2D character rigging and animation
Rig flat artwork and pose it
Rigging turns a drawing into something you pose. Premation has both approaches: a skeleton with bones, IK chains and controllers for characters built from parts, and puppet pins on a generated mesh for a single drawing that needs to bend.
Free · AGPL-3.0-only · macOS & Windows
The panel that does it
The editor’s own panel, rebuilt on its chrome. It works: drag, toggle, queue.
How to do it
- 01
Bring in the artwork
Import an SVG with the parts as separate paths, or one PNG cut-out for the puppet route.
- 02
Build the skeleton
The Bone tool (Ctrl B) draws bones on the canvas, or Rigging ▸ Auto-rig places a biped or quadruped skeleton with IK chains and controllers in one step.
- 03
Bind and weight
Bind the layers to the bones; paint per-vertex weights in the Rigging panel where a joint bends wrong. Bend pins keep a rigid core so elbows fold instead of pinching.
- 04
Pose and keyframe
Drag a hand controller and the arm solves with IK; switch a chain to FK to polish angles. Record a pose and it is written as ordinary keyframes on the bones.
Questions
- Is this like DUIK for After Effects?
- It covers the same ground — auto-rig, IK/FK switching, controllers — as a built-in feature rather than a script, and the poses are plain keyframes you can graph-edit.
- Can a rigged character be exported to Lottie?
- Not as a rig. Bake the motion and export the vector shapes; the deformation itself is a Premation feature, not a Lottie one.