How to create Wallpapers in Blender

saviski · July 9, 2026, 7:25am

How to create Nova Skin wallpapers with Blender

Build a scene in Blender, press one button, and get a re-skinnable wallpaper that anyone can customize right in the browser — no re-rendering. Make it a still interactive scene or a full animation. You render once; the exported wallpaper lets viewers:

drop in any Minecraft skin and see it relit instantly,
switch classic (Steve) / slim (Alex) arms,
toggle scenery layers on and off,
and, for animated wallpapers, play the whole animation — re-skinned live.

Everything lives in the sidebar. Press N in the 3D viewport to open it — the add-on’s NovaSkin and Animation tabs and the rig’s Thomas Rig Legacy tab all live there.

What you’ll need

Blender 4.2 or newer (5.2 recommended).
The NovaSkin Export add-on (this guide — install below).
The Thomas Rig Legacy rig — the Minecraft character rig the exporter is built around.
ffmpeg on your PATH — only for animated wallpapers. Still wallpapers need nothing extra.
A little Blender comfort: moving the camera, adding lights, placing blocks. You don’t need to be an expert.

Part 1 — Install the NovaSkin Export add-on

Open Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Get Extensions, search for “NovaSkin Export”, and install it
Enable it.

Alternatively, you can install it from GitHub:

Go to the releases page and download the latest novaskin_export-*.zip.
Open Blender and drag the .zip straight onto the Blender window.

(Or: Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Get Extensions ▸ ⌄ ▸ Install from Disk… and pick the zip.)

Make sure “NovaSkin Export” is enabled in the add-on list.

To update later, just install the newer zip the same way.

Part 2 — Install the Thomas Rig Legacy rig

The wallpaper characters come from the Thomas Rig Legacy rig. Install it once from the Blender Extensions platform:

Open Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Get Extensions, search for “Thomas Rig Legacy”, and install it
Enable it.

The NovaSkin panel will tell you (and link you) if it can’t find the rig, so you’ll know if this step is missing.

Part 3 — Build your scene

Start a new file and set the stage. Nothing here is NovaSkin-specific — it’s just a normal Blender scene:

Save your .blend somewhere with room to spare. The export writes a novaskin/ folder right next to your saved file, so an unsaved file can’t export.
Add a camera and frame your shot. Whatever the active camera sees is the wallpaper — set your resolution in Output Properties; 4K (3840×2160) is the preferred wallpaper size.
Add lighting — a Sun for direction plus some fill works well. The light and shadows you set here get baked into the wallpaper.
Build the environment — blocks, terrain, water, foliage, mobs… whatever your scene needs. This becomes the background and the foreground around your characters.

Tip: the characters are re-skinnable in the browser, but the environment is baked as-is (it’s a static image, or a video for animated wallpapers). Put the effort where it counts.

Part 4 — Add your player(s)

This is where the Minecraft characters go in.

Add the rig

In the 3D viewport, open the Add menu (Shift + A) → Thomas Rig Legacy.
A character rig appears. Move / rotate / pose it to taste. You can add several — every Thomas rig in the scene becomes a separate re-skinnable player in the wallpaper.

You don’t need to apply a skin in Blender. The wallpaper tool re-skins each character in the browser, so whatever skin the rig has is ignored on export — a plain default rig is fine. (Both classic and slim arms are exported, so viewers can switch either way.)

The face is handled for you

The Thomas rig has an animatable 3D face (eyes, eyebrows, mouth) meant for animation. Those 3D features can’t re-texture — a viewer’s flat skin face has nowhere to wrap onto a sculpted 3D face. So the exporter automatically ignores the facial expressions and uses the flat Minecraft skin head instead. You don’t have to touch the rig’s face settings.

Part 5 — (Optional) Mark toggleable scenery layers

Want a mob, a tree, or a prop that viewers can turn on and off in the browser? Mark it as an optional layer:

Select the object (or a whole rig / collection), open the NovaSkin sidebar tab.
Under Layers, hit “Mark as Optional Layer.”

A selected mesh marks just itself; a selected rig marks the whole rig; with nothing selected it marks the active collection.

Marked layers show up in the panel with an ✕ to remove them.

Each optional layer is exported separately (correctly occluded, with its own shadow) so the web tool can toggle it. Player rigs can’t be marked — they’re always players.

