jaisurya-dev-art/rigby2d: Open-source 2D skeletal animation editor for games and film. AutoRig layered PSDs, animate with meshes, IK and physics, lip-sync from audio, render video, export JSON/.skel. JavaScript, Rust, Godot and Unity runtimes. Built-

English · 日本語 · 简体中文 · 한국어 · Español · Português (Brasil)

Open-source 2D skeletal animation for games and film.

Rig your art with bones and meshes, animate it, render it as film, and ship it to any game engine. Free forever.

_{Windows · macOS · Linux · or the full editor in your browser, nothing to install}

Website · Documentation · Devlog · Add-ons

_{Listed on AlternativeTo next to Spine, DragonBones and Live2D}

_{▶ Watch Rigby2D 0.4: everything new in 45 seconds · Also: Meet NILA, our mascot, animated in Rigby2D}

_{The editor animating NILA: the head bone selected in the tree, its keys in the dopesheet, its pose in the inspector.}

Featured in

• YouTube architectural review: Rigby2D GitHub Explained: 2D Rigging Across Game and Film Runtimes by Alex Hitt — an 8-minute technical breakdown of AutoRig mesh topology, deterministic physics solver parity across engines, the Game and Film workspaces, and the built-in MCP server.
• Polydium (CG · VFX · Game Daily Briefing): Rigby2D — 레이어 PSD를 자동으로 리깅하는 오픈소스 2D 스켈레탈 애니메이션 에디터 — featured in the Polydium Pipeline Briefing for Korean game and VFX studios.
• Open-source & AI indexes: Listed in Trendshift Top Game Engine Open-Source Projects (2026), Nicheloom, and Context7.

Documentation

Read the documentation: guides with screenshots for every part of the editor, the runtimes and the MCP server. The pages are also in docs/.

| Get started | Rig | Animate | Ship and automate | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Installation | Importing art | Animating | Export | | Quick start | AutoRig | Graph editor | Runtimes | | The interface | Bones and slots | Poses and faces | Python scripting | | Demo projects | Meshes · Constraints | Film · Scenes · Lip-sync | AI assistants (MCP) |

Features

• AutoRig: a layered PSD becomes an editable rig in one step: bones, joints, bending meshes and IK.
• Full rigging toolset: bones, weighted meshes, linked meshes, image sequences, skins, events,

• Animation: Setup and Animate modes, dopesheet, graph editor with Bézier handles, onion

• Film workspace: 4K, timecode, an animatable camera, audio tracks, viseme lip-sync with

• Scene composition (new in 0.3): several characters on one stage as actors with NLE-style clips

• A focused editor: Game and Film workspaces, panels you can resize or pop out to a second

• Your work is safe: saves that never leave a half-written file, .rigby1 backups like Blender's

• Preferences and add-ons: Edit ▸ Preferences for the language (English, Japanese, Chinese,

• Welcome screen, auto-update and runtimes from the editor: new projects, recent work, starter

• Coming from other tools: opens Spine exports (with a migration checker) and DragonBones

• Python scripting and custom tools, and a built-in MCP server so AI assistants such as

• Lossless skeleton JSON (3.8, 4.2, 4.3) and binary .skel with texture atlases, played by the

• Built-in tutorials and demo projects (NILA, Rigbytron, and a scene with both), also on the

Getting started

• In your browser: open the editor, nothing to install.
• Windows: download the portable editor

• macOS: download the .dmg

• AI assistants: install Rigby2D-AI.mcpb

• From source (Node.js 20+ and the Tauri prerequisites):

git clone https://github.com/jaisurya-dev-art/rigby2d.git
cd rigby2d
npm install
npm run dev        # desktop app; npm run web:dev for the browser, npm test for the tests

See Installation for every option.

Project structure

src/core/       Runtime: data model, skeleton JSON/.skel + atlas I/O, pose evaluation, constraints, playback
src/editor/     Editor UI: viewport, tree, inspector, dopesheet, graph editor, import/export, scripting
src/webgl/      Reference WebGL renderer for the runtime
src/mcp/        Model Context Protocol server for AI assistants
runtimes/       Rust runtime and the Godot 4 node (preview)
site/           Website and documentation site (GitHub Pages)
docs/           Documentation pages and images
branding/       Logo, icons, Rigbytron and NILA (proprietary, see TRADEMARKS.md)
src-tauri/      Native desktop shell
test/           node:test suites

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for the development setup, coding style and pull request process.

License

Rigby2D's source code is licensed under either of

• MIT License
• Apache License, Version 2.0

Unless you state otherwise, any contribution you submit for inclusion in Rigby2D is licensed under both licenses as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

The editor distributes Pyodide and CPython for Python scripting under their own licenses; see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Trademarks

Rigby2D, Rigbytron and NILA, and the Rigby2D logo, lockups, icons and the Rigbytron and NILA mascots in branding/, are proprietary trademarks of the Rigby2D project. They are not covered by the MIT or Apache 2.0 licenses. Forks and modified versions must use their own name and branding. See TRADEMARKS.md.

The DragonBones demo characters on the website (site/showcase/dragonbones/) are © The DragonBones team and other contributors, under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, not the Rigby2D license.

Disclaimer

Rigby2D is an independent open-source project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the makers of any other animation software. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Rigby2D reads and writes the skeleton JSON, binary .skel and texture atlas file formats solely for interoperability, so that users can work with their own exported files. This support was implemented clean-room:

• JSON and atlas formats: implemented from publicly available documentation.
• Binary .skel format: implemented from the publicly documented binary layout of earlier versions and by comparing JSON and binary exports of the same skeleton (black-box observation of exported data).