So you’ve seen all the cool animated minecraft textures given motion sickness, but you’re probably wondering how to make animated textures in minecraft. Wonder no longer!
For starters, you’re going to need a graphics editing program that can handle transparency and layers, like Photoshop or GIMP.
Once you have the basic graphics editing tools, making animated minecraft textures is actually really easy. You start by selecting the minecraft texture you want to animate from the textures folder of the .jar file. Let’s take brick, for example.
(This image is zoomed into 1000% just so you can get a better view. It will probably help you to work with a significant zoom whilst you’re working on your own animated textures too.)
How To Animate Minecraft Textures
The minecraft animation system works just like a movie reel. You can ‘animate’ minecraft textures simply by adding more ‘frames’ to the item.png. The number of frames you add (and by frame, I mean vertically duplicated item image) will vary the speed of the animation. More frames means longer, smoother animation. Fewer frames means faster, more jerky animations.
minecraft texture ready for animation with blank frames
This animation will have eight frames, but you can add more or less depending on what you want your animation to look like/do. Now begin animating by making subtle changes on each ‘frame’, as shown below.
the basis for the sliding walls minecraft animation
This shows you the base animation for the ‘sliding walls’ animation that has become so popular in recent videos. You’ll need to ‘fill in’ the blank spots with the remainder of the texture, like so:
finished moving wall brick minecraft texture
Now save this image and put it into the texture folder in your minecraft .jar where you found the original. Voila! Instant animated minecraft wall. (If you like, you can download the image above and upload it into your own minecraft .jar and see how it instantly becomes animated. Simply re-name it to ‘brick.png’ to get it to work.)
This method will work with all minecraft textures, all you have to do is create several different versions of the same .png file and present them in vertical order as shown above. The game will do the rest of the work for you. Keep in mind too, if you animate a block like wood or brick or anything like that, half slabs will automatically animate the same way.
Now go forth and make your own custom minecraft animations!