Minecraft Skin Renderer

There are three ways to load a skin:

• Username - Type a Java Edition username and click Load to fetch it automatically. For a Bedrock player, pick Bedrock above the box and type their Xbox gamertag.
• File upload - Use the Or upload a file drop zone in the Skin settings, or drag a PNG straight onto the model.
• Drag and drop - Drop a skin PNG (or a .bbmodel) straight onto the model. The viewer lights up as a drop target.

Bedrock gamertags. Mojang keeps no public copy of Bedrock skins: the only one is what GeyserMC saves when a Bedrock player joins a Java server running Geyser. So a gamertag loads the skin as Geyser last saw it (the status line says when), and a player who has never joined such a server has no skin to fetch yet; upload their PNG instead. A Java server's .Name and a Floodgate UUID work in the box too, and switch it to Bedrock by themselves. With a name already in the box, switching between Java and Bedrock loads that name from the other one, since many players use the same name on both.

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. HD skins keep their full detail: the texture is used at its native resolution, and the Pixelated filter keeps the edges crisp.

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. Auto always tells you what it chose by marking the type it picked with a dot.

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.

The Edition switch underneath picks which slim model Alex means. Bedrock's slim arms hang half a pixel lower than Java's, and that is the whole of the difference: the arms are still 3 pixels wide, the texture map is identical, and Steve is the same model in both editions, so the switch greys out while Steve is showing. Nothing in a skin file records which edition it came from, so Auto cannot work this one out and your choice always stands.

Because that is how Minecraft renders it, and the tool matches the game.

Accounts named Dinnerbone or Grumm are served a skin whose PNG is stored flipped top to bottom, so every texture region sits in the wrong place. A viewer that does not know this shows a blank face with the artwork down in the torso. The renderer un-flips the sheet so the regions line up again, then turns the finished model upside down.

It works this out from the texture itself rather than from the username, so uploading one of those skins as a PNG, or a re-hosted copy of one, gets the same treatment. Everything else still works normally on it: posing, materials, lighting and every export.

Open the Pose tab and pick a preset: Standing, Stand Tall (how the Mojavatar stands in its own pictures, shown from their camera), Spotlight (standing tall in a beam of light, a lit floor and glints about it), Crouching, Idle Sway, Happy Sway, Waving, Bowing, Sitting, Relaxed, Handshake, Pointing Hand, Salute, Walking, Sprinting, Ninja Running, Ninja Dashing, Skipping, Sneaking, Celebrating, In Love, T-Pose, Dab, Pleading, Crying, Surprised, Vanishing, Hurt, Death, MC Death, On Fire, Totem, Sword, Stab, Mining, Pick Swing, Aiming, Block, Placing Block, Eating, Golden Apple, Drinking, Level Up, Pumpkin Head, Jack o'Lantern, White Pumpkin, White Lantern, Looking Left, Looking Right, Zombie, Villager, Enderman, Creeper, Explosion, All Fours or Pouncing. The items are the game's own, held where the game holds them: an iron sword for Sword and Stab, a diamond pickaxe for Mining and Pick Swing, a grass block carried in both hands for Block (Placing Block sets it down), cooked beef for Eating, a golden apple, a red potion for Drinking and a drawn bow for Aiming. That is one click and it is usually all you need. In the Look tab, the Busts group aims the camera at part of the figure: Full Body, Half Body (waist up, so the arms and the whole gesture stay in frame), Portrait (head and shoulders) and Head. It is framing rather than a pose, so it keeps whichever pose you picked and works from whatever angle you are orbited to, and stays on as you pick other poses and animations. It moves the camera rather than cropping the picture, so orbiting or picking a new angle afterwards simply carries on from there.

The camera follows the pose. The Stand Tall pose is shown as its pictures are, in perspective through a long lens, and there a bust is a crop of that view: the camera only turns and narrows its lens. Every other pose and every animation is shown in the standard view, where a bust moves the camera in to fit the part. Once you orbit or pick an angle yourself, picking a pose keeps your angle and changes only the view; Reset next to the angles gives the camera back to the pose.

To pose by hand, click a body part in the viewport (it lights up as you hover it). The part highlights, and a Selected part editor with Position / Rotation / Scale appears above the option cards. There is no mode to turn on first.

