skeleton

This pack makes shields block much less of your vision, while positioning them to better match how they look in 3rd person. It also improves shield positioning & scaling across the board, such as for 3rd person blocking. Additionally, it gives shields unique break particles, and a separate position in your hotbar while blocking.

player

Effects include lower & symmetrically-held shields, and consistent sizing. Through painstaking math & model simulations, I've arrived at a set of highly precise numbers for every possible display position - 3rd person (both hands), 1st person (both hands), GUIs, dropped items (including villagers & foxes), item frames, and even heads.

Before:

before

After:

after

ground

villager

fox

item frames

zombie

Q: Seems simple enough. "Painstaking" how?

A: Shields have a very weird origin point in vanilla. This makes things like working with staggered rotations about multiple axes really complex, which I guess shows in the way Mojang ended up handling shield positioning. I set out to make my display positions symmetrical for both hands, among other things.

Q: What did you mean when you mentioned villagers & foxes?

A: Their hand and mouth positions are based on that of dropped items. After testing, I opted to make dropped items rotate around the wood of the shield rather than around the handle, in part to let these two mobs' positions look better. But I don't have fine control over the individual positions, and the focus is on how shields look on the ground.

Q: Why are shields on heads smaller?

A: I tried to make them bigger to match the size of held shields, but vanilla doesn't allow scaling like this for worn items.

Cloud's Unobtrusive Shields++