Hey!
Great news for those of you who liked the R17 stuff (arches, spheres etc):
The new Minecraft update (1.21.11) made big changes to Minecraft's block model format. They removed basically all rotation restrictions. In the past you could rotate cubes around only one axis and only in 22.5 degree steps. Now this is all lifted and you can bring any part of the model in any orientation. Of course that's also a tiny bit disappointing for me because I came up with lots of cool ways to get around these restrictions - but great for players. I hope these changes don't get reversed any time soon.
Now with the new changes I'm finally able to "update" a lot of my older content (e.g. R17) to the newest Minecraft versions. But it will certainly not be the same so I will avoid calling it an "update" or "rework". I think the best option is to make it a standalone pack to avoid confusion with the old R17 for PTGI because PTGI absolutely does NOT work with these newer models! The shading etc is completely broken. The geometry is almost the same but the new models are block models and not entity models. These two are handled very differently in PTGI.
There are a lot of improvements to the models compared to their counterparts in R17 and there is also new content. For example the arches now have a correctly curved concrete texture on the curved part - And they can now be placed in any orientation e.g. sideways and you only need one block (sculk vein) to place almost all variants. Dead coral fans are just an alternative/backups.
Other new models that I made:
Tubes: Basically cylinders with curved corner pieces and different end options. Easter Egg: The end pieces have googly eyes if you set the "powered" blockstate to "true" by using the debug stick.
Rounded Cubes (true bevel and not just normal maps)
Dodecahedrons, different materials, different sizes and rotations.
Ramps: 45 degree angled blocks that can be placed in any direction. Great to build diagonal walls or even a completely 45 deg tilted room (as on the old R17 map).
Also brought back older models like ventilaton ducts, cone lamps (on and off), small stairs, palm leaves etc.
Also included reflective mirror blocks. With them you can easily check if the textures are offset in reflections.(bug)
I made custom icons for all the textured items and I also added the R17 search feature (+custom item names) to find the custom blocks easily. It now works for all languages ( = around 120+ language files in the resource pack).
Performance should be significantly better compared to R17 for the weird custom models like spheres etc. That's simply because the models are regular block models now with all non-visible faces culled manually (instead of buggy Optifine custom entity models).
An important change: With the custom model pack i want to avoid texturing any of the oldschool minecraft blocks. Only newly added blocks (e.g. after 2018 or version 1.12.). I have always tried to mix realistic models with minecraft's blocky pixelated original textures because that's a super interesting contrast. I want to show that this is all running inside of Minecraft and that it is not just a random architecture rendering software.
So what shapes are possible now with the new block model format?
Well with some tricks you could create any triangle geometry (if you use a texture with transparent background on a plane). But that's not a very elegant use. And it requires some sort of automation because you can't really model that manually.
The shapes that make the best use of the new block model format in my opinion are shapes with constant curvatue in certain areas that repeat. Best example: A sphere. It has the same curvature in all directions everywhere. This means you can smooth the surface easily by using one single normal map that is applied to every single quad plane. The overlap of the quads doesn't matter much and is practically invisible. In the image above you can see two different ways to model a sphere with squares of equal size. The 2nd method is significantly better (less total overlap and also less squares).
Torus segments and all other rotational surfaces (e.g. vases) are also great because you only need the normal map of the profile curve and all rotated parts can reuse it.
Dodecahedron: With the new models you can now also create a perfect dodecahedron because it's faces are pentagons which have corner angles larger than 90 degrees. This means you can create the pentagons with 5 rectangular planes perfectly as seen in the image above. Perfect triangles are obviously not possible with this specific approach. I think you can model the dodecahedron fairly easily manually in Blockbench by first creating the base pentagon and then duplicating and rotating. But I decided to code a simple tool that allows me to generate these kinds of shapes procedurally and export them to a correct minecraft block model json file automatically. If you have any ideas/wishes for specific geometric shapes that I could make, please let me know. I think I now have the required tools.
A type of shape that I'd love to try in the future is the Möbius Strip, with it's many variations. Basically twisted objects.
Are you going to create a mod for all these models?
I personally love the fact that this pack is only a resource pack and not a dedicated mod - A resource pack is super easy to install and you can also use it on a normal multiplayer server with friends. But i think the main reason is that as a mod it would be a lot less impressive because with mods you can simply load any 3d triangle geometry into minecraft.
SHADERS:
With my textures so far I recommended Kappa v5.3 simply because it has amazing PBR support especially for emissive textures (e.g glowing rails or sticky pistons) and it also has nice Depth of Field. But since the new models are a bit more focused on architecture, I think Kappa is too stylized. I looked a bit closer at paid chinese shaders like Sundial and Iteration (which Ultimate Immersion is using for his mod pack) and they are absolutely stunning. Especially iterationRP. Very good fps, amazing GI and very robust with barely any visual bugs when using my new models. IterationT is a free useable alternative. (no worldspace reflections or GI). Almost all screenshots from this post use iterationRP.
There are reports of one of the iteration shaders containing stolen code and thus I have decided to stop promoting the name in my videos. But I can't lie to you, the best shader to use with these new special shapes is currently iterationRP. Kappa v5.3 still works well if you use correct settings but of course it is only screen space path tracing.
Sundial Alpha (paid) and Sundial Lite (free) are also pretty good in general.
BUGS:
The new Minecraft versions also brought some bad changes with it: On the texture atlas they now added padding around all textures which causes textures to appear offset/shifted in reflections when using path traced shaders. I tried to avoid that by moving important blocks e.g. white concrete to the beginning of the atlas so it is not shifted. I also made sure that vanilla textures are correct - at least when only using the new pack on its own.
Animated PBR maps are bugged so blocks like the jukebox are sadly a bit broken when seen close up. This is probably an iris issue and should be fixed soon.
Social media update: The jukebox did not perform well at all and I don't really have any ideas for other jukebox videos because I've already showed everything. In general I think the approach I've used so far is not sustainable and I'm hoping that the new round models will get some attention. I have never uploaded a video about R17 so I'm very curious how it will perform.
DOWNLOADS:
As always, the downloads can be found on the download post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/public-downloads-127596976
Attached to this post is a .pdf guide for the new funky models pack. With shader settings etc. (I'll bring back the website as soon as possible)