Show HN: A free Minecraft skin editor

hamza512b1 pts0 comments

Back in December of 2020 I posted a small Minecraft skin tester to r/Minecraft. It was rough, still under development, built on top of Three.js and hosted on my own domain at the time. I did not expect much from it. It got 625 upvotes, and a few kind people left suggestions: add layers, add animations, let people make their own skins.

I kept the list in my head and just kept going.

Why I rebuilt the whole thing

Here is the part I rarely say out loud: the skins were never really the point. I wanted to learn computer graphics.

So at some point I threw away the easy path and rebuilt the renderer from scratch, no Three.js this time, just raw WebGL calls. Someone on Reddit asked if I had reused code from Blockbench. I did not. Rebuilding the cube, the lighting, the camera and the painting by hand was slow, and honestly a little bit crazy. But every bug I ran into taught me something I could not have learned by importing a library.

That rebuild became MineSkin Pro.

What it is

It is a free tool for previewing and editing Minecraft skins in 3D. That is the whole promise, and I have tried hard to keep it small:

No ads. Not now, not later. I hate ads, so It was never an option.

Nothing is uploaded. Every skin you draw stays in your browser. I do not have your files, and I do not want them.

It works on your phone. Around 60% of the internet is on mobile, so it had better.

It is open source, under AGPL, at github.com/hamza512b/mineskin.

When I relaunched it in 2025, plenty of people told me it did not need to exist. "Blockbench is right there." "There are a thousand of these already." "Why would anyone pay $8 for this?" They were not wrong. So I dropped the paywall the same day and made it free forever. I would rather it be used than paid for.

The numbers surprised me

I do not check the analytics often, but when I did recently they stopped me for a second.

In the last three months alone, 70,079 people visited the site and looked at 187,413 pages. Both numbers roughly doubled, +105% in visitors and +117% in page views. In June, around 13,000 of them were active and 12,000 were completely new.

The part I like most is not the totals though, it is the map. In a single thirty-minute window, there was people from the United States, China, Peru, Vietnam and Argentina. And right now, as I write this, there are twelve people on the site. A quiet little hobby project, and there is almost always someone on it.

Thank you

I still read every comment. Someone recently called it "the most polished editor I have seen." Another said that after ten years away from the game, it was one of the best skin editors they had used. One person just wrote, "Forget paint, I'm using this now." Those mean more to me than the graph does.

It is still a side project, made in my free time, and it is still not finished. But if you make Minecraft skins, it is there, it is free, and it will stay that way.

You can try it at mineskin.pro.

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MineSkin Pro: the story of a free Minecraft skin editor | Hamza Khuswan

free minecraft people skin from still

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