Animate a pixel-art character

The pixel puppet rigs your pixel character and poses it the way a pixel artist would: limbs turn without blurring, tip toward the camera, and get their lines redrawn where they are seen end on. Only the character's own colours are used. Animations come from a built-in library, and one animation plays on every character rigged the same way.

You bring
One pixel-art figure at 1×, facing front, arms and legs a little apart from the body. Or a four-legged animal from the side.
You get
A Rive file that plays everywhere, or a live one your app poses and dresses; plus PNG frames, sprite sheets, GIFs and a web page.
Needs
Nothing beyond the install for baked files, the Claude Desktop extension included. The live puppet is built with Rive's command-line tool.

Want to see it first? The try page rigs a character you drop and plays it walking, waving and cheering in Rive's own runtime, right in your browser, with nothing to install.

Ask your assistant

  • Rig my pixel character (hero.png) and give it idle, walk, run and wave, with a sprite sheet of each.
  • Add a red jacket my image model drew, as an outfit the game can switch on.
  • Give her a smile and a blink.
  • Make my pixel dog walk.
  • Make it a live puppet my app can dress at run time.

How it works

  1. A base the rig can read: one figure, pixel art at 1× on transparency, facing front in a relaxed pose with arms and legs a little apart. No such picture yet? sprite_art_brief in base mode writes the prompt for your image model. Made by a model? snap_pixel_art first (Fix AI pixel art).
  2. Rig it. pixel_autorig measures the joints on the silhouette and fits a 17-bone skeleton (hips, chest, head, shoulders, arms, hands, legs, feet), and finds the face. It returns the figure with each joint ringed; a joint that's off is moved by hand and checked again.
  3. Check it. pixel_review checks the rest pose, the cut, the joints and the face, then every frame of the animations: new dark seams, skin showing through clothes, pinholes, feet that slip. A viewer page shows each flag in place.
  4. Animate and export. Animations come by name from the library: idle, wave, cheer, tilt, emote, sit, walk and run for people; walk and idle for four-legged animals. pixel_animation lists and previews them.
    • Plays everywhere: pixel_puppet_bake bakes every animation, for every outfit and body type, into one Rive file with a state machine that picks them. It can also write every frame as PNG, a sprite sheet and a GIF per animation, and a web page.
    • Live: pixel_puppet_live puts the puppet itself in the Rive file, with controls for every bone, the face, expressions, lean, light, outfit and view. Your app can even hand it new clothes as PNGs.

Outfits, faces and hands

Your image model draws each change on the base, and each becomes a layer:

  • Clothes: sprite_art_brief in item mode, snap_pixel_art against the base, then extract_layer for the top, bottom, feet or head. Each outfit is a list of layers.
  • Expressions: face mode, then extract_layer adds the face to the base, such as a smile with its blink.
  • Hand shapes: hand mode, then extract_layer adds a fist or another shape as a part the animations can switch to.
  • Clothes from another character with the same bones: pixel_refit carves them to the new body and flags what needs a touch by hand.

Good to know

  • The live puppet runs in Rive's web players from version 2.44.1 on, with no signing. Check your native players before relying on it there; the baked file plays in every Rive runtime.
  • Rive's 2D-canvas web runtime smooths pictures; the bake can scale the puppet up by whole pixels for it.
  • Something simpler, like a breathing idle and a blink without a rig: split_image moves part of the picture, and snap_motion_to_pixels keeps the motion on whole pixels.
  • The limbs can be exported as data for another engine: pixel_unwrap.

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