NovaSkin Export

Changelog

1.4.3

More fixes for the Mixamo FBX → rig retarget and the export (Animation tab).

• Retarget keeps the rig's placement. If you positioned a character somewhere in the scene and then copied an animation onto it, the character used to jump back to the world origin. It now stays where you placed it, and the placement control still moves the whole animated rig afterwards.
• Export works from Pose / Edit mode. Clicking Export (Draft, full, or the still Mesh export) while a rig was in Pose or Edit mode — for example right after posing or placing it — could fail with "context is incorrect". The export now switches to Object mode on its own before it starts.

Internal: the exported manifest.json now stamps a routing format field (still mesh / animated) for the web tool.

Changelog

1.4.2

A maintenance release that fixes the Mixamo FBX → rig retarget — the tool in the Animation tab that copies an external animation onto your character.

• Consistent size. The character no longer changes size depending on which FBX you retarget from. The pose solve was leaving a stray scale on the hips that cascaded to the whole rig; it's now removed.
• Shoulders stay attached. Arms are transferred as a clean rotation copy with the arm's "World" mode engaged, so the shoulders no longer detach from the body on large poses.
• Hands no longer twist. The source hand rotation is now carried over, so the hands follow the forearm instead of staying locked to the body (which showed up as a twist at the wrist).
• Root motion travels correctly. An animation's movement is now applied to the rig's master Root bone, so the whole rig moves together instead of leaving the Root control behind at the origin.

Still-image (Mesh) and animated exports are unchanged.

Changelog

Animated wallpapers

This release adds proper support for animated wallpapers. Alongside the existing still-image (Mesh) export, you can now export your scene's whole frame range as a looping, re-skinnable animation that plays in the browser — the character animates, the scenery moves, and anyone can drop in their own Minecraft skin without re-rendering.

Everything lives in a new Animation tab in the NovaSkin sidebar (press N in the viewport). It has two buttons:

• Export Draft — a fast preview of the first few seconds at half resolution and half frame rate, using a quick screen-space light (base skin layer only). Use it to check timing and framing before committing to a full render.
• Export Animation (full quality) — the entire frame range at full quality. For each frame it bakes a per-character UV light atlas, so the second skin layer (hat, jacket, sleeves, pants) is lit correctly per face instead of borrowing the base layer's light. This is slower (a Cycles bake per character per frame) but is what you ship.

What gets exported

• One composite.webm. The scenery, the character lighting, and a character-vs-scenery occlusion matte are stacked into bands inside a single video, so one decoder keeps them in perfect frame lockstep — no drift between the character and the background.
• The character animation as a compact mesh stream (roughly 1 MB for 15 seconds), plus both arm styles so the browser can switch between classic (Steve) and slim (Alex).
• The scene's exact view transform (AgX, Filmic, …) baked as a 3D LUT, so the re-lit characters match the look of your rendered scenery.

Optional layers (props)

Props marked as optional layers — a held sword, a pane of glass — are exported as toggleable meshes that depth-composite with the characters. Each carries its own baked texture (albedo and alpha, capturing material colour tweaks and transparency), and can be toggled on/off and re-skinned in the browser.

Also in the Animation tab

A Mixamo FBX → rig retarget, for bringing external animations onto the character.

Requires ffmpeg on your PATH for animated exports. Still-image (Mesh) exports are unaffected and need nothing extra.

Fixes & polish (1.4.1)

• Fixed a lighting artifact in the baked light atlas: a dark band that could appear along the last pixel row of a character's arm/body front (a second-layer face bleeding over the base). Those edges are now lit correctly.
• Fixed a one-frame desync between the character mesh and the video on autoplay.

Changelog

What's new in 1.3.0

Interactive Mesh export — now the default

Export each Minecraft character as a re-skinnable 3D mesh with a baked light atlas, instead of flat per-part images. The exported wallpaper can be:

• re-skinned live — drop in any skin and see it relit instantly;
• switched between classic and slim arms at runtime;
• toggled — show/hide individual scenery layers and per-part overlays (hat, jacket, sleeves, pants…).

Resolution-independent, with a per-character foreground pass and soft shadows.

Animated export (beta)

Export animated wallpapers — the scene as video (background + foreground + light) plus a compact screen-space mesh stream, with a companion web player. Opt-in from the add-on preferences.

Streamlined sidebar

The exporter now defaults to a clean Mesh-only workflow. Two advanced / experimental features live behind add-on preferences, both off by default:

• Legacy Texture UV export — the classic per-part UV / mask / light image export;
• Animated export (experimental).

Rendering quality

Anti-aliased pixel-art sampling, clean sprite edges (no dark fringe), correct depth ordering between characters and scenery, combined soft shadows, and water tinting for submerged characters.