• Tap a body part to select it, then pick the Move, Rotate or Scale tool.
• Drag a number field sideways to scrub it, or tap the minus and plus buttons either side. Tap the number itself to type an exact value.
• Shift+click (desktop) selects several parts at once.
• Click empty space to deselect.
• Part / Cube switch - Above the position fields. Part edits the whole part, its cube and its second layer together. Cube edits one cube: switching a selected part to Cube holds the cube you clicked, and Base / Layer beside it picks between the part's base cube and its second layer, so you can pose, move or scale them separately. A click on the figure selects in whichever mode is set. On desktop, Alt+click picks a single cube without switching modes.

Undo and redo (Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Shift+Z) cover the pose and every other setting: materials, background, lights and visibility are all in the same history. The exceptions are the viewer's own controls, which change how the preview is drawn rather than what it contains: Smooth edges and the camera you drag with the mouse. Reset, next to the pose presets, puts every part back where it started, and so does the Standing card.

Yes. Open the Animation tab and pick one: Idle, Stand Tall, Spotlight, Idle Sway, Happy Sway, Wave, Bow, Sit, Shiver, Nod, Head shake, Walk, Run, Sprint, Ninja Run, Ninja Dash, Skip, Sneak Walk, Sneak Spam, Jump, MC Jump, Bounce, Cheer, Clap, Celebrate, Joy, Love, Dance, Piglin Dance, Turn around, Spin, Sulk, Cry, Surprised, Vanish, Hurt, Death, MC Death, On Fire, On Fire Panic, Totem, Punch, Stab, Mine, Bow Shot, Block Walk, Place Block, Eat, Golden Apple, Drink Potion, Level Up, Pumpkin Head, White Pumpkin, Pumpkin Walk, Pumpkin Zombie, Zombie, Villager Walk, Enderman, Creeper Walk, Creeper, Explosion, Pounce, Prowl, Crawl, Gallop or Rainbow Gallop. Stand Tall strikes the Stand Tall pose the way the Minecraft Live avatars strike theirs: up into it in one go and past it, a dip under it, held a second and a half, and back to standing. Spotlight strikes it under a stage light that flickers on over the figure, the sparkles coming out round it one by one. The prop animations carry the game's items: an iron sword for Stab, a bow for Bow Shot (raised as it is drawn, the arrow let fly, and the next one fetched from the hip and laid on the string), a diamond pickaxe for Mine, a grass block for Block Walk and Place Block (which sets it down on the floor and steps back from it), cooked beef for Eat, and a golden apple and a red potion for Golden Apple and Drink Potion, gone once eaten or drunk. They bring the game's own particles with them: crumbs of the food at every bite, the effect's swirls once it has been eaten or drunk (Regeneration's pink and Absorption's blue for the golden apple, the potion's red), and a puff of dust as the placed block lands. Cry sheds tears from under the eyes that fall and splash at the feet, and Totem flashes red with the blow, raises the totem of undying in front of the face and bursts into its green and yellow glitter, Level Up pulls experience orbs in from all round and hops as the level comes up, Love gives off the game's hearts, On Fire burns in the game's own flames, flashing red at every burn, On Fire Panic runs about in them, Vanish crumbles the figure into dust on the wind and puts it back together, Hurt flashes the game's red as the figure is knocked back, Enderman carries a block in a haze of portal particles and teleports, Creeper walks in on four legs, flashes and goes off, Explosion is that blast on a figure that just stands there, Ninja Run leans into a sprint with both arms held straight back (Ninja Dash is the same on the Run's legs), Rainbow Gallop trails a rainbow from the rump, Pumpkin Head tosses a carved pumpkin onto the head, where it becomes the head and lights as a jack o'lantern (White Pumpkin is the same in white, its eyes catching a yellow glint), and Pumpkin Walk and Pumpkin Zombie walk in it. Walk, Sprint, Sneak Walk, Punch, Mine, MC Jump and Piglin Dance follow Minecraft's own animations, MC Death tips over the way the game does (Death falls flat on its front, spread-eagled, as the chibi maker's drops), and every animation plays on the standing figure: picking one puts the pose on Standing, and a pose you made by hand is kept and comes back when you pick None or press Reset.

To save one, press Export and, under Animation, pick the file:

• GIF - Works everywhere.
• APNG - Keeps soft edges and the ground shadow. What Signal and LINE take for animated stickers, and Discord at 320 x 320.
• WebM - A transparent video for Telegram stickers, offered in Chromium browsers such as Chrome and Edge.

The file is exactly one seamless loop at the frame rate and speed you choose, and the speed plays in the preview too, so what you see is what you get. Pick Turntable under Motion for a 360 degree spin of the model instead.

