Minecraft head render

A lit 3D cube of any player’s head, from any angle, as a PNG. Isometric by default, perspective on request, up to 1024 px.

yaw=-45 pitch=20

yaw=0 pitch=0

yaw=45 pitch=30

yaw=180 pitch=15

yaw=30 pitch=75

yaw=-30 pitch=-25

The URL

https://skinrender.dev/render/853c80ef3c3749fdaa49938b674adae6/head?size=128
https://skinrender.dev/render/jeb_/head?size=128&yaw=45&pitch=30

The head render is the whole 8×8×8 cube with the hat layer as a slightly larger cube around it, drawn by the same rasteriser as the body. The default camera turns the head 35° and looks down on it by 12°, which shows the front and one side with a sliver of the top: the framing most sites use because it reads as a face while still looking three-dimensional. The canvas is square and defaults to 256 px; size changes it, up to 1024.

How many pixels is a Minecraft head?

Eight on every side. A player’s head is an 8×8×8 pixel cube, and its six faces are 8×8 squares packed into the top-left 32×16 corner of the 64×64 skin file. The hat layer uses the same layout 32 pixels to the right, and the renderer draws it as a cube half a pixel bigger on every side, which is why hair and helmets stand off the head.

Right and left are the player’s own. The flat face avatar is just the front square with the hat front on top of it, so a render at a multiple of 8 px (size=64 is 8 screen pixels per skin pixel) keeps every texel the same size. To see the whole sheet, the skin render type returns it as a PNG.

Yaw, pitch and the camera

Two parameters do most of the work. yaw turns the head about its vertical axis: 0 faces the camera, positive values turn the head so its right side comes toward you, 180 shows the back. pitch tips it: positive looks down on the top of the head, negative looks up from below the chin. Both are in degrees, both wrap, both default to the values above. roll rotates the finished image, which is rarely wanted but exists for the odd tilted badge.

The third parameter is fov, the vertical field of view. It is 0 by default, which means orthographic: parallel edges stay parallel and the result looks like a Minecraft item icon or an isometric illustration. Values of 30 to 50 add natural perspective, where the near face looks bigger than the far one. Above 70 the effect is exaggerated and a large fov with a high pitch gives the fisheye “looking down at a tiny person” look.

https://skinrender.dev/render/069a79f444e94726a5befca90e38aaf5/head?yaw=45&pitch=30&fov=0
# fov=0 and size=256 are the defaults, so this is the same image:
https://skinrender.dev/render/069a79f444e94726a5befca90e38aaf5/head?yaw=45&pitch=30

True isometric projection has a pitch of about 35.26°; 30° is what most people expect from Minecraft-style art, and 45° yaw shows both visible sides at equal width. zoom scales the head on the canvas, and margin (a fraction of the canvas kept empty) controls how close to the edge it gets; crop=true trims the empty border away entirely so the image is exactly as big as the head.

Hat layer and shading

The hat overlay is drawn as a second, slightly larger cube, so hair and hats stand off the head as they do in game. hat=false removes it. shading controls how strongly the faces are lit differently (1 matches the inventory look, 0 is flat and useful if you apply your own lighting), and aa sets the supersampling factor: the default of 2 is a good balance, 4 is smoother for very large renders, 1 is fastest and gives hard pixel edges.

Server icons, player lists and cards

Three uses come up constantly. Player lists on a website or Discord bot: head?size=64 in a template string per UUID, with loading="lazy"; the images are cached for an hour on our side and by every browser, so a list of a hundred players costs almost nothing after the first view. Server icons and avatars for a Discord webhook: head?size=256&bg=1e1e2e gives a solid-background square that platforms which strip transparency will still show correctly. Cards and profile pages: a larger perspective head, head?size=512&fov=40&pitch=-5, sits well beside a name and stats.

const online = ["069a79f444e94726a5befca90e38aaf5", "853c80ef3c3749fdaa49938b674adae6"];
list.innerHTML = online.map((uuid) =>
  `<img src="https://skinrender.dev/render/${uuid}/head?size=64" width="64" height="64" alt="" loading="lazy">`
).join("");

For a Bukkit or Paper plugin that draws a head on an in-game map, request head?size=128, read it into a BufferedImage and hand it to MapPalette; the Java snippet shows the whole thing.

Unknown players

A head for a player who does not exist or has never set a skin is rendered as Steve or Alex (chosen the way the game does) with an X-Skin-Fallback header, so an <img> never breaks. Pass default=none when you would rather get a 404 and handle it yourself, or default=steve to always fall back to the same face. Everything else about caching, fallbacks and error codes is on the caching and limits page.