Thread:ASDFGirl/@comment-30510983-20160901045452/@comment-25118285-20160901204500

Well, now I am distraught and trying to rewrite a guide. So, it will probably suck. Fair warning.

First thing's first, click New Project in the upper left. A box will pop up that's not very important until the texturing stage, so just slap in a Project Name and get rolling. The most important button you'll need is the New Cube button in the bottom right. This button will create a new 1x1x1 cube for you to work with (obvs). Clicking on your new cube will show a bunch of values over on the left hand side. To change the cube's size, use Dimensions. To move it, use Positions. And to rotate it, use Rotation. Fairly straightforward. You'll hardly ever use Opacity, MC Scale, or Custom Scale, so just leave em alone.

All of that seems easy right? Well, here's where things get slightly hairy: hierarchies. Hierarchies connect all the parts together so that when you move/rotate the "parent" part, all of the "dependent" parts move with it. To create a hierarchy, go to the list of parts over on the right of the screen. Click on the part you want to be dependent and drag it to the parent part. When you release, it should become indented below the parent part. Here's an example of a typical hierarchy, using an old titanis model from my JurassiCraft days.

When you are making your hierarchy, you'll likely see the parts move. This is because of rotation points. Rotation points are the points on which the parts of a model rotate. Pretty straightforward. When making animal models, think of them as the joints of the animal. They are very very important for animating and simply manipulating your models.

When you place a new part, the rotation point is by default located at the top front left of the block. This is almost never the correct location for a rotation point on an animal model. To move where the rotation point is in relation to the part, change the Offset values. More often than not, the rotation point should be in the center of the part when looking at it from the front. To do this, make the X offset negative half of the width of the part. So, if the part is 6 blocks wide, the x offset should be -3. Here's another example, this time using a general theropod head shape.

When you put parts in a hierarchy on the model tree, the dependent parts will automatically have the same rotation point as the original part. So, if you have a "head" block with the rotation point at the top back middle and make the "top jaw" block dependent on it, the top jaw will automatically move so that its rotation point is at the same location as the head's (as long as the position values are all 0). To move this rotation point where you want, use the Position values. In this case, we'd want it on the front of the head, somewhere in the center of the face. (The offset would need to be changed so that the top jaw's rotation point would be at the back of the part, so it would connect with the face).

Okay, I think that's it for now. Half of this probably didn't make any sense, so I'm sorry. Feel free to ask questions, because I'll probably be able to answer those better than rambling on my own. Good luck