Materials. The Look settings hold the material options. Each one is a complete look: it sets the surface finish plus a matching lighting and tone style.

• Soft Toy - Matte molded-plastic with soft, even lighting; a cute Kinder-egg toy look (default).
• New Renders - The light of the Mojavatar's own renders, matched to them: no shine on the faces turned to the camera, the side of the head brightening toward its top front corner, and a faint reflection of the floor across its lower half.
• Glossy Toy - Shiny clearcoat finish with punchy product-shot lighting, like a vinyl figure.
• Clay - Ultra-matte, soft and slightly pastel; a modeling-clay feel.
• Plastic - Glossy clearcoat surface under a neutral studio light.
• Matte - Flat, non-reflective surface.
• Metallic - Shiny metallic appearance with strong reflections.
• Embossed - Unlit with thin bevelled edges that catch the light: cube edges facing the key light glint, edges facing away fall into shadow, the way Minecraft title art pops its block faces.
• Flat (Unlit) - No lighting or shading; 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.

Inner faces. Inner faces, in the Look settings, draws the inside of each cube through the see-through pixels of its faces, the way Blockbench draws a model and Bedrock shows a hollow skin: a skin built out of holes, like a toilet bowl or a helmet, renders with its insides in shadow instead of gaps straight through it. It is on by default, and on a skin with no see-through pixels it changes nothing; untick it to see straight through the holes. Shade inner faces, just below it, keeps those insides darker as if in their own shadow; untick it to show them in the skin's colors as painted.

Flatten layers. Tick Flatten layers in the Look settings to paint the skin's second layer (the hat, jacket, sleeves and pants) straight onto each part instead of drawing it as its own slightly bigger shell, so the figure has flat sides with nothing raised. A layer you hide in the Parts panel stays off the skin too. It is off by default.

3D layers. Tick 3D layers to give every pixel of the second layer sides that run down to the part under it, wherever the pixel next to it is see-through, so headphones, a hat brim or a sleeve's cuff stand on the figure as solid pixels instead of a thin sheet floating just off it. Scale or move a second layer away from its part (Cube in the Selected part editor) and its sides still run all the way down to the part. The GLB and OBJ exports carry those sides too. It is off by default, and dimmed while Flatten layers is on.

Smooth edges, on by default, supersamples the preview so the cube silhouettes are not jagged. Pixelated texture keeps the skin's pixels crisp; turn it off for a softened, filtered texture.

Lighting. The Lighting settings have a slider for every light: Key (the main light, the one that casts the shadows), Fill (the softer one from the other side), Ambient (the even light everywhere), Rim (from behind, lighting the figure's edges), Softbox (a small square light by the head's top front corner, which warms that side of the head) and Reflection (the bright floor mirrored on the side of the head, below a crisp line). Each starts at 100% of the look's own; a look without a rim, softbox or reflection starts it at 0%, and raising it adds the New Renders one. Reflection is the Mojavatar renders' look for their pose, so in New Renders it is on for the Stand Tall pose and at 0% for every other pose and animation, where the turning head would sweep its line about, until you move the slider yourself. Move lights in viewport puts four colored spheres into the 3D view: the yellow sphere is the key light, the blue sphere the fill light, the white sphere the rim light and the green sphere the softbox. Key, fill and rim shine from a direction, so their spheres sit on a ring around the figure that stays in view; drag one and its light shines from there. The softbox is a light in a place, so its sphere is where it is, and it keeps facing the head as you move it. Click a sphere to select it, then drag the gizmo arrows. Reset, next to the Lights heading, puts them back.

What's the difference between Shading and Ground shadow? Shading lets the model cast shadows onto itself, so the head darkens the torso and the arms darken the body; it is off for every pose but Stand Tall, as its renders show the head's shadow on the body, until you tick or untick it yourself. Ground shadow drops a shadow onto the floor beneath the character, and its Intensity slider sets how dark it is; it is on for every pose and animation until you tick or untick it yourself. They are independent: use either, both, or neither.

Every one of these is undoable, like every other setting in the tool.