Part 6 — (Optional) Animate your scene

Want the wallpaper to move? Anything you animate in Blender’s timeline — the characters, the camera, the scenery — becomes part of the animated wallpaper. Skip this part entirely for a still wallpaper.

Set your frame range (Output Properties ▸ Frame Start / End, or the timeline) — that range is exactly what gets exported.

You can animate however you like. The quickest way to get a character moving is to retarget a ready-made Mixamo animation onto the rig:

Grab an animation from Mixamo and export it as an FBX.
In Blender, import the FBX (File ▸ Import ▸ FBX). It comes in as its own skeleton.
Place your Thomas rig where you want it in the scene first.
Open the Animation tab in the NovaSkin sidebar, and under the retarget section pick the imported FBX as the source, then hit “Copy FBX Animation to Rig.”
The animation is baked onto your Thomas rig — right where you placed it. You can then hide/delete the original Mixamo FBX.

The retarget copies the motion, not the character — your rig stays re-skinnable, and both arm variants are still exported.

Part 7 — Export

Everything up to here is the same whether your wallpaper is still or animated. The difference is which button you press.

A) Still (interactive) wallpaper

Open the NovaSkin tab in the 3D viewport sidebar (N).
Check the Rig section — it lists the players it detected. If it says no rig was found, revisit Part 2/4.
(Optional) In Output, choose where the novaskin/ folder goes — the default is right next to your .blend. Set render samples under Quality if you want a cleaner bake.
Hit Render.

A progress bar runs while it works (background, character meshes, light, shadows, scenery). You can cancel any time with the Cancel button or Esc — the scene is always restored exactly as it was. When it finishes, use “Open Output Folder” to find your novaskin/ folder.

B) Animated wallpaper

Switch to the Animation tab instead. It has two buttons:

Export Draft — a fast preview of the first few seconds at half resolution and half frame rate, with a quick screen-space light (base skin layer only). Use it to check timing and framing before committing.
Export Animation (full quality) — the whole frame range at full quality. For each frame it bakes a per-character light atlas, so the second skin layer (hat / jacket / sleeves / pants) is lit correctly. This is slower (a Cycles bake per character per frame) but it’s what you ship.

A few things worth knowing:

ffmpeg is required for animated exports (see What you’ll need). Still exports don’t need it.
The whole animation ships compactly: the scenery, the character lighting and a character-vs-scenery matte are packed into one composite.webm, plus a small animated mesh stream (~1 MB for 15 s) and your scene’s exact look — so it stays in perfect sync and re-skins live.
Optional layers (Part 5) become toggleable meshes that depth-composite with the characters — a held sword, a pane of glass — each with its own baked texture (transparency included), swappable in the browser.
The Bands checkboxes let you drop the background / light / occlusion band when your scene doesn’t need one.

That’s your wallpaper — a small folder of files plus a manifest.json describing how they fit together.

Part 8 — Test it in the browser

Click “Open Wallpaper Tool” in the panel, or go to minecraft.novaskin.me/wallpapers/tools/blender.
Load your export folder — select the novaskin/ folder you just created (the one containing manifest.json).
Your scene appears (and plays, if it’s animated). Now try it:

Drop in different skins — per player — and watch them relight to match your scene.
Switch classic / slim arms.
Toggle your optional layers and the character’s 2nd layer (hat / jacket / sleeves).
For animated wallpapers, play / pause / scrub the timeline and save the result.

If it looks right here, it’ll look right as a wallpaper.

Troubleshooting & tips

“No rig found.” The character must be a Thomas Rig Legacy rig, and the rig add-on must be installed and enabled. The panel links you to the rig if it’s missing.
Export won’t start. Save your .blend first — the output folder is written next to it — and make sure the scene has an active camera.
Animated export fails / no video. Make sure ffmpeg is installed and on your PATH; animated exports need it (still exports don’t).
The environment doesn’t change when I re-skin. That’s expected — only the characters are re-skinnable; the scenery is baked. Use optional layers for anything you want toggleable.
Cleaner result: raise the render samples in the panel’s Quality section before the final export. For animated, run Export Draft first to check timing before the slower full-quality bake.

This is the one-click successor to the old by-hand workflows — the Cinema 4D and Mine-imator template guides.

Built something? Post it in the thread — we’d love to see it.