixel cube with a cutout down the middle for the Tesseract to slide into, 6-pixel thick walls and I think a 4-pixel thick floor. I cut out the Glass Block pixels on each side of the cube, trying to pay as close attention as I could to the placement of the cutouts in the movie, although the sides don’t all seem to look identical so I had to approximate for the design/arrangement of each side. The inscription was definitely the hardest part of this project though. For starters, a 5x5 group of letters on a 64x64 cube doesn’t really add up evenly, but I’m not a mathmagician so I mostly just threw myself into a brick wall over and over with trial-and-error until something finally worked. I modeled the letters out in free-floating space to get the size and spacing as accurate as I could first, then I created “molds” for those letters that I used to redraw/etch them in the surface of the cube, along with the other letters which I carved into the side based on the size of the other letters. From there, I peeled that side of the cube off and used that wall as a new mold to create a free-floating text chunk with all the letters, which I was able to shrink/center in Bambu Studio and use like a cookie cutter to punch out the inscription on each side of the blank cube! Which I might add, took a lot longer than it should have and had way more problems than expected. But after using Mesh Boolean twice on each side of the cube, I finally punched out every letter fully on every side, and it looked better than I could’ve expected! The font for the letters still isn’t 100% accurate based on the limitations of the program I used to model them, but I think they’re more movie-accurate than any other version available!

It took me around half a day to make this model from start to finish, and around 9-10 hours for the next few consecutive days to print out my prototypes until I finally printed one I was happy with. After experimenting with a few alternate printing options and settings (including cutting the cube into individual sides to print flat at 100% solid infill, as well as trying to implement supports in the engravings which just ended up ripping the walls of the cube apart when I tried to remove them), I finally figured out a formula to make the Earth Crystal print the way I was hoping for in the first place. I was able to print a version that was much more translucent than my previous attempts, with engravings that were much higher quality/resolution, without using many supports except for along the bottom perimeter in order to prevent warping (like my original attempt which warped more than a Nether forest!). Through a combination of print speed, infill density, and whatever other settings I changed, I finally made a version that works almost perfectly! For some reason though, my final version has a much tighter clearance for the Tesseract cube to fit into the inner section than my previous attempts, but that might be a result of the print quality of that particular attempt. The published Print Profile should contain all the modifications I made to the individual object settings, so you should just be able to download it and hit print and it’ll work perfectly, but if you have any issues let me know and I’ll try to help if I can. If you’re absolutely insane, you could try multicolor printing the letters in a translucent/glow-in-the-dark blue plastic, but I’d be concerned for your health if you do. But please show me some pictures if you decide to do that, I’d really love to see how it turns out! As always, printer discretion is advised. If you want Bambu’s official suggestions for using translucent plastic, you can find them here: (https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/knowledge-sharing/transparent-petg).

Again, just to reiterate, I designed this version of the Earth Crystal to be the most screen-accurate available so far and to be compatible with the Hasbro Marvel Legends Loki Tesseract replica. But if you don’t have that Tesseract, I also included a basic cube of the same size that you could print in clear/glowing blue plastic to use instead, and the Earth Crystal interior can be easily measured and slightly less easily resized to match the dimensions of just about any glowing/light-up plastic/resin cube you could hope to obtain or stumble upon in your heroic adventures. I wonder if putting a Bayverse AllSpark inside the Earth Crystal would open a new Space Bridge to Cybertron…

Feel free to check out my Instagram @_jaebii_ for additional photos and behind-the-scenes of this project and my design process, as well as other 3D-printed toys and props! If you’re feeling generous and can spare enough money to donate a little to show your appreciation for my work, you can use this link (https://www.paypal.com/donate/?business=LKR6R7H3Z4GPJ&no_recurring=0&currency_code=USD) to support me through PayPal! I’d really appreciate it! And thanks for taking a look at my version of the Minecraft Movie Earth Crystal and Orb of Dominance! I'd love to hear about your experience printing these props and see your final print, so be sure to leave a comment or review if you print these or if you have any issues with the files!