Your first character

From sign-up to a posed, animated character ready to drop into your game engine. About five minutes if your art is ready, ten if you're also generating it.

1. Sign in

Go to charios.com and click Sign in with Google. There's no separate password, no email confirmation. After Google round-trips you'll land on your dashboard. The free plan covers three projects with every editor feature unlocked — no credit card required.

2. Create a project

On the dashboard, click + New project. You'll see a row of templates (a fox warrior, a cyberpunk drone, an undead skeleton) and an Empty project option. Pick a template if you want to play with the editor before drawing your own art; pick Empty project if you have a character ready.

3. Upload your character

Inside the editor, click the Upload pill at the top of the canvas. Two options:

• Layers — drop one or more PNGs of body parts (head, torso, sword, shoes…). Charios auto-detects each shape and lets you confirm which crops to keep before snapping each one to a bone.
• Character Image — drop a single composite character. Charios cuts it into parts for you, even cleaning up a noisy background if needed.

After confirming, your character appears on the rig. Each body part is now its own layer, attached to a bone.

4. Pick an animation

Click Anim check at the top of the preview canvas. The mocap library opens — 87 clips, sorted by category. Find a Walk you like, click once to preview, double-click to apply.

The right canvas now plays your character walking. If something looks off, see Apply a clip for adjusting playback speed, or Show the bone wireframe for diagnosing odd retargeting.

5. Export

Click Export in the top-right and pick a format:

• GIF — looping animation. Good for Discord, Twitter, design docs, the loading screen of your game website.
• Unity prefab — drag the unzipped folder into your Unity Assets/. The prefab arrives posed in T-pose with the Animator playing your idle on Awake.
• Godot scene — .tscn file. Drop into your project and Godot's AnimationPlayer autoplays your idle.
• Unreal actor — PNGs plus a Python script. Run it from inside UE5 and a posed Blueprint actor lands at /Game/<Project>.

That's it. You went from zero to an exported, posed, animated 2D character. The next things to try: adjust body proportions to make a stockier or lankier version, generate AI variants for five alternate looks, or test-run your character in a platformer to feel how it moves.