How to Animate a Minecraft Build!

Hello my name is green and today i’m way out of my comfort zone here i’m going to be showing you how to animate a building and by this i mean using command blocks to make it appear like they are moving so if i press this button here you can

See this proof of concept how we can make an elevator go up and down using command blocks the idea behind it is very simple you build a series of frames and then you use command blocks to paste them in one after the other it really looks like it is moving and

It’s very very effective but you can do more than just an elevator you can do practically anything for another example here is a fire animation just made with stained glass and it’s just beautiful you can make anything you want you could make a man walking anything

As you can see all of the frames are laid out like this accompanied by a command block and this is essentially how it is done i will go into more detail now so here we have all the frames laid out on the floor they are of course empty

Right now and the first thing that we’re going to do is build the animation and this is probably the easy bit and the hard bit depending on what you want to do so for this example i’m going to make a very simple wobble monster and a wobble monster is simply a cobblestone

Pillar that flops side to side in an animation so essentially all we have to do is build each frame of the animation so in every square i’ve just edited the cobblestone pillar to move ever so slightly using slab and stairs every time we go along so that when played one

After the other it’s going to appear like it’s moving now it seems very simple and i’m doing a very simple animation and with the help of world edit you can copy paste it over make your edit and continue so on and so forth until you have a large set of

Frames like i have here and this is essentially it this is the entire animation now the cobblestone pillar is nothing without a face so i just go and add a sign for the face of the wobble monster but as you can see these are all

The frames and if you just look from one frame to the next you can tell how this is going to move and all we’re going to need to do now and this is probably the hardest part to explain is the command blocking so you just place the command

Block right next to each single frame and we need to make a very specific command which i’m going to break down into its core components there are four parts of the command block and do bear with me i will explain the command first and then put it into practice so you

Understand what i mean there are four parts the first bit is forward slash clone that bit’s easy then you have x y z x y z and another x y z and obviously those x y’s and z’s all represent a number more specifically the direction of the coordinate you need to go in

Okay so the first xyz represents the block that we want to select with the command block to highlight the area that we want to clone the second xyz is the second block that we want to clone so imagine a virtual space highlighted by two points that cuboid is the area we are highlighting

To clone finally the third xyz is quite simply the place where we want to paste that clone so that will remain the same number throughout each command block as will everything else in fact the way we’re setting out our command block is relative to the build meaning that every

Single command block will be the same and this actually saves quite a lot of time because you could either paste the same one in or use world edit just to simply stack the command block forward right now let’s put it into practice so the first thing we need to do is forward

Slash clone and just put that straight into the command block that’s probably the easiest part now we need to tell the command block which two points we need to select to highlight the area which we’re going to clone the first set of xyz is this first gold block that i’ve

Placed there the second set is going to be the second gold block and you can visualize that cuboid space where the wobble monster is and that is the area we’re going to highlight so we now need to tell the command block relative to the command block where the gold blocks are

So using world edit i’m just measuring along the first x coordinate and in the direction there positive x is where it is so i then do tandem eight which was the amount of blocks it was as was calculated by the world edit and you can

See that is how far it is to the gold block so the tandem is just that little squiggly line and now we need to do exactly the same thing for the y coordinate which is obviously above you so that is six finally we need to tell

It where it is on the zed coordinate so again i’m using world edit to calculate how far along that is which is nine blocks so it’s then space tandem nine so we’ve now told the command block to select that particular gold block as our first point we now need to tell it the

Second gold block where that is so in a similar way we are telling it that is just one block to the right of it and underneath so because there’s no positive x coordinate we just put a single tandem as there’s no place for it to go

And upwards instead of going up we are going down one block so we need to do tandem minus one that way we’re telling it to go negatively into the ground one block to go to the gold block there and then finally we need to tell it to go to

The positive z coordinate and you can see these coordinates by pressing f3 to bring that information up and we do tandem one we have now selected those two points as our coordinates it now understands relative to that command block where it’s going to go the final

Set as i said when i explain the command is where we’re going to paste it so i just want to paste it here where i’ve placed the command block and it’s going to paste it towards positive x positive y and positive zed so highlighting it here in this cuboid dimension here so

The block that i want to highlight is that diamond block which i’m just about to place in the corner of those things so just so you’re aware that is how it determines where it is going to be placed so i’m just going to press f3 and you

Can see it has a section which says block and i’m just going to write in the chat that diamond block which i was standing on i then rush over to the command block and that’s the last set of coordinates i need to put in the ones

From the chat which i just did now if i click done i can then add a button to it just to test if it works and click the button and it appears look there it is that is the cloned and placed area for animation that is the first one

Now comes the easier part which is just replicating it and you can replicate that area because the command block will take it as it is when it is activated so if i press it again it removes those gold blocks with all the changes that i have just made

So what happens next is quite simple we need to stack this one command block to every single one because the command is completely the same every time because as i said it’s all relative to the command block you can actually put in specific coordinates for all three parts

But that would be very very lengthy it’s probably better to understand the concept of making it relative to the command block so that you can just replicate it every time and as you can see i’ve been pressing the buttons and it’s been changing it so once we’ve got

This command block placed all we have to do is link it up with some redstone and send a pulse all the way through at the right tick and it will play the animation where i’ve told it to paste the clones so now all we have to do is

Link it up with redstone so quite simply you add redstone all the way along and a repeater at the end make sure that you do not place redstone over the top of your wobble monster area otherwise it’s going to clone the redstone as well i actually made this very same mistake

When i was doing this please bear in mind that this was my first time doing it and i know a lot of you command block geniuses out there that i’m sure are watching this are thinking green sucks at command blocks it’s true it’s completely true i’m going through the

Easiest way to do this but there are ways to save time for example you can reuse frames you can just have the command block be activated again for the elevator each frame is used twice there’s no need to actually copy paste it more than once because you can just time

It correctly with the command blocks once you’ve hooked it up and maybe cleaned up the animation a little bit it should look something like this and now it’s time to send a pulse through it because we are basically finished so if i just hook it up to a button you can

See in the background it is playing the animation however most people found and i have been advised that a button pulse is too long for the kind of animation we want so the way we deal with this is add a command block underneath and we’re going to be using the set block command

I’m just going to teach you straight up how to do this so you want to take again using that block on f3 write the coordinates down above this exact command block where we want to the pulse to begin then we put in those coordinates so from this example 16341029

That gives you the coordinates and then we just put stone so let’s test it out we press the button boom it just set it to stone very easy now we head on over to our animation stand and we’re going to be doing something very similar we type in the exact same command except

This time it’s set block the coordinates once more and a redstone block i think a lot of you will know what is going on some of you might not as soon as we activate this command block it’s going to spawn in a redstone block and instantly remove

It and change it to stone because it activates that other command block there you can see in practice and the animation moves a lot faster because of it and you can even see in the background how the redstone block is instantly changing to stone to send the

Signal and not only that you create a signal from a distance without having to hook it up to loads and loads of redstone so as you can see we’re kind of finished here that is the animation that is how you animate a building i know the wobble monster wasn’t particularly exciting but

It demonstrated the proof of concept to you and how you go about doing it so i really really hope i managed to explain myself correctly i struggled to understand some of the concepts when i was learning this myself and this is a good time to credit my friend sage who

Taught me how to do it so big thank you to him i’m sure he’ll be in the comments if you want to chat to him thank you thank you thank you sage that was very nice of you to teach me and i hope that some of you will make some animations

Maybe even tweet me a gif of your animations that you end up doing so that’s it from me thank you very very much for watching and if you’re listening to my voice right now that means you made it to the end of the video which i am always appreciative of

Thank you so much good bye man i should become a singer