Animation (experimental)

Asset Tap can rig a humanoid mesh to an embedded 52-joint skeleton and bake animation clips into model.glb. The skeleton ships in the binary, so rigging needs nothing downloaded. Packs only add clips.

One model carries N animations, the way Mixamo and Meshy work, rather than one export per clip. Bake is declarative: the file ends up with exactly the clips you named or ticked. Unticking (or omitting) a clip removes it.

Use the humanoid template when you want a figure the auto-fit can read: T-pose, arms the widest points, a gap between each arm and the torso and between the legs.

Desktop app

Generate or open a character, switch to the 3D tab, and open Animate. The panel is optional; the viewer stays an inspector until you do.

1. Rig: pose the shipped skeleton on a frozen mesh. Dragging a joint never deforms the model. Markers are colored by body part and labeled L or R; a legend sits beside the viewport, not over it. Rig always opens with joints you can drag.
2. Auto-fit is a button, not something that runs on open. It fits the skeleton to a readable humanoid and leaves the joints alone on a mesh it cannot read as a body. Review the result before you bind.
3. Bind: skins the mesh to the posed heads. Every joint must sit on the body; a joint off the mesh is refused by name. The confirmation says how many joints you moved from the auto-fit.
4. Clips: click a row to play it (preview never writes). Tick the set you want and press Bake. The panel shows what will be added and removed. An empty tick-set is a separate clear, not an overloaded Bake.

Animation packs add rows to the clip list. See Clip packs. Switching clips does not rewrite model.glb until Bake.

Command line

# Generate a character and rig it in one run
asset-tap --rig -y -t humanoid "a knight in plate armor"

# Rig an existing mesh and bake a walk
asset-tap bind --mesh model.glb --clip walk

# Several clips on one model
asset-tap bind --mesh model.glb --clip walk --clip Sword_Attack --clip Idle_Loop

# Skinned T-pose, no animation
asset-tap bind --mesh model.glb --fit-only

--clip repeats on both --rig and bind. Re-running bind on an already-rigged mesh keeps its skeleton and weights, so adding a clip cannot undo joints you arranged by hand. Pass --refit to discard the pose.

asset-tap clip install --from Universal-Animation-Library.zip
asset-tap clip install --from Universal-Animation-Library-2.zip
asset-tap clip list
asset-tap clip list --model output/2026-09-08_120000/model.glb

A missing clip or pack is a local error (exit 7), not a retryable failure. walk is an alias for Walk_Loop; clip list shows the names the pack actually contains.

Machine-readable: asset-tap --json bind --mesh model.glb --clip walk. The result names the written model and the full baked clip set. See the CLI machine interface.

Clip packs

Clips come from Quaternius' CC0 libraries:

• Universal Animation Library (ual1)
• Universal Animation Library 2 (ual2)

The rest pose we ship is derived from the first library. Both packs can sit side by side; catalogs merge.

Out of the box: Download Universal Animation Libraries in Help or Animate → Add pack... (or asset-tap clip download / --json clip download / MCP clip_download) pulls the Standard libraries from the latest Asset Tap release. The archive is hash-verified and is not inside the app. Already-installed packs are left alone, so a Source upgrade you installed yourself is never overwritten. clip download --force refreshes only packs stamped by a previous download.

Each Quaternius page also has a free Standard download (the site button or Itch) and the remaining paid Source clips. Those zips install the same way: drop the .zip / folder / .glb on the Animation panel, Add pack..., File → Install Animation Pack..., or clip install --from. The overlay says "Drop to install animation pack" on that panel so a UAL archive is not imported as a library bundle. Dropping a pack on the preview toasts to use the Animation panel. The pack id drops the tier suffix, so installing Source over Standard replaces that library rather than duplicating its clips.

MCP

generate takes bind: true and clips: ["walk", "Sword_Attack"]. The same rules as the CLI: no pack required to rig, a missing clip is a local error. Full tool list: MCP server.

What this does not do

• Fingers stay excluded. Hands will not curl with a grab or fist clip.
• Root-motion (_RM) variants are ignored so preview does not walk the model out of the viewport. In-place loops only.
• Props can be rigged by hand. Auto-fit will not invent a pose on a chest or crate; use the prop template when you are not animating.
• No weight painting, no invented bones, no full animation editor. Bind computes weights from the posed heads.

A bind step is recorded on bundle.json when you bake. See Bundle structure.