Minecraft Skin Viewer
Enter a Minecraft Java Edition username and their skin lands on the player model, which you can turn to any angle. Below it the same file lies flat, front and back, and the download button gives you the untouched PNG.
About the Skin Viewer
The viewer resolves the username through the public Mojang profile service and loads the skin from textures.minecraft.net, the same place the game gets it from; only a profile without a skin address falls back to Crafatar. It reads Java Edition accounts only, because that profile service does not hold Bedrock gamertags.
The model is the real one: head 8x8x8, body 8x12x4, arms and legs 4x12x4, with the second layer a quarter of a pixel outside the body, arms and legs and half a pixel outside the head, the way Minecraft draws it. Every face is a straight cut out of the skin file, scaled without smoothing, so what you turn around is the texture itself rather than a picture of it.
Arm width comes from the account: Mojang's profile says whether the skin was uploaded for the slim model, and the viewer then draws three pixel wide arms. A file that is 64x32 instead of 64x64 is from before Minecraft 1.8: it stores one arm and one leg, and the viewer mirrors them to the other side, exactly as the game does.
Below the model the same skin is laid out flat, front and back, including the hat, jacket, sleeve and trouser overlays. The download button gives you the untouched PNG from the profile.
How a Minecraft skin file is laid out
A skin is a 64 by 64 pixel PNG, or 64 by 32 for a file made before Minecraft 1.8. Every box of the player model is unfolded into it the same way: its top and bottom side by side, and under them the four sides in a row.
- Top band
- The head, an 8 by 8 by 8 box, with the hat layer in the same shape right next to it.
- Second band
- The right leg, the body and the right arm, from left to right.
- Third band
- The trouser, jacket and sleeve layers of those three parts, each one band below its base.
- Bottom band
- The left leg and the left arm, each with its second layer beside it. A 64 by 32 file ends before this band, so the game copies the right arm and leg to the left side, and only the head has a second layer.
- Arm width
- 4 pixels on the classic model and 3 on the slim model, which ignores the last column of each arm in the file. The model is stored with the account when the skin is uploaded, not in the PNG.
- Transparency
- Java Edition draws every pixel of the base layer opaque, whatever the file says. Only the second layer can be see-through, and it has shown semitransparent pixels since 1.9.
What happens when you look up a name
The name goes to Mojang's profile service, which answers with the account's UUID and the name as its owner writes it. A second request to Mojang's session server returns the skin address, the arm model and, if the account has one, the cape. Your browser then loads the PNG straight from textures.minecraft.net.
A name that was found is kept for six hours, so a skin changed within that time can still show the previous file here. A name that does not exist is checked again after ten minutes, and each visitor can look up 40 names a minute. The box takes up to 16 letters, digits and underscores, the characters a Java Edition name can use.
To open the viewer with a name already filled in, add ?username= and the name to the address. The compare page does exactly that when you pick View full details.