Only the head is a cube — every other papercraft part is three different rectangles
Six parts, 36 faces, 1,632 square skin-pixels of paper. The head's six faces are identical; the body's come in three sizes; the arms and legs in two. That decides how each net folds.
Unfolding a Minecraft character into printable nets means turning six boxes into 36 rectangles. The boxes are not the same shape, and the differences are what make some parts easy to assemble and others fiddly.
The six parts
| part | w × h × d | distinct face sizes |
|---|---|---|
| Head | 8 × 8 × 8 | 1 — all six faces 8 × 8 |
| Body | 8 × 12 × 4 | 3 — 8×12, 4×12, 8×4 |
| Right arm | 4 × 12 × 4 | 2 — 4×12, 4×4 |
| Left arm | 4 × 12 × 4 | 2 |
| Right leg | 4 × 12 × 4 | 2 |
| Left leg | 4 × 12 × 4 | 2 |
The head is the only cube. Its net is perfectly regular: six identical squares, any of which can be the front, and no way to glue a face to the wrong edge and have it still fit.
The body is the only part with three different face sizes, because it is the only one whose cross-section is not square — 8 wide by 4 deep. Front and back are 8 × 12, the sides are 4 × 12, and the top and bottom are 8 × 4. Three sizes means three ways to attach a flap wrongly, and the mistake only shows up once two other faces are already stuck down.
Arms and legs are the easy ones, despite looking like the body. Their cross-section is square, so front, back, left and right are all 4 × 12 — four interchangeable rectangles plus two small 4 × 4 caps.
How much paper that is
Surface area, in square skin-pixels:
| part | area |
|---|---|
| Head | 384 |
| Body | 352 |
| Each arm | 224 |
| Each leg | 224 |
| Total | 1,632 |
The head is 384 of 1,632 — just under a quarter of the whole print for a single part, which is the opposite of how it looks on screen. At the default scale of 8 pixels per skin-pixel, that is 104,448 printed pixels of character.
Glue flaps are sized max(6, scale × 1.5), so they stay usable at small scales instead of shrinking to a sliver you cannot fold.
Legacy skins mirror, and only two parts do
The left arm and left leg carry a legacyMirrorOf pointing at their right-hand counterparts. A pre-1.8 skin is 64 × 32 and has no bottom half, so there is no left arm or left leg to read — those two parts get mirrored copies of the right ones.
The head, body, right arm and right leg have no such fallback because they never needed one; they have always lived in the top half of the sheet. So an old skin gives you a papercraft model that is necessarily symmetrical, and there is no way to recover asymmetry the source file never had.
The UV table is the whole specification
Each part names all six faces by their coordinate in the skin: right, front, left, back, top, bottom. That layout is fixed by Mojang, so there is nothing to infer and nothing to configure — given a skin and those coordinates, the net is fully determined.
Which is worth knowing if a papercraft print comes out with a face in the wrong place: the problem is not the unfolder's geometry, it is which pixels are in that rectangle of your skin.