Building
Armour
Armour is the art Minecraft draws on a player's body when they wear a helmet, chestplate, leggings or boots. A pack reskins one of the vanilla sets, and every piece of that set in the world changes with it.
This is not a 3D model
Armour is drawn as a flat texture on the game's own body shape. There is no way to give worn armour real geometry from a Resource Pack — not with OptiFine either, which never offered it. What can have depth is a helmet: any item worn in the head slot renders its own model, which is how crowns and masks are made.
The sets#
Eight vanilla sets can be reskinned: leather, chainmail, copper, iron, gold, diamond, netherite and the turtle shell.
A pack holds at most one of each, because an armour asset is the vanilla set it replaces — there is nothing to name. Sets your pack already has are shown greyed out in the Add asset sheet.
Copper needs 1.21.9, the turtle shell has no leggings
Copper armour didn't exist before Minecraft 1.21.9, so exporting a pack for anything older simply leaves it out. And a turtle shell is a helmet only — it has one sheet where every other set has two.
Two sheets, not one#
Every set is made of two 64×32 sheets, and they are not interchangeable:
| Sheet | What wears it |
|---|---|
| Outer | Helmet, chestplate and boots |
| Leggings | Leggings only — its own, narrower drawing |
The game draws leggings from a separate sheet at tighter proportions, so art meant for the outer sheet puts a belt buckle on somebody's knee. The editor keeps them as two tabs and saves both together.
Most of the leggings sheet is unused, and the editor dims those pixels. That isn't a bug in the file — the game genuinely never reads them.
There is no left arm or left leg
An armour sheet has one arm and one leg. The game draws the left side by mirroring the right, so painting a boot paints both boots. This is Minecraft's layout, not ours.
Making one#
Open Add asset, choose Armour, and pick the set you're reskinning. Any of three doors works:
Generate — describe the armour and it's drawn for you:
weathered bronze scale armour, green patina in the seams
You can attach a reference image here, and it's worth doing for anything with a specific look. It isn't traced — at this size nothing can be — it's shown to the director, which reads the placement off it: where each colour starts and stops on the body, what the face looks like, what's on the chest. Three or four things it can actually put somewhere beats a paragraph describing them.
Draw — start from something and paint it yourself:
- Vanilla art — the real set's own texture, ready to recolour. Often the fast way in: an armour sheet is an unwrap, so recolouring a correct one beats drawing one from nothing.
- Empty — transparent sheets, for drawing from scratch.
Upload — bring your own image. Anything is accepted, and what happens to it depends on what it is:
| What you upload | What you get |
|---|---|
| A 64×32 armour sheet (or any image twice as wide as it is tall) | Used as-is — it already is the file the game reads |
| A 64×64 player skin | That skin's clothing becomes the armour |
| A character or a piece of armour on a plain background | Cropped to the subject and wrapped onto the body |
| Anything else — a texture, a photo, a pattern | Tiled over the set, so you get armour made of it |
How a set is made
Nothing asks an image model for an armour sheet — that file is an unwrap, and the drawing that matters is the one on a body. So a set is designed: a director starts from the real set's own art, blocks out the colours and paints the identifying details itself — the face, the emblem, the bands, the sides of every piece — then has the pixel-art model redraw that design with real material on it, and puts back anything the redraw softened. After every few changes it looks at the set worn: flat from the front and back, and as the game actually draws it, in solid boxes from a three-quarter angle.
That division is the whole reason it works. An image model paints convincing fabric and metal and cannot be told where to put anything — and it follows the colours of what it's shown far more than the words it's given. At sixteen pixels across, where a thing sits is the design: an arc reactor is a two-pixel circle in the middle of a chest. Ask for a specific character's armour and you'll get its faceplate and its chest light in the right places, rather than a suit in roughly the right colours.
A set takes a few minutes for this reason, and costs more than a single texture does. Every sheet in the set comes out of the one design, so a set is one charge whether it has two sheets or four — and no two runs are the same, so a set that comes back wrong is worth a retry.
Coverage#
A generated set is cut to the shape of the set it reskins, and there's nothing to choose. Ask for iron and you get iron's silhouette: a band across the top of the head, a sleeve to the elbow, the face and forearms bare — because that's what iron is. Chainmail's helmet is two pixels deep and stays that way.
Vanilla's sets cover surprisingly little, and the temptation is to let a generated one cover more. Don't be surprised that it doesn't: armour is worn over a player, not instead of one, and art that reaches the whole head and the whole leg stops reading as equipment and starts reading as a costume — a painted face where a helmet goes, trousers where boots go. Every armour box is also drawn a pixel proud of the body on each side, so a set that covers everything is a visibly swollen one.
If you want the whole head, paint it: the 2D editor has no such limit and never has. It greys out only the pixels the game will never read. The restriction is on what a generation fills in, where nothing is watching the result but you.
Plumes and crests are placed for you
Ask for a plume, a crest or a ridge and it's drawn onto the crown of the helmet directly — front, back and over the top, so it reads as a ridge from above. That isn't a shortcut: the head is an eight-pixel box and there is no above it to draw in, so a plume left to the image model ends up cropped off or squashed across the eyes. Say what you want and it lands on the crown in your trim colour; horns and wings become a crest too, since nothing can stick out past the body.
Why the arms look chunky
Minecraft grows every armour box by one pixel on each side — a helmet is a ten-pixel block around an eight-pixel head, and a sleeve is six pixels around a four-pixel arm. That's what makes a pauldron look like a pauldron, and it's also why armour is always a size up on the player wearing it.
One thing follows that surprises people: the sleeves and the chest overlap, because six plus ten plus six is wider than the body they sit on. A shadow is drawn down the inside of each sleeve so the arm still reads as an arm rather than melting into the chest — you'll see it on any set whose sleeve runs down the limb.
If a set looks fat to you, the fix is art rather than size: a sleeve a shade different from the chest, painted side faces, a boundary at the shoulder.
An upload is cut to the same silhouette and is free — except a straight 64×32 sheet, which is already the file the game reads and is kept exactly as you drew it.
Generating leather puts the art on the dyeable base and leaves the overlay empty, so the result takes dye. Add studs and straps on the overlay sheet afterwards if you want details that keep their own colour.
The editor#
The sheet is on the left and a player wearing it is on the right, and both paint the same pixels. Painting the figure writes to whichever layer is selected, exactly as painting the sheet does.
The body underneath is a plain Steve. He's scenery: he's never edited and never ships with your pack. Hide him from the right-hand column if he's in the way.
Leather and dye#
Leather is the only dyeable set, and it works differently enough to be worth reading before you draw it. It has four sheets rather than two: a base and an overlay for each layer.
- The base is multiplied by the player's dye colour.
- The overlay is drawn on top and is never tinted.
So anything that should take the dye goes on the base, and anything that must keep its own colour — studs, straps, buckles, metal — goes on the overlay.
You cannot give each dye colour its own artwork
The dye is a multiply over one texture, and the format has no way to select a different texture per colour. The base/overlay split is the whole of colour support. Because it multiplies, a dye can only ever darken the base — so draw the base light if you want bright dyes to read.
The dye picker in the editor is a preview only. The colour lives on the player's item, not in your pack.
Older Minecraft versions#
Minecraft moved where armour textures live in 1.21.2. You don't have to care: the pack stores one copy and export writes whichever path the version you picked reads. The only thing you lose going back is a set that didn't exist yet.
Seeing it in game#
There's no give command for armour, because there's no custom item involved — your pack reskins the real set. Put on real iron armour and it's your art. Sync the pack to a server and equip a piece to check it.