Behind the Scenes: Realistic Minecraft Steve

Explore how Chase McGill brings Minecraft’s blocky hero to life with unsettling hyper-realism, transforming Steve into a grotesquely detailed 3D masterpiece.

INTRODUCTION

Hello, my name is Chase McGill, and I am a 3D generalist based in New Jersey and Los Angeles. I love using Blender to create realistic characters—sometimes serious and sometimes goofy. My “serious” work tends to lean toward the darker side, usually featuring scary medieval knights.

INSPIRATION

The Minecraft movie trailer had recently come out, and amid all the attention it received, the most shared opinion was that live-action was not an appropriate medium to portray the beloved game. I enjoy creating hyper-realistic, grotesque characters, so I thought it would be funny to stay faithful to the game's proportions while going all out on the realism to create the most unsettling and realistic portrayal of Steve.

PROCESS

Sculpting

I ripped the Minecraft player model straight from the game and imported it into ZBrush to ensure the most accurate proportions. I then dynameshed and sculpted directly on top of each body part.

I especially enjoyed sculpting the hands—his square, bunched-up fists make him look so angry.

Textures

After retopology, UVs, and baking, I created the albedo texture in Substance Painter. This involved layering numerous noise textures and adding as much variation as possible. Real human skin contains an incredible amount of detail, so it’s essential to ensure that “no two pixels are the same.”

I used low-opacity dirt brushes to paint the nose, lips, cheeks, and ears red, the forehead yellow, the eyelids blue, and the chin green. Subtly hue-shifting these areas with a rough brush is crucial for achieving a convincing look. If you're curious, search for “color zones of the face” to get a better idea.

I also made the subsurface map in Substance, which is more layered noise. The most important part of this map is to darken the nose, eyelids, and ears. Subsurface scattering will look too strong in these areas without this compensation.

The roughness and specular maps were just a combination of a cavity map bake from ZBrush and more layered noise textures.

I imported everything into Blender and started on the materials. The clothes were just an albedo map and the displacement from ZBrush on a principled shader with a little bit of subsurface scattering. Fabric tends to have a bit of translucency since it’s essentially hair, just tightly packed together into a solid form.