Make animated textures

Make one step by step

1. Open the Texture Pack Maker and make a pack, or open one you have.
2. Open a block or item texture and choose Make animated in its menu (⋮). It gets two frames, and a strip of frames appears under the canvas.
3. Paint each frame. + adds a copy of the selected frame; the ⋯ menu duplicates, copies, pastes, moves and deletes frames. Turn on the onion skin to see the frame before faintly while you paint.
4. Press the clock for Timing: how many ticks each frame shows (20 ticks are 1 second), times for single frames and Blend frames. Press play to watch it at game speed.
5. Press Export. Java packs get the strip with its .png.mcmeta, Bedrock packs a flipbook_textures.json entry.

Frames, onion skin and the strip

• Drag a frame to a new place with the mouse. On a phone or tablet use Move earlier and Move later in the ⋯ menu.
• After clicking a frame: Alt + arrow keys move it, Delete deletes it, and Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V copy it and paste it as a new frame, into any animation of the pack. The comma and full stop keys step through the frames while you paint.
• The onion skin shows the frame before faintly over the one you paint, so movement lines up. The ⋯ menu shows the next frame too.
• Deleting frames down to one, or Stop animating, makes the texture still again. Both can be undone.

Timing in ticks

Minecraft counts time in ticks: 20 ticks make 1 second, so one tick is 0.05 seconds. Every frame shows for a whole number of ticks:

• Each frame shows for sets the speed of every frame. A new animation starts at 4 ticks.
• Frame times give single frames a time of their own, for a pause or a quick flash.
• Blend frames fades each frame into the next tick by tick, like flowing water. It looks best with slow frames.
• Play order plays frames in any order and as often as you like: 1, 2, 3, 2 bounces back, 1-8 plays a run, and 3:40 holds frame 3 for 40 ticks.

Java Edition: the .png.mcmeta file

Java reads an animation from a file named like the texture plus .mcmeta, next to it: stone.png gets stone.png.mcmeta. Frames run top to bottom, frametime is the speed in ticks (1 when it is left out) and frames lists the play order, with a time for frames shown longer:

{
  "animation": {
    "interpolate": true,
    "frametime": 4,
    "frames": [
      0,
      1,
      {
        "index": 2,
        "time": 10
      },
      1
    ]
  }
}

Frames that aren’t squares need their size, from 1.13 on. The game then reads them in rows, left to right:

{
  "animation": {
    "width": 32,
    "height": 16,
    "frametime": 2
  }
}

The editor writes what the oldest version of your pack reads and warns you on export when a version in its range can’t play part of it. Java animates the textures it gathers on a texture atlas: blocks and items in every version, particles, paintings and effect icons from 1.14, chests, beds, signs, banners, shields and shulker boxes from 1.15, and the GUI sprites of 1.20.2 and newer. Mob skins, armour, fonts, colour maps and the pack icon are drawn on their own and stay still, so the editor says so instead of animating them.

Bedrock Edition: flipbook textures

Bedrock lists its animations in textures/flipbook_textures.json. Each entry names the texture and the block tile from terrain_texture.json that shows it:

[
  {
    "flipbook_texture": "textures/blocks/glowstone",
    "atlas_tile": "glowstone",
    "ticks_per_frame": 4,
    "frames": [0, 1, 1],
    "blend_frames": false
  }
]

Frames are squares as wide as the image, top to bottom. The editor writes the game’s own entries along with yours, so water, lava, fire and the other animated blocks keep moving.

Import a GIF, save as GIF

• Import GIF or frames… in the texture’s menu or the ⋯ menu takes an animated GIF, a sprite sheet (frames of the texture’s size side by side, or a strip of squares) or several pictures, in the order of their names. You can also drop a GIF on the canvas.
• Every frame is resized to the texture’s size without smoothing, so pixel art stays sharp.
• GIF times are in hundredths of a second: 5 hundredths make a tick, so the GIF’s timing turns into ticks, rounded. You can keep the current speed instead.
• Save as GIF… saves the animation to share, up to 16 times bigger. Blended frames are saved tick by tick, as the game shows them. GIFs have no half-transparent pixels: those become solid or see-through.

Open a pack with animations

Open a Java .zip or a Bedrock .mcpack and its animations play in the editor, ready to change: frames, speed, frame times and blending come from its .png.mcmeta files or its flipbook list. Animations are saved with the project, so project files and backups keep them too.

Questions