Basics
You create vehicles by putting a set of parts together. That's the simplest way to put it. Besides that, you can also animate it and add particles and sounds to it.
Parts can be either blocks or items. You can change the scale and rotation of each part. You can even add heads with custom skins.
Components
Parts
Bones
Seats
Sounds
Particles
Parts are the main component you use when creating your vehicle model. They give a "shape" to your model. But we also have components like seats, sounds, or paticles.
Bones are also very important. You can think of a bone as a "group" of parts. Bones have a "pivot", which is a point around which the parts rigged by that bone rotate around, as simple as that. We highly recommend you to play with the pivot and the rotation of the bone, so you will quickly understand how it works.
Now, what are bones used for? Bones are mainly used for animating your model. In fact, you can only animate bones, not parts. For every single animation keyframe, you set a rotation, scale and translation for every bone. If you are familiar with the concept of animation keyframes and mesh rigging, you should be able to quickly get the idea, as these concepts are used in applications like blender and blockbench.
Seats are self-explained. You just set the point where you want the seat to be at. Now, there is a property named "main", which determines what's the seat of the operator. The operator is the player that controls the vehicle. When a player mount the main seat, that player becomes the operator of the vehicle and can therefore control it.
Sounds are self-explained. You just set the name of the sound to play, the delay, the volumen and the pitch. The delay determines time between playing the sound again. Read about Ticks to get a better understanding of the way this works. Now there is a property named "global", which determines who can hear the sound. If global is enabled, it will play for everyone that close enough to vehicle. If global is disabled, it will play only for the players that are inside the vehicle (operator and passengers).
Particles are self-explained. You just set the type of particle to display, the point where to display it at, the delay, the count, the dispersion, and optionally, the data.
The delay determines time between playing the sound again. Read about Ticks to get a better understanding of the way this works.
The count determines how many particles are to be displayed.
The dispersion determines the distance between each particle. The higher the dispersion, the greater the distance.
The data is optinal, and it's used to change the way the particle looks. Not all types of particles support data, and some types of particles require the data to be set. The most common use for the data is to change the color of the redstone particle. The builder tool will automatically detect the kind of data for the type of particle you are using, and will enable the respective options for you to use, so you can set the data. So, for example, if you are using a redstone, it will automatically show you the red-green-blue fields, so you can set the color of the particle by changing those values.
In the image above you can see the options the builder tool enables whenever editing a particle of type "redstone". In this case, the kind of data for a particle of type "redstone" is a color and size; the color is set by changing the red-green-blue (aka RGB).
You can find lots of RGB color pickers out there on the internet like this one: https://www.rapidtables.com/web/color/RGB_Color.html Even by just googling "rgb color picker" it will show you a RGB color picker.
User interface
At this point, it clear for you that the user interface (aka GUI) is something never seen before. We decided not to use the ordinary Minecraft GUI as it can be confusing, but overall, slow.
Instead all you have are just buttons/text-fields floating over the model you are building. And, on the right side, you have the hierarchy list, which is just a list that displays the bones, and the parts in hierarchical order:
You can see there "EDITION", "BONES", "ANIMATION", etc... Well, you click on that, and it will open another page with different buttons, just like any user interface, but, quick to use!
In the hierarchy list, you can see "Root", well, that's the root bone; you can't delete or rename it, it is the parent/ancestor for all of the parts and bones you create. You can also see that the way the hierarchy list displays the information is by showing you the bones in yellow and the parts in black.
Now, there are also text-fields, so that way you can set stuff like the name of the model. To use them, just hover it, and then enter in your chat what you want enter, and that's it! In the image above, you can see the model name text-field (the one that says "motocross-bike"). Yeah, that's a text-field, go ahead, hover it and then type something in the chat, and you will see it changes to what you entered.
Now, the hierarchy list is full of text-fields; so you can easily change the name of every bone and part of your creation.
Ticks
In case you don't know what ticks are, this is a brief explanation:
Think of ticks as "heartbeat". A minecraft server ticks aproximately 20 times every second. It's important that you understand ticks as they are used for particles, sounds, and animation keyframes.
For example, when adding sounds to your vehicle, you'll use a setting called "delay," measured in ticks. Think of ticks like tiny clock ticks or heart beats; they control how often things happen in Minecraft.
Higher delay: The sound plays less often. Imagine waiting more ticks (heart beats) before playing the sound again. So, a delay of 20 ticks means the sound plays every second (20 ticks), while a delay of 80 ticks means it plays only every 4 seconds (80 ticks).
Lower delay: The sound plays more often. The closer the delay is to zero, the less time the sound waits between playing again. So, a delay of 3 ticks means the sound plays almost constantly.
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