Camera Obscura

Capture Your Minecraft World in Photos! 🎮📸

With the Camera Obscura mod, you can take pictures of your game world or server and save them as maps. The key advantage — no client-side mods are required for server use: everything is rendered directly on the server using ray-tracing technology!

🔧 How It Works

The mod adds a "Camera" item to the game that looks and functions like a regular spyglass but has a special purpose. When used, it creates a map showing the visible landscape, consuming a map item in the process (configurable).

There's no crafting recipe for the camera yet — the item must be obtained through creative mode or commands.

⚙️ Configuration Settings

On first launch, a configuration file will appear in the configs/camera-obscura.json folder with these parameters:

{
  "renderDistance": 128,
  "showSystemMessages": false,
  "renderEntities": false,
  "renderEntitiesAmount": 20,
  "fullbright": false,
  "fov": 70,
  "biomeBlend": 1,
  "cameraItem": "minecraft:spyglass",
  "cameraConsumesItem": true,
  "cameraConsumeItem": "minecraft:map",
  "commandPermissionLevel": 2
}

• renderDistance — visibility range in blocks
• showSystemMessages — display system messages when taking photos (default: off)
• renderEntities — experimental entity rendering
• renderEntitiesAmount — number of entities to render (default: 20)
• fullbright — ignore light levels
• fov — field of view (30 to 110)
• biomeBlend — biome blending
• cameraItem — item used as camera model (minecraft:spyglass)
• cameraConsumesItem — whether items are consumed during photography
• cameraConsumeItem — item to consume (minecraft:map)
• commandPermissionLevel — permission level for commands (default: 2)

🎮 Control Commands

Main Commands:

• /camera-obscura — take a picture from the player's perspective and give them the map
• /camera-obscura <entity/player> <scale> — photo from the specified entity's perspective, scale up to 3 (3×3 map)
• /camera-obscura save — save the photo as PNG in the renders/ folder with a date-formatted filename
• /camera-obscura save <entity> <scale> — photo of an entity with PNG saving, scale up to 10
• /camera-obscura clear-cache — clear texture and model cache

Default image size is 128×128 pixels.

🔐 Permissions

Standard permission system is used:

• camera-obscura.command, camera-obscura.command.scale
• camera-obscura.command.entity, camera-obscura.command.entity.scale
• camera-obscura.command.save, camera-obscura.command.save.scale
• camera-obscura.command.save.entity, camera-obscura.command.save.entity.scale
• camera-obscura.clear-cache

⚠️ Known Features

Some functions are under development:

• Entity rendering is slow and doesn't support all entities
• Liquids appear "blocky"
• Hard lighting
• End Gateway and portal blocks appear pure black
• Large models may get cut off
• Rendering issues at coordinates in the millions

The core functionality involves downloading game assets from Mojang's servers and rendering the world with ray tracing. The result is saved as either a map or PNG image.