Export an animated GIF

One-click looping GIF of your active animation. Works for posting to Discord and Twitter, dropping into design docs, embedding on a landing page — anywhere a static character image won't do.

Exporting one clip

Click Export → GIF. Charios steps the preview scene through one full mocap cycle (or 3 seconds of synthetic idle if no clip is applied), captures each frame, palette-quantises to 256 colours, and assembles a GIF89a stream. The file downloads automatically.

File size

Most exports come out at 600-900 KB. Two things drive size up:

• Cycle length. A 3-second clip at 24 fps is 72 frames; a 1-second loop is 24. Slower playback speeds → more frames → bigger file.
• Resolution. Charios renders the GIF at the canvas's natural pixel size. Zooming in before export gives you a higher-resolution GIF at the cost of a much bigger file.

Multi-clip zip

If you've selected multiple clips in the mocap library (radio buttons on each card), the export menu shows Selected anims (zip) as well. This walks every selected clip, renders one GIF per clip, and bundles them into a single zip — useful when you need a folder of every animation for a press kit or a team handoff.

Transparency

GIFs use binary transparency (a pixel is fully on or fully off). Anti-aliased edges may show small artifacts against busy backgrounds. If clean alpha matters, export to PNG sequences instead — coming soon, or available today by writing a quick screen-capture script against an applied animation.

Composing onto a background

Charios GIFs always export with a transparent background. To composite onto a coloured backdrop, pull the GIF into your image editor (Photoshop, GIMP, Affinity) and add a flat layer underneath. The Background plate in the editor is preview-only and never bakes into the export.