What Charios solves

We built Charios because the gap between "I have a character drawing" and "this character is animated and in my game" is way too wide. Here's the matrix of problems we hit, and how each editor feature maps to a fix.

Before Charios, here's what shipping a 2D animated character looked like

1. Draw the character in Photoshop / Procreate / Krita as separate layered body parts.
2. Export each layer as a PNG.
3. Import into Spine or DragonBones. Spend an evening learning the bone-rigging UI.
4. Manually attach each PNG to a bone. Set up parent-child relationships. Test pose.
5. Animate by hand keyframe-by-keyframe, or buy mocap data and figure out how to retarget it.
6. Export as JSON / atlas / runtime files. Find a runtime SDK for your engine.
7. Wire up the runtime SDK in your engine. Hope the bones don't drift.

We watched indie devs give up at step 3 over and over. The friction is in the tooling, not the artistic effort. So we built Charios around the assumption that most 2D characters are humanoid, and that's the only assumption we need to make.

Problem: rigging is the friction

The fix: a fixed 17-bone humanoid rig. Charios ships with a single skeleton — left/right arms, legs, head, spine, sword. You don't pick bones. You drop your character art and the editor auto-snaps each piece to the right bone. If the auto-snap gets one wrong, you drag the layer onto the right bone in the panel — that's the entirety of "rigging" in Charios.

Read more: Upload art & auto-cut layers · Understand layers & the bone rig.

Problem: animating by hand takes forever

The fix: motion-capture-first animation. Mocap is what film and AAA games use. It's just been priced out of indie reach because of the complex retargeting tools required. Charios bundles 87 mocap clips and retargets any humanoid clip onto your character automatically. Walk, run, jump, sword swing, idle bob — they're already animated; you just pick the one you want.

Bringing your own mocap is a drag-and-drop. Mixamo, CMU, Truebones, Rokoko — anything humanoid lands cleanly without you knowing what "retargeting" means.

Read more: Browse the mocap library · Bring your own mocap.

Problem: getting the character into your engine

The fix: real engine-native exports. Charios doesn't ship a runtime SDK that you'd then need to integrate. Each export is the format your engine already speaks: a Unity prefab, a Godot .tscn, a UE5 Blueprint actor. The animation curves are baked into the export, so your character animates the second you drop it into your engine.

Read more: Export overview.

Problem: iterating on the look

The fix: AI variants. You spent two days drawing the perfect cyberpunk samurai. Now your art director wants to see what they'd look like in ice armor. With variants, hit Generate 5 and Charios uses Vertex AI's Imagen to regenerate every layer of your character in a new style — keeping the silhouette, the rig, the animation, all of it. Five styles in 30 seconds.

Read more: Generate AI variants · Regenerate a single layer.

How Charios compares

Charios isn't trying to replace Spine for the AAA studios that need timeline-fine-grained keyframe animation. We're targeting the 90% of 2D-character workflows where a humanoid character + bundled mocap + a clean engine export is what you actually need.