This is a Mine-imator tutorial video I did about how to give Minecraft characters arms. It uses a technique called “parenting.” It saves a lot of time. I’ve include a full transcript of the video below:
TRANSCRIPT
(0:00) Hey everybody, it is Dr. Block here and I thought I would give you all a Minimator tutorial. (0:09) I’ve been learning how to use Minimator over the past couple years (0:13) and there’s a few things that if I had known when I first started using it, (0:19) it would have saved me hours, dozens of hours probably of time. So I thought I’d share that (0:27) with you.
The thing I want to talk about today is how do you make the default characters, (0:35) such as this desert villager or this wandering trader, how do you make them have arms? (0:46) So you can, you know, move the arms around, bend them, (0:51) hi, how you doing? Pose them, you know, however you want. You can put a sword in their hand, (0:58) whatever. Honestly, it’s pretty easy but it took me a while to figure it out so I thought I would (1:07) share that with you.
So let’s move all of these guys out of the way. Whoops, that’s not what I (1:20) meant to do. Let’s move, okay, I can’t select them all at the same time.
Let me just move this (1:29) guy out of the way. Alright, there we go. Move this guy a little closer so we can see what’s (1:36) going on.
Okay, so you’re thinking, how do I make the arms move? Well, you select the arms, (1:47) you can make them move a little bit but not the way you probably want them to work. So what you (1:59) got to do first of all is get rid of the arms. So you select the arms and then you take the scale (2:05) down to zero.
So they’re technically still there but they’ve vanished. Alright, now where do we get (2:12) arms? This is actually surprisingly easy. So first what we got to do is go over to, not that, (2:23) to this.
This is Nova Skin and what we’re going to do is look for a skin for Desert (2:34) Villager and hope there is one. Otherwise we’re going to have to make one ourselves. (2:41) Oh, look at that, there’s a bunch of them.
So this guy looks promising here. So what you want to do (2:48) is look at the arms. We can put it in a pose.
We can look at the arms. They look pretty good. (2:56) They look, um, looks like they have the same pattern as an actual Desert Villager.
So you (3:04) would download the skin, click the save button, and then it’ll give you a download option. (3:13) So you want to download that file. I’ve already done that so I’m not going to do it again.
(3:18) Then you go back to my animator. Okay, now we need to use our add arms. We’re going to have (3:24) to add human arms because the skin we got is a Steve or Alex shaped skin.
So we go over to this (3:32) cube, click it, and then this arm here means, see what it says, create a single body part from a (3:40) mob or special block. Click on that. So you go to human.
You’re going to add a right arm. (3:51) And if we just hit create, we’re going to add an arm that looks like the default Steve (3:55) character. And we wanted to use that Desert Villager arm.
So I go to my browse and (4:06) there it is. Desert Villager. I already opened it when I was testing it.
(4:11) Create. All right, where’s that arm? Where’d it go? I’m going to have to look down here. (4:18) Right arm of Steve.
Okay. And it looks like it’s over here for some reason. Yeah.
Okay. (4:28) So now, you know, you can move it up and put it against the villager and it looks great. (4:34) But the problem there is if now you want to reposition the villager.
What? The arm doesn’t (4:40) go with him and that’s stupid. So what we have to do is select the arm, (4:45) go over to here to the parent function. And we, sorry, there’s so much stuff in here.
(4:54) We are, looks like this is the Desert Villager. So we want to parent the arm to the body. (5:05) All right.
Okay. Disappeared again, of course. Let’s see where to go.
Right arm of Steve. (5:17) There it is. All right.
This is the thing about Mineimator. I don’t know if there’s a way (5:21) to get things to show up in less random ways, but anyway, as you can see though, (5:30) once it’s parented to the body, see how it lines up nicely with it. So all you have to do (5:35) is connect it how you want.
So I’ll try to put it right up to the neck level and then I move it over (5:44) and I like to check and see if there’s a gap. It looks like it’s nice. Okay.
So now we have (5:51) the right arm. Next we have to do the left arm. So we’re going to do the left arm of Steve.
(6:02) We’re going to do the Desert Villager again. And then we’re going to find it down here. Left arm (6:11) of Steve.
We’re going to parent it to the villager’s body again. Oh look, it’s right (6:16) inside of his body this time. That’s nice.
Okay. These look about the same height now. (6:29) All right.
Let’s see if there’s any gap. Oh, slight, (6:34) slight gap. So we’re going to move it over a bit.
That looks good. (6:41) All right. Now we’ve got a villager with arms.
And because they’re parented, (6:47) they go with him. And then you can do whatever you want with the arms. (7:00) All right.
And this parenting technique you can use (7:10) with other things. If you want to put a sword in his hand, you’re going to parent it either (7:15) to his right hand or his left hand. And then you arrange the sword until it’s in the right position (7:20) and then it will move with him as well.
And you can use this parenting thing with things like this. (7:28) This is an Ashelotl Queen from one of my Surfer Villager books. And (7:36) what I did here is I started with a pink Ashelotl body and then I took away the tail (7:44) and added a tail from a different colored Ashelotl.
And then I took away the head and (7:47) added a different colored head and different colored whatever these are. Gills, hairs, (7:54) I don’t know. And parent it every time.
So then you can move the creature as one. (8:02) And yet still move the tail by itself. (8:10) All right.
So that’s my tutorial about how to add arms onto creatures. (8:23) And look at how amazing it looks. (8:28) Now we can move the sun.
Just amazing. We’ll do a story mode clouds so we can kind of feel that (8:42) vibe. Look at that.
Amazing. And he says, (8:51) See ya. Wouldn’t want to be ya.
So I hope that tutorial was helpful to those of you who (9:01) didn’t know about the parenting function in Mineimator, which is probably the most helpful (9:07) thing for doing scenes and characters. If you have any questions about different (9:14) things you can do in Mineimator, please leave them in the comments. (9:17) I don’t know much about actual animating with Mineimator, but I do know quite a bit about (9:23) posing and doing scenes and things like that.
(9:28) So feel free to ask questions about that aspect of the program. (9:34) And there’s one more thing I meant to mention it earlier. So I hope this little section of (9:41) video doesn’t feel clunky since I had to add it on at the end, but you’re probably thinking, (9:48) well, that’s cool and all, but do I have to do that every single time I want to use (9:52) a desert villager with arms? And the answer, thankfully, is no.
(9:56) So what you want to do is select the entire item. You can see there’s a white outline around the (10:05) whole thing. Like if you just had the arm selected, this won’t work.
You want to make (10:10) sure everything is selected and then you go up to, actually go down here to this little (10:16) disk icon and then you hit save and it will save it as an object file. (10:25) So whenever you want to add it back in later, you would go up here where it says important (10:37) asset, object, keyframe, whatever. And we’ll do Winston and a baby slimy.
(10:52) And it imports it in. And for those of you who know, you know. (10:59) There he is.
He actually had him holding a baby slime before I imported him. Everything (11:07) works. So you can save an object with a sword.
So you never have to (11:16) reposition a sword. You can save it with armor on, etc, etc. (11:21) So that’s the key.
Make sure you save your creation as an object. (11:30) And that is the end of this video. Again, be sure to leave any questions (11:37) in the comments.
Thanks.