u/DoodleMate

The last few months I've been building a web app that extends the 2023 SIGGRAPH paper A Method for Animating Children’s Drawings of the Human Figure.

The method works by 'autorigging' the characters and 'retargeting' human motion capture sequences onto them. So it's mesh deformation, basically.

I made this because I always wanted to see my drawings come to life when I was a kid. That ship has sailed, but maybe the kids of this generation can see that. I also made this because, whenever I see an AI video of a drawing coming to life, it's quite uncanny. I think this has more charm. Let me know if you agree.

(Screen capture not sped up or altered in any way.)

For the past several months I've been building an app that lets children create expressive animated stories using their drawings. I thought this community would appreciate this particular piece of it. Give it an image of a well-silhouetted person-like figure and it'll rig it for realtime animation in about 15 seconds.

Don't take my word for it though. It's free and available on a browser (works on desktop and mobile). URL is the screen capture.

Hello Teachers,

Children love to draw, and I think they'd like to see their drawings move around. I wanted to share a little web utility that does exactly that. It's free of generative AI, so it's actually their drawing. I'm curious whether this (or a similar version of it) might have a place in classrooms. I could imagine that, will a bit of work, it could be a fun way to ground conversations around character development, narrative storytelling, or emotional development.

Hello!

I recently put together a web utility were users can drawing or take a picture of a doodle, quickly rig it, put some motions onto it, and create a little animated meme.

My guiding principle for the design is accessibility. Animation is notoriously difficult and time intensive, and I wanted to make a tool that ANYONE could use to animate their doodles.

I've done my best to make it as easy as possible (a11y best practices, runs on desktop and low-grade smart phones, works with picture of paper drawings), but I'm not a designer and feel like there's probably a lot of room for improvement.

Anyway, if you're curious or willing to help, you can find the app here. Free, no login required:
www.doodlemate.com/meme

I used to do some web dev work, but 15 years ago I went to grad school for computer graphics and haven't done web work since. Recently though I quit my 9-5 and decided to I wanted to get back into it.

Holy moly how things have changed. Like, it's not even the same galaxy anymore. Node? AWS? SCSS? What happened to Bootstrap and jQuery??

It took me almost 6 months to build everything, learning as I went. Claude Code was invaluable in learning about all the new tools and concepts of web dev, but required a lot of direction and review to avoid having huge tangled mess of spaghetti code. I wouldn't trust to to build anything fully automatically any time soon.

Anyway, the web app is a utility that lets you create little animated meme videos by rigging and applying motion to 2D characters. Used it to make the image above.

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.