Animated 2D items appear flat on bedrock

[ZzPowerTech]

Animated textures for Java require a PNG file that is separated into frames, and a png.mcmeta file that controls these frames to generate the texture animation.

These textures aren't fully rendered by Rainbow, even though the item becomes animated when held in your hand, they appear visually thin.

It would need to be corrected to make it similar to the other items.

[eclipseisoffline]

This issue happens only for animated, 2D items making use of the hardcoded minecraft:builtin/generated model in Java resourcepacks. This includes but is not limited to any models using minecraft:item/generated or minecraft:item/handheld as (parent) models.

The minecraft:builtin/generated model here refers to Minecraft's ItemModelGenerator model class. This class automatically generates a 3D model for the item, using its texture's pixels. This is what turns 2D textures into a 3D-looking item in Minecraft.

Bedrock does this too, of course - if you have any custom 2D item on bedrock, without an attachable, the game will automatically do something similar to make the item look 3D. However, to make these 2D items look animated, Rainbow requires the use of a render controller, which requires the use of an attachable, which (as far as I am aware), requires defining a geometry for the item.

Theoretically, Rainbow could do the same as Java, making a 3D model based on the 2D texture, and export it to a bedrock geometry model. I however have not implemented this yet - instead, Rainbow exports a simple, flat 2D model, which is what you're seeing here. If anyone reading this is aware of a fix - please let me know and I'll be sure to implement it! If there is no easy fix here, I will look into emulating the behaviour of the minecraft:builtin/generated model, and exporting it to bedrock geometry files.