How to edit animated Minecraft textures with GIMP

Minecraft is an extremely easy entry point into animation and video game art due to its low bar of entry, but this tutorial will be useful for mod makers and texture artists who work with Minecraft assets and want to use GIMP for their workflow.

This tutorial assumes:

1. you have basic knowledge of GIMP
2. you know how resource packs work
3. you know how to set up the directory structure and where to place the files

If not, there are plenty of other online resources that cover those topics in abundance. This tutorial will cover Minecraft’s animated texture format, and how to use GIMP to edit them using a custom GIMP plugin to automate some of the process.

For this tutorial, we will be working with GIMP 2.10.

Minecraft’s Animated Textures

Most textures in Minecraft are a simple 16x16 png image. For example, the blast furnace texture:

The front texture of a blast furnace

At its basis, the only thing needed to animate any item or block texture is the texture itself, and a .mcmeta file.

Animated textures are simply a 16xN sized image, where N is a multiple of 16. It is composed of all of the animation frames stacked on top of one another in a single image. You…