Models

Bones that do something

Name a bone with one of these prefixes in Blockbench and it does more than get drawn.

These are Model Engine's prefixes, on purpose

A rig you already have — or bought — names its bones this way. Inventing our own spelling would mean re-authoring a model to move it here, for no gain to anybody. It is a naming convention, and this one is already the convention.

Bone name	What it does
`h_head`	Turns to look at whatever its mob is targeting
`hi_head`	The same, and every bone under it inherits it
`b_wing`	A hitbox of its own — the mob is hit on the wing you aimed at
`ob_wing`	The same, turning with the bone
`p_seat1`	Somewhere to sit. Right-click it
`mount`	Where the driver sits. One per model
`tag_name`	Where a name floats

Anything else is an ordinary bone, which is nearly all of them. A model needs none of this.

Heads#

A head bone turns toward what its mob is fighting, on top of whatever the animation is already doing to it — so a walk cycle still moves the head and looking is composed over it.

It follows the target, not the gaze

Bukkit does not expose a mob's head yaw — the yaw you can read is the body's — so "look where it is looking" is not a question the API can answer. Looking at what it is fighting is, and is what you actually want from a boss. A mob with no target faces the way its body does, which is right: an idle mob's head is straight ahead.

Only on a model worn by a mob. A placed statue has nothing to look with.

Hitboxes#

b_ and ob_ give a bone a hitbox of its own, so a dragon is hit on the wing you aimed at rather than inside one rectangle around the whole animal.

They ride the bone, so they follow the animation. Sized from the bone itself, measured when the pack is built.

A hit on a bone is forwarded to the mob. The wing is not a creature: it has no health of its own, and the mob takes the damage with its own resistances, its own death and its own loot. What a bone changes is where you have to aim, and how much that is worth:

  place:
    hitboxes:
      head: 2.0
      wing: 0.5

Matched against the bone's own name and not its lineage — unlike an animation's bone mask. A hitbox is a place you aimed at, and counting everything inside a torso as a torso hit would make a head worthless the moment it was inside one.

Seats#

p_ is a passenger seat and mount is the driver's. Right-click one to sit; the seat follows the bone, so a seat on a walking mount goes with it.

mount is a whole bone name rather than a prefix, which is Model Engine's one exception and is copied exactly. A bone called mountain is scenery.

Nametags#

tag_ says where a name floats. Vanilla puts a name a fixed distance above the hitbox, which on a model three blocks tall and five wide is somewhere inside its knee.

The text is the mob's own custom name, and its vanilla one is hidden while the tag is up so there are not two. Taking the model off gives it back.

What is deliberately not here#

Procedural bones — tails, segments — and item-display slots on a bone.

Both are animation the engine would be inventing rather than a position it can read off your rig, and half-doing either is worse than not having it: a tail that lags wrongly reads as the plugin being broken, and there is no setting anybody can reach to fix it.