Minecraft Chibi Skin Maker

There are three ways to load a skin:

• Username - Type your Minecraft Java Edition username and click Load (or press Enter) to fetch it automatically.
• File upload - In the Skin tab, click the upload area ("Drop a skin PNG here or click to upload") and pick a file from your computer.
• Drag and drop - Drop a skin PNG straight onto the preview, or onto that upload area. It lights up as a drop target.

Standard 64x64, legacy 64x32, and HD skins at any power-of-two size: 128x128, 256x256, 512x512 and up. The rule is simply a 1:1 or 2:1 image whose width is a power of two. The chibi itself is always a small 24x33 sprite, so an HD skin is sampled at its native resolution rather than squashed down first: a 128x128 skin's face lands pixel-for-pixel on the head, and detail finer than the sprite (256x256 and up) is sampled down. The Pixelated setting keeps the edges crisp.

Once a skin is loaded, the Skin card lists it by name and size, with a button to download that skin sheet again as a PNG (handy for keeping a skin you fetched by username) and one to remove it and go back to the default Steve or Alex skin.

What is "8px UV height"? Standard skins give the body, arms and legs 12 pixels of vertical texture space. Some specialised skins pack that detail into only 8 pixels instead. If yours is one of them, tick 8px UV height in the Skin settings and the viewer remaps the UVs so the texture is not stretched. Leave it off for normal Minecraft skins.

Steve has 4-pixel wide arms, Alex has 3-pixel wide arms. These are Minecraft's two default player models (the classic and slim body types), and using the wrong one makes the arm texture render incorrectly.

You should not have to care. The switch sits at the top of the Skin card and is set to Auto, which reads the body type straight out of the skin: a slim skin leaves the wide-only strips of its texture empty, so the tool can simply look. Once a skin is loaded, Auto marks the type it picked with a dot under the Steve or Alex button.

Pick Steve or Alex yourself and that choice is locked: loading another skin will not overrule you. Go back to Auto and it re-reads the skin you already have. Switching between the two keeps your pose and your skin.

Open the Pose tab and pick a preset: Standing, Waving, Handshake, Zombie, T-Pose, Sitting, Dab or Crouching. That is one click and it is all there is to it.

Poses follow the character into every camera: the 3/4 views, the Portrait bust (a waving portrait makes a great profile picture), the front, back, side and back-3/4 angles, and even the top and bottom views. Only the head-only bust keeps the standing figure - with just the head in frame, there is nothing below the shoulders to pose.

Poses and animations are exclusive: picking a pose switches off any running animation, and picking an animation puts the figure back to Standing. Either swap is a single undo step.

Undo and redo (Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Shift+Z) cover the pose and every other setting: materials, background, shading and visibility are all in the same history. The one exception is the preview's zoom and the character's placement inside a badge; double-click the preview to reset those. Reset, next to the pose presets, puts the avatar back to Standing.

Materials. The Look settings hold the material options. A material is a tone pass over the finished sprite: it shifts the colors' saturation, contrast and brightness, and a couple of them add an edge treatment. The shading is the same for every material; only Flat (Unlit) switches it off.

• Soft Toy - The colors as composed, a soft matte molded-plastic look (default).
• Glossy Toy - Punchier saturation and contrast with a brightened top edge, like a vinyl figure catching a highlight.
• Clay - Desaturated, soft and slightly brightened; a modeling-clay feel.
• Plastic - More saturated with harder contrast.
• Matte - Slightly desaturated and low-contrast, flat and calm.
• Metallic - Colors drained almost to gray with the contrast pushed up, a cold pewter read.
• Embossed - Darkens a one-pixel rim all the way around the silhouette so the sprite reads as pressed relief, the way Minecraft title art pops its block faces. It keeps the normal shading.
• Flat (Unlit) - No shading at all; shows the texture colors as-is.

Barebones (flat colors). Tick Barebones in the Look settings to flatten the skin's shading into flat colors, the look of the barebones resource pack. It merges each region's near-identical shades onto one color, so a shirt's light and dark teal become a single teal, while distinct colors and bold features (the mouth, the eyes) are kept. The Color similarity slider sets how aggressively similar colors merge: higher is flatter. It reprocesses whenever you change skin and works on any skin.

