Building

Models

A model is geometry: cubes with textured faces, arranged inside (or overhanging) a single block. It's the one asset kind that changes an object's shape rather than its surface.

Making one#

Describe it and generate it, the same as anything else, but expect minutes rather than seconds. Models run through the builder, our most advanced pipeline, built for maximum quality over speed: it plans the object, constructs it cube by cube, paints its materials as it goes, and re-inspects its own work before calling it done.

You can also upload a .bbmodel from Blockbench or a vanilla model .json, or start from a stone cube and build by hand. Edit with AI and Animate with AI take a model you already have and a sentence about what to change.

The editor#

A Blockbench-style editor, split into five modes because the jobs are genuinely different: shaping is not painting, and neither is deciding how the thing sits in your hand.

Edit mode#

The model is a list of cubes (Minecraft calls them elements). Each cube is a box with six faces, and each face points at a texture.

Cube coordinates run from -16 to 32 on each axis, with the block itself occupying 0..16. Overhang is legal and often correct (antlers, wings, roof edges). Keep the visual centre of mass near the middle of the block so it sits well when placed.

Hotkeys#

Defaults, all remappable in the editor's settings:

The rail also has a Select tool (no gizmo, just picking) and a Pivot tool for moving a bone's pivot point without moving its cubes, the one you reach for when a hinge rotates around the wrong spot.

Bones#

Select several cubes and group them into a bone: a named group with its own pivot point. Bones are what you animate: rotating a bone rotates everything in it around one pivot, which is how a door swings or a wing beats.

A generated model arrives with this already done, parts named, grouped into bones, pivots sitting at the joints (a left_front_wheel pivots on its axle), so Animate mode has real handles without any regrouping.

UVs#

Which part of a texture lands on which face is normally handled for you: you think in faces and materials, not texture coordinates. There is a UV panel in Edit mode for when you genuinely need it, but no ordinary workflow should depend on it.

Paint mode#

Paint straight onto the model in 3D. For anything fiddlier than a colour correction, open the full pixel editor from here, same texture, proper tools, and it comes back when you're done.

Display mode#

Minecraft renders a model differently in each context, and each context gets its own rotation, translation and scale override:

• First person / third person
• Left and right hand
• On a head
• Dropped item: lying on the ground
• Item frame
• Shelf
• GUI: the inventory icon

Unset slots inherit the vanilla block defaults, so you only touch the ones that look wrong. There's a player rig in the preview (Steve or Alex, or your own skin) so a held model can be judged against a body rather than against empty space.

Render mode#

The same viewport dressed for showing off: pick a backdrop (transparent, solid, gradient, or a real Minecraft sky with a grass ground), frame or spin the model, and capture a PNG. Transparent backdrops produce genuinely transparent captures, which is what you want for a Discord post or a shop listing.

Importing a model#

Two formats upload:

• .bbmodel (Blockbench) keeps its element names, its groups (which arrive as bones), its animations and its embedded textures, so a rigged Blockbench model comes in ready to animate rather than as bare geometry.
• .json (a vanilla block model) is the format an exported pack already uses, so it goes straight in as geometry.

A model too big for Minecraft's legal model box is scaled down to fit automatically.

Seeing it in game#

Minecraft has no "add a model" for Resource Packs. A pack can only change how something that already exists looks, so every custom model rides on a vanilla item or block. That choice is the model's carrier, and it's the single most consequential setting on a model:

The two legacy carriers place like normal blocks without any plugin, but you run out of vanilla blocks to borrow. The item carrier has no such ceiling, which is why it's the default; the trade is that placing it needs the plugin.

With the item carrier: sync the pack, take the give command from the model's page (or press Give in-game, which hands you the item where you're playing). Right-click a block to place it: the model appears centred on the block you clicked, facing the way you were, and the item is consumed. Punch it to pick it back up, unless the model has a left-click animation trigger, which makes it unbreakable on purpose (see Animations).

A placed model is not a block; it's a display entity, or several for an animated model. It doesn't occupy a block space or stop water, placements survive a restart, and your world's block protection doesn't cover it: a plugin that stops players breaking blocks won't necessarily stop them punching your models, worth checking on a public server.

How big it stands#

The give card has a Size dropdown, from an eighth up to eight times. It resizes the model at placement, not in the pack — so one model gives you a desk ornament and a landmark without editing anything, and two copies of the same model can stand side by side at different sizes.

The size rides on the item, like the animation choice does. It grows from the base, so a bigger model stands on the block you placed it against instead of sinking into it, and the punchable area grows with it. Break it and the item that drops remembers its size.

Choosing the block#

Pick Block as the carrier and the Studio lists every vanilla block a model can borrow, in two groups:

• Fixed: end rod, lantern, soul lantern. Each of these carries several models at once (one per facing or hanging state), and a placed model always sits the way you built it.
• Directional: anvils, ladder, stonecutter, grindstone, lectern, campfires, fence gates. One model each, and Minecraft turns it to face the way you place it, exactly as it turns the real block.

Leave it on Auto and the Studio takes the first block that's free, fixed ones first. In the Add asset sheet, a block the pack has already spent is greyed out; ask for one anywhere else and you get told it's taken rather than quietly landing somewhere else. Free a block by deleting the model holding it, or by moving that model to another carrier from its Get in-game panel.

Exporting#

A model leaves as JSON, in the vanilla block-model format, under assets/minecraft/models/. What wires it up depends on the carrier:

• Item carrier: an item definition at assets/minecraft/items/paper.json that dispatches on custom model data, so a piece of paper given with the right tag renders as your model. The give command on the model's page is the matching half.
• Block carriers: a blockstate file plus the block model, so the vanilla block you borrowed renders as your model wherever it's placed.

Textures the model paints with are exported alongside it and pointed at by name, which is why moving a model between packs carries its textures too.

On Bedrock#

Geometry converts: the .mcpack carries a real Bedrock entity with your model as its geometry, and animations come across as native Bedrock keyframes rather than being dropped. Carriers and give commands don't, since both are Java mechanisms.