Welcome

Charios is a 2D character animation tool that runs in your browser. Drop layered art onto a humanoid skeleton, retarget motion-capture clips onto it, and ship the result as an animated GIF or as a posed prefab for Unity, Godot, or Unreal Engine 5. No build step. No animation timeline to scrub through. No bone painting.

This guide walks you through every part of the editor, framed around the problems users actually run into — "how do I get my character to walk?", "why is my sword behind the body?", "how do I export to Unity?". If you have five minutes, the Your first character tutorial gets you from zero to a posed, animated character ready for your game.

Who Charios is for

• Indie game developers who need a posed, animated 2D character for Unity / Godot / Unreal but don't want to learn Spine or DragonBones. Charios trades the richest possible animation tooling for radically less learning curve — most users ship their first export inside 10 minutes.
• Solo artists and animators who want to bring a static character sheet to life without rigging it from scratch. Drop the PNG, hit a mocap clip, done.
• Game-jam teams that need 6 enemies animated by Sunday night. Generate base art with AI, drop into Charios, retarget Mixamo clips, export — same day.
• Marketing and design teams who need short looping character GIFs for social posts, landing pages, and decks.

What makes Charios different

• Fixed humanoid rig. You don't draw bones. We give you a 17-bone skeleton; you drop sprites onto it and we figure out which bone goes where.
• Mocap-first animation. 87 motion-capture clips ship in the box (walk, run, jump, sword, idle, …). Click one and it plays on your character. Drag your own .bvh or .fbx and it retargets automatically.
• Browser-native. Nothing to install. Your projects auto-save to the cloud and follow you to any machine.
• Real engine exports. Unity prefab, Godot scene, UE5 actor — not just a sprite atlas. Animation curves are baked into the export so the character animates the moment you press play.

Where to start

• Brand new? Read Your first character. Five minutes, end to end.
• Want to know if Charios fits your project? What Charios solves walks the use cases and how each editor feature maps to a real problem.
• Need a refresher on a specific tool? Open ⌘K from anywhere on this site and search.