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Cubes

Cubes are the building blocks of your custom models. They work just like standard Blockbench cubes, and are exported as item models.

Entity Creation

Cubes don’t create entities of their own. Each Cube is baked into the model of the Group it’s in, and that Group’s item_display entity renders it.

Supported Features

  • Tint Index

    A face’s Tint marks it for recoloring in-game. On Minecraft 1.21.4 and newer, choose what color each tint index uses in the Group’s Item Model Properties.

  • Light Emission

    Makes the Cube render at a fixed brightness, no matter how dark its surroundings are. Great for eyes, screens, and other glowing details.

  • Rescale

    Scales a rotated Cube’s faces by 1 / cos(angle), so it still fills the same width after rotating, like vanilla models.

Rotation Limitations

Cube rotations follow Minecraft’s item model rules, which depend on your Target Minecraft Version:

Minecraft VersionRotation rules
1.20.4 – 1.21.5One axis at a time, in 22.5° steps between -45° and 45°.
1.21.6 – 1.21.10One axis at a time, any angle.
1.21.11 and newerAny rotation, on any axes.

Animated Java enforces these rules for your target version. Cubes that break them are outlined in red, and exporting fails until they’re fixed.

Size Limitations

Minecraft limits how big an item model can be, but Animated Java works around it: Cubes can be any size.