This plugin is well-maintained and widely used and has a proven track record in the community. As with all third-party plugins, use it at your own discretion.
Nerdy's Player Animator is a plugin that allows you to animate the player model with bedrock entity keyframe animations using blockbench
How to use
First, you will need to click here to download the official blockbench player model you will be animating. Now that you have the model, you will need to create animation for it in blockbench. If you do not know how to create and export blockbench model animations, watch a tutorial on how to do so.
Once you have your .json animations file, you will need to navigate to the resources section and find the new player animator tab. Here, you can import your files and preview the animations they contain.
Once you have imported your files, you can use the play animation procedure block, in which all your animations are listed.
You can also stop any ongoing animations using the stop animation procedure block. This will work on any other animations being played by mods using this plugin.
Important information
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Java plugins must be enabled for the procedure blocks and player animations resource tab to work
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This plugin requires the forge mixins plugin to be installed
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No external dependencies are included in your mod, this is all using code provided by the plugin
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The plugin should only be loaded if you plan on using player animations, as otherwise it will generate all of its player animation related code for no reason and bloat your mod
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When playing the animation, it will respect the loop type set in blockbench; a looping animation will loop and a hold on last frame animation will freeze on the last frame, so you will need to use the stop animation procedure block to end them
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You can find supported MoLang queries and math operations here
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If you experience issues with flickering when playing animations, then make the procedure block only run on either the server or the client so it doesn't trigger twice
Changelog
v2.4.3
-Reposition the animation preview page's rotation pivot to be in the center of the player
-Cleaned up animation preview page code
v2.4.2
-Fix the player becoming invisible in the inventory after a first person animation in 26.1.2
v2.4.1 & 2.2.5
-Fix crashes when a fake player entity/npc is spawned in 26.1.2/1.21.8
v2.4
-Allow crouching during animations now unless left or right leg are animated
v2.3.1
-Fixed animations making the player floating arms in 26.1.2
v2.3
-Ported to MCreator 2026.2 and Minecraft 26.1.2
v2.2.4
-Fixed sleeves always being disabled in first person animations for 1.21.1
-Attempted to fix issue where the mcreator animation preview stopped working after a while
v2.2.3
-Fixed first person arms showing in all perspectives when using shaders
v2.2.2
-Fixed player animations not progressing for players that are offscreen in multiplayer
v2.2.1
-Fixed sound keyframes not replaying in loop animations
-Fixed first person animations sometimes flashing the player head on the screen when ending
-Fixed small incompatibility with custom entity models plugin rendering in first person
v2.2
-Sounds played from sound keyframes in player animations will now follow the player's position as they play
v2.0.4 (2025.3) & v2.1.1 (2026.1)
-Fixed mixin conflict with the player animator API mod
v2.1
-Ported to MCreator 2026.1
v2.0.3
-Major improvements to first person animation camera clarity
-Fixed first person animations not playing while the chat was open
v2.0.2
-Implemented a better layer hiding system for first person animations to prevent all render layers from rendering
v2.0.1
-Fixed player arms and armor sleeves not being hidden in first person when using the custom entity models plugin to hide them
v2.0
-Added support for 35 new molang queries
-Added support for new math operations
v1.9.4
-Fixed the body bone's pivot not being accounted for, leading to incorrect X and Z rotations
v1.9.3
-Fixed some incorrect positioning of third person item animations
v1.9.2
-Fixed sound keyframes not playing sounds set to play at 0 seconds
v1.9.1
-Fixed arm sleeves always being drawn in first person animations even if they were disabled
-Fixed third person animations not progressing at all if in first person for the local player
v1.9
-Added support for item bones on the arms of the player model to animate the held items too
(Download updated model attached on this page)
v1.8
-Refactored the animation loader to prevent any possible animation loading issues on servers
-Greatly improved clarity of animations played in first person
-Fixed player model being partially invisible in GUIs during first person animations
v1.7.1
-Fixed crashes caused by the v1.7 armor visibility fix
v1.7
-Added support for sound keyframes in animations
-Fixed the armor layer being rendered in first person animations
v1.6
-Added a new procedure block in the advanced category to play animations from strings
(Placed in advanced since it will crash the game if the name is incorrect)
v1.5.3 (2025.3)
-Fixed player "body" bone calculations being slightly off
v1.2.3 (2025.2)
-Fixed player "body" bone calculations being slightly off
v1.5.2
-Fixed other players' bodies being ivisible in 1.21.8 when using first person animations
v1.5.1 (2025.3)
-Fixed body parts in 1.21.1 sometimes desyncing
v1.2.2 (2025.2)
-Fixed body parts in 1.21.1 sometimes desyncing
v1.5
-Reworked to player animations tab to include an animations viewer
v1.4.1 (2025.3)
-Fixed piglins crashing the game in 1.21.1
v1.2.1 (2025.2)
-Fixed piglins crashing the game in 1.21.1
v1.4
-Added the option to play player animations in both third person and first person
v1.3
-Ported to MCreator 2025.3
v1.2
-Added support for all bedrock keyframe types
-Added limited support for molang
-Fixed player arm swinging being stopped even if the animation doesn't affect it
v1.1.1
-Fixed animations crashing in multiplayer with multiple players online
v1.1
-Added the check if animation is playing procedure block
-Added chinese translations (thanks to cdc1234)
-Changed the animation loader so animations for each mod use namespaces, you will need to save your procedures that play animations again or regenerate the code of the workspace to apply this change
v1.0.1
-Increased plugin weight to prevent other plugins overwriting its template generation
v1.0
-Plugin release
Legacy player animator versions archive:
1.8.1 for 2024.1
1.9 for 2024.1 and 2024.2
2.1 for 2024.3 and 2024.4Comments
hello Nerdy and MCreator community, is there any way to make idle/walking animations with this plugin? As an example, if I add a laser pistol with custom animations for the player, and make walking/idle animations is there any way to play them? I think I could make the idle animation work with the "when item in hand tick" trigger but I can't find any way to apply the walking/running animations I want to make :( can anybody help?
> Task :compileJava
C:\Users\New\MCreatorWorkspaces\d\src\main\java\net\mcreator\d\procedures\DProcedure.java:63: error: package Procedure does not exist
DMod.PACKET_HANDLER.sendTo(new Procedure.DModAnimationMessage(Component.literal("walk_back"), entity.getId(), false), connection, NetworkDirection.PLAY_TO_CLIENT);
what is this? i just create procedure - On player tick update and play animation for event\target entity and play walk_back, i sent file in folder player_animation and import animation on player model from official blockbench model with name walk_back.json
hey, there is a visual glitch with Solas Shaders. When you go on f5, your first person hand and off hand still render. I think this is related to the "render animation in first person" feature. It doesn't affect the gameplay, but would be cool if you could fix it in the next version.
Does this plugin work for java mods? cuz im trying to use the 2025.3 version and it ain't workin, (it also says bedrock model in the title so maybe its a bedrock only thing... i dunno) so either im stupid or its a bedrock thingo. please help me, im lowkey crashing out!
Im also having the same issues. I tried changing mcreator versions and generators but it didnt work in forge 1.20.1, only in NeoForge 1.21.x