Outline. Thickness in the Look settings traces the whole chibi with an outline, from 0 (off) up to 10 sprite pixels. Raising it above 0 reveals Sharp corners (square instead of rounded) and a color picker. The outline is baked into PNG and GIF exports.

Background. The Look settings also hold six preset colors, a custom color picker and an image tile: pick a picture and it fills the frame, cover-fitted. Transparent is ticked by default, which is why exported PNGs come out with no background; untick it (or pick a color or image) to fill it, and Vignette then darkens the edges. All of it bakes into the export.

Pixelated texture, in the Skin settings, keeps the skin's pixels crisp when the preview scales the sprite up; turn it off for a softened preview. Exports stay crisp either way.

Lighting and shading. The whole lighting model is the baked shading pass: the squished side faces render slightly darker than the fronts, and the shoulder line, arm crease and far leg pick up soft shadows, which is what gives the sprite its depth. The Shadow strength slider (default 53) sets how hard that pass darkens: 0 removes it completely, around 50 is the calibrated reference look, and 100 pushes every shaded area to black.

Every one of these is undoable, like everything else in the tool.

Open the Animation tab and pick a clip. There are 19: Idle, Walk, Run, Skip, Jump, Wave, Nod, Head shake, Clap, Cheer, Sulk, Joy, Surprised, Bow, Bounce, Dance, Shiver, Turn around and Spin. The preview starts playing it right away.

Animations and poses are exclusive, so picking a clip returns the figure to Standing, and Reset stops it. The Speed control in the export panel plays the clip back from 0.5x to 2x, and the preview follows it, so the canvas shows exactly what Download GIF writes: an endless loop at your current camera view, framing and background.

Yes. Open the Parts tab and click the eye next to any part to hide it: Head, Body, the two arms and the two legs, each with its own outer layer (hat, jacket, sleeves and trouser overlays) that toggles separately. Hide a base part but keep its layer to show just the clothing, or hide a layer to strip it off.

Show all parts brings everything back, each toggle is undoable, and whatever you hide stays hidden in the exported PNG and GIF.

Pick the shot first. The Camera settings choose the angle (the number keys 1 to 0 reach the ten standing views) and the Pose settings choose the stance. The dashed frame in the preview marks exactly what the file will contain.

Then press Export in the Actions card. The export panel opens on three format tiles, each showing the exact pixel size it will write:

• Pixel art - The character on its own, upscaled by a whole number so it is never resampled or blurred. The Size select has its true size (around 22 x 32) and every whole-number upscale.
• Profile picture - The chibi centered on a square canvas, 1:1 by default. It comes out transparent; untick Transparent in the Look settings to fill it with your background.
• Round avatar - A circular badge with transparent corners, ready to upload as a Discord or YouTube picture.

With a badge format selected, scroll or pinch on the preview to resize the character inside the frame and drag to place it; double-click resets. That composition bakes into the file.

The same panel holds everything else: the aspect ratios (1:1, 4:3, 16:9, 4:5, 9:16), sizes from 256 to 4096 px, Copy PNG, and the animated GIF with a Speed select from 0.5x to 2x.

Every layout uses your current camera view, pose and background settings (the vignette bakes in too). Download PNG saves the file; Copy PNG puts the image straight on the clipboard. Download GIF exports the animation picked in the Animation tab as an endless loop, at the same layout and framing, and the preview plays it at exactly the GIF's timing. Preview-only settings (the zoom, the pan and the Pixelated texture checkbox) are never baked in.

Yes. The gear button in the Actions card opens the settings config. Save copies or downloads a small .json file that captures your whole setup: the body type and skin, the material, background, outline, shading, part visibility, the camera view, the pose and the animation. Load reads a config back, either by dropping the .json file onto the panel or by clicking to choose it, and applies it in one step that a single undo reverses. The skin travels inside the file, so a saved config is self-contained and easy to share.