[1.8.8]Rotating the Player's Arm?

1. Cancel the rendering event of the player on the Pre stage

2. Launch your own renderer DoRender. Make sure it's actually called via debugger

3. Do whatever logic you need to in the renderer.

 

You can't replace the player's renderer/model, short of doing the above or using the popular API designed to replace player renderers.

I'm toying with this too right now, and noticed this thread is actually relatively fresh so thought I'd reply.

Worth noting I'm in 1.7.10, but Zethariel's method is exactly what you want. Using nothing but information from this page, I've gotten the original player entity hidden and a pritnln of test when my own render calls doRender.

TL;DR this code produces this result (note the lack of player model, that's in 3rd person):

    @SubscribeEvent
    public void renderPlayer(RenderPlayerEvent.Pre event) {
    	if (event.entityPlayer.getHeldItem() != null && event.entityPlayer.getHeldItem().getItem() instanceof YOUR_MOD_CLASS) {
    		event.setCanceled(true); //This hides the player
    		RenderPlayerCustom renderPlayer = new RenderPlayerCustom(); //Initialize your render class
    		renderPlayer.doRender((AbstractClientPlayer) event.entityPlayer, event.entityPlayer.posX, event.entityPlayer.posY, event.entityPlayer.posZ, 1.0F, event.partialRenderTick);
                //you can get the player, their coordinates and the partial ticktime from the event. That 1.0F, oddly, never gets used in the end, just passed around a bit. Unless I missed something.
    	}
    }

//in a custom class extending RenderPlayer
    @Override
    public void doRender(AbstractClientPlayer p_76986_1_, double p_76986_2_, double p_76986_4_, double p_76986_6_, float p_76986_8_, float p_76986_9_) {
    	System.out.println("Test!");
    }

Then you just need to do your actual rendering code, which is whatever you want.

Everything posted here should work - anything beyond this will be different between 1.7 and 1.8 because of how rendering changed. Shame as I'm effectively doing the same thing (although I'm adding elbows too) and I'd share my code otherwise. Ah well, good luck!

EDIT:

One other thing of note, if you copy the doRender method from RenderPlayer as a basis to work from, remember it does things like checking if the render event has been cancelled. You'll need to do some edits before it'll work