Camera controls. Left-click drag orbits, right-click drag pans, and the scroll wheel zooms. The Camera settings hold the camera presets, and the number keys reach them too: 1 to 4 for Front, Back, Left and Right, 6 and 7 for Top and Bottom, 8 and 9 for the 45 degree views, and 0 to return to the default. Key 5 toggles orthographic: it removes perspective entirely, so the model reads as a flat, straight-on portrait. The tool starts in perspective, which suits a full-height figure, but orthographic is the better choice if you want the render to sit flat against a background. In perspective, Lens sets the camera's lens in millimetres, from a wide 18 mm to a long 300 mm: the figure stays the same size and the camera moves closer or further, so you see only the perspective change (the tool starts at 38 mm; a long lens flattens the figure). The angle presets and the angle Reset bring 38 mm back. The same settings have Auto-rotate, which spins the model continuously, and Lock rotation, which freezes the orbit and shows the current azimuth and polar angles.

Export formats. Press Export in the Actions card.

• PNG - Still image from 128 to 4096 pixels (320 x 320 is a Discord sticker, 128 x 128 a Discord emoji), square by default or in 4:3, 16:9, 4:5 or 9:16. Supports transparent backgrounds.
• Round avatar - The same picture cut to a circle with transparent corners, ready to upload as a profile picture. It shapes the animations too, and the preview's frame turns round to show what stays.
• GIF - The playing animation as one seamless loop at your chosen frame rate and speed, or a 360° turntable from the current camera angle. Keeps a transparent background; the ground shadow is left out of a transparent GIF, since GIF transparency is all or nothing.
• APNG - The same animation, lossless, with soft transparency and the ground shadow.
• WebM - A transparent video for Telegram stickers, in Chromium browsers such as Chrome and Edge.
• GLB - Binary glTF format, includes pose, textures, and materials. Best for importing into other 3D tools.
• OBJ - Wavefront OBJ format, widely compatible but does not include textures.
• BBModel - Blockbench project file, so the posed model opens straight in Blockbench for further editing.

Yes, through the BBModel export: a Blockbench project with the model in the pose you made, the skin and every animation in the tool. The file opens in your pose, and every animation still plays as it does here, from standing. Open it in Blockbench to edit it further, or take it on from there.

What comes with the animations. The items are real cubes (a flat item thickened into 3D the way the game does it, a block as one cube): the sword, the bow and its arrow, the pickaxe, the grass block, the food, the potion and the pumpkins, each in a bone of its own that only the animations using it show. The effects are geometry too: the particles (hearts, smoke, crumbs, experience orbs and the rest) as small crossed squares bearing their sprite, the On Fire flame and the Rainbow Gallop trail. The flame turns to face the camera in Blockbench and on Bedrock; with no camera to read, it stands still as a cross through the body. The particles, the flame and the trail all hang in one bone, fx, at the top of the outliner, so if you only want the model, right-click it there and delete it. Where the figure disappears (Enderman, Creeper, Explosion), the model shrinks to nothing for that moment. The Vanish is rebuilt from the skin's own pixels: the figure crumbles pixel by pixel in the same order and at the same moments as in the tool (the tool's crumble runs across whatever way you look; the file's runs across the front), and the flakes blow away, char to ash and break into specks, then it all comes back together. That is the export setting Vanish as pixels, on by default; it makes the file about twice as big and adds over a hundred bones, so untick it for a server. The pixels hang in the fx bone too, so deleting fx takes them, and the figure then simply disappears for the Vanish. The pictures of the items and effects share the skin's texture, below the skin, since a Bedrock entity takes a single one.

ModelEngine. The file is saved in the layout ModelEngine reads, with the spaces in bone names turned to underscores as it needs. Each arm carries one of ModelEngine's item bones, ir_right_hand and il_left_hand, and the right one follows the built item through the animations, so a real item can be held there instead. Put the file in ModelEngine's blueprints folder. ModelEngine makes every bone with cubes a display entity of its own, so deleting the fx bone also keeps the model light on a server.

Bedrock. In Blockbench, pick File, Convert Project and Bedrock Entity, then export the geometry and the animations. The arms carry the hold points a Bedrock humanoid uses, rightItem and leftItem, the right one moving with the item the same way.

What stays in the tool. The red flash of a hit and the creeper's white flash are drawn on the skin as it renders, so they are not in the file.

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, shadows, outline, lighting, part visibility, the camera angle and the full pose. 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.

Yes. The renders, animations and 3D models you export are yours to use freely, including commercially: on a website, a server store page, a video or a thumbnail. Credit isn't required, but it's encouraged: a mention or a link back to nogard.dev helps keep the tools free. This covers what you make, not the tool itself, so please don't copy or rehost this page or its code. The Terms of Use have the details.