This is a Ruby gem that allows you to easily retrieve a player's raw Minecraft skin from Amazon S3 (http://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftSkins/Notch.png) and restructure it into a variety of usable sizes and formats.

It relies on the simple, pure-ruby 'chunky_png' gem to parse and restructure the skins, rather than huge libraries like RMagick.

It uses nearest neighbor resizing to perfectly resize the avatars to the size you desire.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'minecraft-avatars'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install minecraft-avatars

Usage of minecraft-avatars is extremely simple and straightforward. As of right now, there are two types of avatars.

# Extract the 8x8 face and head accessory to a 64x64 image
image = MinecraftAvatars::Face.new(player_name, size = 64, accessories = true)

# Extract the standard character avatar (front of the head, arms, legs, and torso) to a 32x64 image
image = MinecraftAvatars::FlatCharacter.new(player_name, size = 64, accessories = true)

Keep in mind that avatars are not lazy-loaded and perform an HTTP request every time the class is intialized.

# Get the raw blob (this is what youll likely be using)
image.to_blob(constraints = {})

# Save the image to a file
image.save(file_path, constraints = {})

# Output the image to an I/O stream
image.write(io, constraints = {})

All returned avatars share a set of methods used for exporting the image data in a variety of ways. These methods are simply aliases to the internal ChunkyPNG::Canvas::PNGEncoding methods. Therefor, you can use the same parameters you can for ChunkyPNG.

The documentation can be found at http://rdoc.info/gems/chunky_png/ChunkyPNG/Canvas/PNGEncoding

Retrieve a 128x128 face avatar for Notch with no accessories and save it to /tmp/notch.png. Also catch exceptions incase Notch somehow doesn't exist.

begin
    image = MinecraftAvatars::Face.new "Notch", 128, false
    image.save '/tmp/notch.png'
rescue MinecraftAvatars::InvalidPlayerException => e
    # Notch doesn't exist? WHAT THE FU-
end