This is the render of the Minecraft forest before I made adjustments and lighting changes. I wanted to balance what a player would expect to see in terms of color and what the scene would look like more realistically.
This was my first step with the project. After creating the voxel text, I used MASH to create the grid for the grass block tiles. I first tried doing this by hand but somehow they didn't line up exactly. I used a new technique for me at that time, where I created a set grid with MASH and then inverted the set to be used as an eraser to remove parts of the grid to reveal the text underneath.
My next move was changing the GEEK FOREST text to something more interesting. So I increased it's height in the 3D space and changed it's color to be greener. I also made it react to gravity so the fill of the letters would be closer to the ground than the outline of the letters, in short, it made the text look like it has a cool outline to each letter in a lighter green when they're all the same color! I also started creating the smaller versions of the blocks that show up after breaking the normal sized blocks.
The scene looked cool enough from the bird's eye view I established earlier, but I thought it would be even better if it was set to the height of a Minecraft player (like Steve). So the scene would be seen as if you stumbled upon this patch of dirt while playing Minecraft itself!
This is screenshot of the scene as I was working on it. In this part I am creating the first tree I placed into the world. Shortly after placing them with MASH. I animated the smaller blocks to be on a loop and rendered out this awesome animation!