Using MC skins serves multiple purposes. Firstly, they are vastly available, and an infinite number can be acquired for free. Secondly, people who play MC tend to attach to their skins, and allowing them to load them to the game has added value. Thirdly, the minecraftly style lowers expectation from rigging quality. Using lesser bones makes everything simpler - both rigging and animating.
I've started with taking a MC skin:
This is the skin of the girl on the righthand side in the first picture. In MC it looks like this:
Using Unity's sprite editor selected the desired parts. Note that the side of the head of an MC skin does not include the face. Instead, I took the left half of the face, and replaced the right side of the profile texture with it. So it's just half a face pasted on the side of the head, which looks completely convincing. The skin does not yet incorporate any of the frontal torso which tends to include a lot of the skin-unique features (in this case, the long hair for example).
I've rigged the sprite:
Note that the hands and legs are assigned two bones, unlike minecraft. This required a lot of tinkering with the texture weights so that the bending looks alright. In game, it looks like this:
I then increased the head size and only included half the width of the hands to make the skin more child-like:
Any MC skin works as long as it's 64X32. 64X64 I simply cut in half to include only the upper part.
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