u/DoodleMate

I thought it would be cool to have animated versions of your own drawings as character sprites in scratch projects. So I made a tool that does that. It's free, browser-based, no login, and it doesn't use generative AI (instead it autorigs the drawing and retargets motion data onto it).

The exported sprite contains custom logic blocks you can use to play the animations on command (e.g. make them run, wave, jump when user presses keys or something).

Right now it's unoptimized because I wanted to see if anyone was interested in this. If so, I could make it more performant, add more motion types, and other things too.

Let me know if you think this would be cool for your projects!

Tool link: https://doodlemate.com/scratch

Hi r/IndieAnimation,

I built a tool that takes a single character drawing and produces a rigged, animated character from it. Upload a sketch, get back a character that can dance, walk, or perform other motions while keeping the original linework intact.

It's not generative AI. Under the hood it's a bespoke autorigging system that infers a skeleton from the drawing, plus mocap retargeting to drive the motion and face/mouth assets to support expressions and lip syncing. The character you get out is still your drawing, just rigged and moving.

Right now I'm shipping it as a consumer product where kids animate their own drawings, which is genuinely fun (my four year old loves it) but also pretty constrained. The motions and scenes are limited and there's minimal fine control over anything. But the underlying tech could go much further, and I'm trying to figure out whether there's a real use case for indie animators that's worth building toward.

A few questions I've got.

1. Could you see some version of this fitting into your workflow? Could it save you time on shorts, prototypes, pre-vis, etc? Or does serious work need a level of rig control that single-drawing automation can't reasonably give you?
2. What features would be table stakes for indie animation use? Custom mocap imports? Standard export formats (FBX, Spine, JSON skeletons)? Layered/multi-character scenes? More finegrained control over motions or character rigs?
3. Is there an appetite for animation tooling that explicitly isn't built on generative AI? I made that choice deliberately because I wanted the output to be the artist's drawing, not a model's interpretation of it. Curious whether that distinction resonates with indie animators, and whether this tool has value because it doesn't use generative AI.

Thanks for reading.

After rigorous testing by our 2-year-old and 4-year-old, DoodleMate is officially live!

Turn paper drawings into living animations in just moments. The app animates the child’s actual drawing, not an AI’s interpretation or a blurry guess. Your data privacy is secure and you don't need to make an account. We hope you have fun animating and would love to hear any feedback you may care to share.