Multi-Textured Blocks

I know that this is a popular topic to learn so here it is!

Starting off, we need to review how the blocks are rendered in the game. Blocks are rendered using JSON files, or JavaScript Object Notation. When the model JSON is loaded it checks for various variants. These variants are used to determine how the block is then rendered onto the screen. (More information here). The only variant that we want to worry about today is the "textures" variant. This variant is responsible for reporting back to Minecraft which textures in what domain to render on what object. In this case, we want to render on our tutorial block custom textures that I will provide (or you can make your own if you want to). We are going to create grass and dirt blocks. First we are going to rename our tutorial block to dirt and create a second block and name it grass and create a second blockstates and model JSON files. We will call it "tut_grass" and "tut_dirt". Make sure you change the material to ground for the dirt and grass for, well, you know, grass. And also, change the harvest tool to "shovel" so that we can harvest it properly.

We need to make the blocks drop the proper drops. In the grass class, press CTRL+O and type in getItemDropped and press Enter. We need this method to return Item.getItemFromBlock(Blocks.tutDirt). This is going to make the block drop the dirt block instead of itself. If we add this exactly to the dirt class, but replace Blocks.tutDirt with this keyword, then we can ensure that the same thing happens for the dirt. Now we need to add this to the registry so that we can render it and test it. We need to go into the JSON files that we created earlier for the dirt and grass and rename everything, except the grass model file, leave everything there.

The grass model class is going to be different. You may have noticed the there is the variant "textures" and after that there is the child tag "all", which tell Minecraft to apply the following texture to all sides. What we want to do is tell Minecraft to apply certain textures to certain sides, and there are certain keywords to allow that to happen.

If we tell Minecraft to have the parent model be "cube" rather than "cube_all" then we can have a plethora of different faces for our textures. We can tell Minecraft to render a specific texture on a specific face. A face is defined as a side of a block that is facing a certain direction. There are currently, in vanilla,

• "north"
• "south"
• "east"
• "west"
• "up"
• "down"

We can specify a texture on any of these sides as long as we have the parent model of "cube" rather than the traditional "cube_all".

So now in our JSON file, if we specify the parent to be "cube" then change "all" to be various faces, we can achieve what we want easily.

We are telling it on the "up" face, we want to apply the "tut_grass_top" texture, and then the same texture for the "north", "south", "east", "west" faces because these are the sides of the cube. Then the "down" is the bottom of the cube.

We should also tell minecraft to render a particle when we walk or mine it by adding the "particle" variant in after "textures" which is going to give the texture for when we break the block and particles spawn.

Now if we put the following textures into our assets and run the game then we get the following result! Hopefully you do too! You can apply this concept to any block whatsoever.