Lumina's Custom: 3D Models

Lumina's Custom is a Minecraft rendering mod that loads real external 3D assets into the game — with their rigs, bones, materials, morphs, and animation systems intact. The point is to step outside the cube workflow and use models that come straight from standard 3D pipelines, without sacrificing too much performance in the process.

Everything runs through a preset system. A preset isn't just a model file — it's the full package: the 3D asset itself, its render config, its materials, the scale/position/rotation tweaks, optional physics (mmd only), animation files, and the animation states tied to gameplay logic.

So a preset really defines how a model exists inside Minecraft, not just what it looks like. If animations are part of it, the preset also maps which clip plays in which state. A player preset assigns walk, sprint, jump, idle, swim, attack animations (and much more to come) based on actual player state. A block preset can swap animations depending on redstone level. An entity preset can switch clips based on movement or combat behavior. It keeps things modular and reusable.

Modern 3D format support

The mod handles FBX and GLB natively, including their built-in animation systems. Both formats give solid runtime performance and play nicely with modern tools, so they're the go-to choice when FPS matters as much as visuals.

MMD models are also fully supported through PMX and PMD, with animation playback driven by VMD files. That covers complex skeletal rigs, advanced material setups, morph systems, high bone counts, accessories, toon textures, and authentic VMD playback — basically everything you'd need to drop a full MMD character into a scene without losing fidelity.

There's also partial retargeting support for animations, so a clip authored on one rig can be reused on another without redoing the whole thing from scratch. It's not perfect across every rig combo, but it covers some of the common cases.

MMD physics, with a Bullet backend

MMD models are usually heavier than FBX or GLB because of their bone counts and physics setups, so the mod ships some settings to allow the player to select between custom gl rendering (which doesn't support shaders) or shader-compat rendering (which comes with a higher performance impact but support iris shaders). It also comes with a Bullet Physics-based cloth simulation to handle dresses, long hair, accessories and other soft-body details properly.

For heavier scenes, those simulations can be baked and replayed instead of solved live every frame. You keep the look without paying the runtime cost — which is the only real way to make complex characters viable in larger scenes.

Third-person player replacement

One of the bigger features: the default Minecraft player model can be fully replaced in third-person by a rigged, animated 3D character. Not a skin swap — an actual rigged model driven by an FBX, GLB, or PMX/PMD+VMD preset.

Gameplay states are wired directly to animation playback: walking, sprinting, jumping, falling, attacking, sneaking, swimming, riding, idle (and much more to come), plus the transitions between them. The preset decides which clip belongs to which state.

The animation system goes a bit further than one-clip-per-state, though. A single gameplay state can hold multiple clips chained together — for example, a jumping state can play a jump start clip, transition into a jump loop while the player is airborne, and then resolve into a jump end on landing. Transitions between states are also blended, and the blend behavior is configurable per states, so you can tune how snappy or smooth the switches feel without touching code.

The result is an actual animated character instead of the stock blocky figure — one that reacts properly to what the player is doing, not just snapping between poses.

Hand item attachment on player presets

Custom player presets fully support rendering the items the player is holding. You specify which bone the left hand and right hand attach to, and the items follow those bones through every animation.

The attachment is configurable on multiple levels:

• a global scale and rotation offset for all held items
• per-item-type overrides (for example, all swords)
• per-item overrides when a specific item needs to sit just right

So you can set a sane default once and only tweak the cases that actually need it.

For MMD characters, this gets easier than it sounds. Bone names in PMX/PMD files are almost always in Japanese, which would normally make the hand-bone setup a guessing game. The mod auto-detects the left and right hand bones from the standard MMD naming conventions, so the held-item config works out of the box on most MMD rigs without you having to dig through bone trees.

Block replacement

Blocks work the same way. Vanilla and custom blocks alike can render as completely different 3D models through presets, while the underlying gameplay logic stays untouched.

A dirt block can render as a wooden barrel. A furnace can become a mechanical generator. A stone block can show up as industrial machinery. Decorative blocks turn into statues, furniture, props — whatever the preset defines. Each block preset stores its model and render setup, which makes large visual overhauls easy.

As of now, blocks doesn't support animations at all. It will probably in the future but actually costs too much performance hence why.

3D display block with redstone states

For more direct control, there's a dedicated 3D display block. Drop any preset into the world with it, and you get redstone-driven animation control across the full 1–15 signal range.

Different signal strengths can trigger different animations, poses, mechanical states or visual behaviors. Signal 1 might be idle, signal 5 an opening sequence, signal 10 a working state, signal 15 a full activation. It's all defined inside the preset itself.

It's built for dynamic builds, not just static decoration.

3D items and entity support

The same rendering system carries over to items and entities. Items can use proper 3D models — weapons, tools, artifacts, custom gear, all of it.

Item presets come in two flavors depending on how broadly you want the replacement to apply:

• World replacement swaps the item everywhere, all the time — every time the selected item appears in the world, it renders as your custom model, no exceptions.
• Player replacement is scoped: the item only gets replaced when a specific player preset is active. That's useful when a custom character is meant to use unique gear that shouldn't show up on everyone else, or when different presets need different versions of the same base item.

Mobs, creatures, NPCs, minecarts, boats, and any technical moving entity can be fully replaced through their own presets, each with its own animations and behavior-linked states. So animated replacements aren't limited to one part of the game — they apply across the board.

Bear in mind that while not everything has been described here as it would be very very long, there's still a lot of limitations due to actual performance degradation. You may kindly ask for a feature but it's not a guarantee it will be available.

And as of now, no other minecraft versions will be supported as it's very hard to maintain compatbility.