Puppet: Armor Stand Animation Engine

Puppet is a vanilla Minecraft animation engine plugin that renders Blender skeletal animations with vanilla .json models controlled by Armor Stands.


Plugin Overview
Puppet adds animatable objects called actors to the world. The /actor command can be used to create and manipulate these objects. You can create actors, move them around, change their pose, and play/pause animations.

The plugin requires Blender for 3D modelling and animation and is co-developed with a Blender exporter. You make models + animations in Blender, export .json files, put them in a server plugins/puppet/data/ data folder, then the plugin will automatically create a resourcepack needed for players.

Other than that, the plugin is pretty minimalistic. It's purely the animation engine and basic commands for manipulating actors. It does not save/load any actors created in the game. It also does not allow any interaction with actors or between actors. It's mainly intended to be an animation backend for other plugins.


Commands

• /actor: Main command for manipulating objects (permissions: puppet.command.actor)
• /puppet: Engine commands (reload, start/stop, etc...) (permissions: puppet.command.puppet)

See wiki for detailed command list


Blender Exporter and Basic Usage
Blender Minecraft .json exporter: https://github.com/phonon/blender-minecraft-json

An example model is provided in this plugin's github repo.

Be sure to read the installation and export guides in the Blender addon readme. Custom models used with this plugin must follow all the same restrictions as vanilla .json models. The basic steps for creating, exporting, and adding custom models to the Puppet engine on a server:

1. Create model in Blender (follow all Minecraft .json restrictions).
2. Create an armature (skeleton) and assign all objects in the model to the bone they should be exported with.
3. Export using the exporter with Export bones and Export animations settings selected. This will export model into several chunks named model.bone0.json, model.bone1.json, ... alongside a model.data.json file containing bone structure and animations.
4. Put the Puppet plugin .jar into your Minecraft server plugins/ folder.
5. Put each custom model and textures into a separate directory in the plugins/puppet/data/ folder. E.g. if you have a model named monster, put all its monster.bone0.json, monster.bone1.json, ... and monster.data.json into plugins/puppet/data/monster/. Put all textures for the model in this folder as well.
6. When the plugin runs, it will automatically generate a resource pack needed for clients to view the custom models. This will be built into the folder plugins/puppet/resourcepack/puppet_resourcepack.zip.