updating your skin to 1.8

so It was a massive pain for me and I'll make it easy for you.

first download this image

this chart is very helpful

I wanted to add an orange stripe down the right side of my body in addition to updating my skin to 1.8 so just ignore the stripe for now

(shot in 1.7 so it goes down both)

if you downgrade to 1.7 after you update your skin any edits to the left side of your body will be deleted and the right side textures will be mirrored until you update to 1.8 again:

when done correctly the stripe (and all other limb specific edits) renders properly


I strongly suggest building your skin from this template: http://www.planetminecraft.com/skin/minecraft-18-skin-template/ and looking at the other one I provided above because many images must be inverted for it to align properly

this is how my skin updated to 1.8 using the template:

theres a small notch taken out of the hat layer just ignore that
the stripe going down the right side can also be ignored as this is just showing the parts of my skin that had to be inverted

your left arms and legs and 2nd layers to any limb (down at the bottom of the image) must have specific sections inverted or else it looks bad in game (again use the above chart)


my finished skin:

 

exactly the same just with the 3 pixel wide arms however this system isnt implemented just yet

At this time, this arm style is only available on the Alex model; in the future, this arm type will be a feature that can be used with custom skins. Alex skins will show as Steve in versions prior to 1.8.

taken from: https://help.mojang.com/customer/portal/articles/979200-minecraft-skins

 

did you animate those?