We're back with another feature in our "10 Questions With" series, spotlighting the amazing creators who bring your favorite projects to life and discussing the stories, challenges and passions behind their creations!

Today, we're delighted to be joined by FreshLX, who was recently named our Creator of the Month for June! FreshLX is most known for their incredible project Fresh Animations, which takes entity animations in Minecraft to a whole new level.

In this interview, FreshLX discusses some of the inspiration and struggles behind creating Fresh Animations and gives some great advice for aspiring authors! Thank you so much for your time, FreshLX!

Let’s start from the beginning. Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you first got into Minecraft content creation?

My name is Alex. I'm 23, and I was born and raised in New Zealand. I was studying graphic/communication design with an animation elective at the time I started sharing Minecraft resource packs online.

Creating Minecraft content didn't start there, though. I've been interested in animations, modelling and rendering for years. I remember my friend in primary school sharing an image of his Minecraft skin someone made for him. I was amazed by it and curious about how I could do it myself. I have Blender project files of Minecraft characters dating back to 2014. From then on, I'd do general modelling and a tad of animation in my spare time and as much as I could justify in school work.

Eventually, I started making custom block models for resource packs, but I never felt like posting them online as they weren't particularly unique. Discovering the OptiFine mod and its extra resource pack features opened up a wider range of opportunities for resource packs, leading to the creation of Fresh CIT - my first real public Minecraft content.

What inspired you to create Fresh Animations, and what was your vision for it when you started?

It was always something in the back of my mind when playing Minecraft; that the animations were very basic. It certainly didn't hold up to other Minecraft content being made at the time, such as official cinematic trailers, fan animations, and even its spinoff game, Minecraft Dungeons. With things like shaders already existing to enhance the game's graphics, improved animations would fit right in. Basically, I’d been searching for something to improve the in-game animations, I just didn't know then that I could do it myself. 

When I started making Fresh Animations (FA), my goal was simply to give the creatures in Minecraft better animations, picking ideas from media like the trailers, cinematics, Minecraft Dungeons, and fan animations on YouTube and putting them in the game as best I could. Of course, when I started, it was a whole new form of animation to learn, being math expression-based rather than the keyframe animation I was familiar with, so it started small with only 7 mobs included with the intention of adding more in each consecutive update.

Fresh Animations has become a standout project in the Minecraft community. What do you think sets it apart?

I think there were many people who wanted the same thing I did; improvements to Minecraft's in-game animations. So I've been fortunate enough to fill a gap in the market where there is plenty of demand. That gap was largely empty when FA was made, with only a few mods stuck on older versions of the game and a limited number of reanimated mobs included. FA's style is also different from those legacy mods, being more reminiscent of Minecraft's cinematic trailers, which lots of people seem to appreciate.

Plus, FA is much more accessible since it's just a resource pack that relies on OptiFine features to work. So as long as there's an OptiFine version, you can generally use FA. OptiFine was already a very popular and commonly used mod at the time. While nowadays it's not as accessible as before, other new and popular mods, such as Entity Texture Features and Entity Model Features, have since been made to replicate it.

Looking back at the first version of Fresh Animations and where it is now, what are you most proud of in terms of how it has evolved?

Whether FA 1.0 actually improved Minecraft's animations is debatable, I think. More detailed, sure, but better? What I've found is that the more detailed the animations are, the more important it is that the animations are realistic. I don't mean that they should literally look real, but things move the way they do for a reason, and you can tell if something looks off. Minecraft's vanilla animations are very basic, but they don't look weird in the context of the game we're all used to. Early FA gave the animations more detail, but they looked more 'off' than the vanilla animations. Maybe I'm only making sense to myself here? 

I say all that to point out that the quality of Fresh Animations today is much much higher than it was four years ago. I've gotten comfortable with the medium and improved as an animator overall, which I'm really happy with. I'm still learning though, and I'm always looking for ways to improve older FA animations with each new version.

Were there any major creative or technical challenges you faced while working on the project? How did you overcome them?

The biggest challenge was getting the result I wanted. I've previously mentioned that the medium is math-based, which isn't a very efficacious way to animate compared to the usual keyframe method. It means getting the look you want for an animation is more challenging, but it has become easier for me with experience.

There are also tools I use to help with this, such as the Desmos graphing calculator for visualising curves. A Blockbench plugin called CEM Template Loader is also helpful for previewing the outcome quicker. Before that I had to wait 10 seconds after every change to view it in-game (I still do this if an animation depends on in-game factors).

