Building a Model

How to make your own mannequin model in Blockbench for ModelEngine. To add the finished model to the picker, see Mannequins.

Start from a copy of mannequin.bbmodel in the pack. Its pivot points already sit on the armor stand's joints. A pivot in the wrong place makes the model bend in the wrong place.

Bones

BoxStand writes the stand's pose onto these bones. The names can be changed under mannequin.bones.

Bone	What it does
head	Follows the head pose
body	Follows the body pose
left_arm, right_arm	Follow the arm poses. Shown only while Arms is on
left_leg, right_leg	Follow the leg poses
baseplate	Not posed. Shown only while Base Plate is on

• A model can leave bones out. A torso has no leg bones, and hides the leg slots with hide-slots.
• A bone with emissive in its name glows at full brightness, see model.emissive-bone.

Child bones

The bones above can sit anywhere in the bone tree, and any bone placed inside one moves with it. The bundled mannequin, with its extra bones marked:

• waist (extra)
  • head
    • neck (extra)
  • body
• left_arm, right_arm
• left_leg, right_leg
  • left_foot, right_foot (extra)
• baseplate

The pose only touches the named bones. Extra bones are free for animations, so hair, a scarf or a tail goes there.

Loop and override

Animation names are up to you. The mannequin file says which animation plays where, and pose.default-animation names the rest pose.

Animation	Loop mode	Override
The rest pose (idle)	Loop	Off
A preset pose	Loop	Off
A slot animation	Once	Off

• Loop for poses: an animation set to Play Once ends and the model falls back to the rest pose.
• Override off: override cancels the rest pose underneath. A slot animation only needs keyframes on the bones it moves, and the pose shows through on the rest.