Puppet: Minecraft Armor Stand Animation Engine

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

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.

This plugin is 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.

See docs/ folder or wiki for Spigot plugin usage.

Below is an overview of the system integrated with the Blender exporter:

Commands

See wiki for details

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

Blender Exporter and Usage

Blender Minecraft .json exporter: https://github.com/phonon/blender-minecraft-json

An example model with bones/animations is included in example/.

Be sure to read the installation and export guides in the addon readme. Custom models used with this plugin 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 is as follows:

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, but 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.

See docs/usage.md or the wiki for more details.

Development Requirements

1. Kotlin v1.3 - plugin language
2. Gradle v6.0 - build system
3. Python (optional) - for generating some documentation files

Build

Windows:

Development snapshots:
./gradlew.bat build

Release build:
./gradlew.bat release

The built .jar will be located in build\libs as either puppet-0.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar (dev) or puppet-0.0.0.jar (release). The smaller sized files beginning with phonon-puppet-... are before shading in gson and kotlin runtime dependencies. Use these if you want to separately load dependencies (see dependencies in build.gradle.kts).