I have an item with over 20 different subtypes, and counting. Each of them has a different texture (it's not as bad as it sounds - bear with me). I could pretty easily draw the texture for each of them and add them to the resources folder, but I intend on eventually having several hundreds of them, and I'm no good with drawing programs. Sure, I can make a reasonable texture, but not for hundreds of them.

 

Now, my item is a test tube, and the subtypes are its contents. So I could theoretically have one texture for an empty tube, and just add the contents' colors at runtime. I know how to do this, but I don't know how I would assign them to the items. Can I do this, and how?

If all that changes is the colour of the contents, use a model that extends

builtin/generated

(e.g.

item/generated

or

item/handheld

) with the tube texture as one layer and the white contents texture as another.

 

To colour the contents at runtime, you need to create an implementation of

IItemColor

and register it for your

Item

by calling

ItemColors#registerItemColorHandler

on

Minecraft#getItemColors

in init.

 

IItemColor#getColorFromItemstack

gives you the

ItemStack

and the tint index, which tells you the part of the model that's being coloured. For models that extend

builtin/generated

, the tint index is the layer index (e.g.

"layer0"

is tint index 0). For the contents layer, return the colour in

0xRRGGBB

format (you may want to store the colour of each contents type); for the tube layer, return -1 (white).

 

If the contents actually have separate textures, you'll need to generate the textures and model at runtime. See

ModelDynBucket

for an example of this.

Hi

 

This example project has something very similar to what you've described

https://github.com/TheGreyGhost/MinecraftByExample

See mbe11

 

It's also possible to dynamically create textures, give them a ResourceLocation, and assign them to your item (I last tested that in 1.8 but I think it's still the same). 

Vanilla examples are with DynamicTexture and in particular in MapItemRenderer for generating a texture, which you can then stitch into the texture sheet using TextureStitchEvent.  mbe50 has an example of stitching, used for Particles.

 

-TGG

Thank Choonster, this did the job. Also, thanks GreyGhost for plugging the MBE entry - I didn't need it here, but I'm sure it will help a lot of other people.