A new pipeline I've come up with recently involves making a keyframe version first, then using the graph curves as a reference to recreate with math expressions. It's not for every animation because it has a lot of steps, but it's great for getting the outcome I want.

It's unreal to see my work show up in YouTube videos when I don't expect it - including channels I've been watching already.

What has been the most surprising or rewarding part of seeing the community engage with your work?

There's a plethora of other resource pack and mod creators who engage with FA in the form of compatibility patches. These are resource packs that make their own projects compatible with FA for the benefit of players who like both our works. The quantity of these packs, how popular they are in their own right, and how beneficial that has been for all creators involved has been quite a surprise.

It's unreal to see my work show up in YouTube videos when I don't expect it - including channels I've been watching already. Just people using the pack in their videos because they like it, which isn’t something I imagined happening when I started.

What is your creation/update process when you work on Fresh Animations?

New additions start in Blockbench, a 3D modelling, pixel art and animation software, and with a plugin called CEM (Custom Entity Model) Template Loader. I start with a mob template and tweak it to rig the model for animation.

To start animating, I open the model file in a code editor called Notepad++ and add an "animations" section to the file. If a mob is similar enough in behaviour and/or appearance of a previous addition, like sheep, cows and pigs, I copy-paste this section as a template because it's helpful to keep the same format across all mobs relatively similar, and when you want to use the same variables there's not much point in starting from scratch. Most mobs will have idle/bobbing, head directions, walking, running and swimming, so I'll at least copy the variables for those. Hostile mobs also get attack and aggressive animations for when they chase the player. From there, I either tweak the animations accordingly or start fresh.

Some examples of basic expressions are:
- “a*sin( age*b )” for idles that always play over time, where age acts as time.
- “a*sin( limb_swing*b )*limb_speed” for walking and running where limb_speed is the movement speed and limb_swing is the distance moved. 
- For swimming, I use a combination: “asin( ageb +limb_swing*c )”, which plays over time and speeds up while the entity moves. 
- The basic “sin( x )” expression graphs a simple wave. To make more complex curves I like to do “sin( x +sin( x*a )*b )”, for example (try it with Desmos if you’re interested!). 

Once the common animations are done, I consider the unique attributes of the specific mob. For example, the goat is similar to the normal farm animals, but it also rams other mobs and jumps very high, so it has extra animations for those behaviours. I also give mobs unique novelty idles to provide them with more personality and charm. 

When improving existing mobs, it often involves cleaning up and reformatting. They're either older or visually don't hold up to newer additions. When I want to make big changes, this likely means a complete redo rather than tweaks to what's already there.

As our Creator of the Month for June, we’d love to hear: what has your journey been like on CurseForge?

CurseForge has been a big part of the growth in popularity and monetary viability of my projects. I started using it fairly early on so that multiple pack versions could be available at once, and it quickly became the main platform for my projects. Since then, Fresh Animations has become one of the most popular resource packs in recent years, no doubt in part thanks to CurseForge and its own popularity and prominence as a platform for the Minecraft modding space.

I think just messing around and trying things out is the best way to learn. It’s also a great way to come up with new ideas for animations and makes the process fun.

You’ve clearly put in the time to grow your skills. What advice would you give to new creators hoping to follow a similar path?

When people ask me how they can learn it, I direct them to Ewan Howell's OptiFine CEM tutorials and the Official OptiFine documentation. YouTube videos are a great way to learn all kinds of things, and I found them helpful for nailing down the basics and putting the documentation into context.

Another way I found useful for learning CEM animation is looking at existing packs to see how they work. You shouldn't copy anything to claim as your own, of course, it’s just like taking a machine apart to see the mechanism inside; you'd pick it apart to see what each piece of code does.

To expand on that idea, I think just messing around and trying things out is the best way to learn. It’s also a great way to come up with new ideas for animations and makes the process fun.

Can you give us a glimpse into what you’re currently working on, or what players can look forward to in the future?

The future for me is foggy, but I do want to make more different animations. For the near future, though, my main focus right now is Fresh Animations 1.10. So far, the update includes the bat, snow golem, squid and glow squid, as well as a huge list of bug fixes and improvements to previous additions.

This has been in the early-access preview stages for almost a year now, but more recently, I've been making some changes to some older mobs, partly inspired by Spring to Life. In the update, the basic farm animals got some new textures and model details, so I've been giving them major overhauls in FA and some entirely new animations like jumping, falling, landing and turning.

Player animations are on the way as well, currently still in early access. It will likely be out for the public sometime this year.