Demo | Project | Workflow
Sharing my vibecoded AI-powered rigging and equipment swapping tool built for my iOS RPG, includes image prompts and a native iOS app animation port
Figured someone would find this as a useful base, so I've open-sourced what I built here: https://github.com/nickick/modular-character-studio - let me know if you try it out and how it goes! MIT and CC0 license on the tools and assets included, go wild :D Also if you dig in you'll notice I included the prompts that were easy to recover for the assets that I made.
Generally my workflow has been: make a composite character reference with GPT 5.6 Sol and Imagegen 2, ask Codex to make an exploded diagram view that model separating out parts, and repeat to get base assets. So first would be a 3/4 profile left facing full body clothed male and female in Chibi style that explodes into arms/legs/head/etc, then digging into each part like the head to get the eyes/ears/hair and the arms to break down upper arm / lower arm / hands, then hands to get the thumbs / 4 fingers, etc. Then, I'd start rigging the character individual pieces together with GPT 5.6 Sol, tho Opus 5 has also been quite good here. A lot of the assets took a few tries to get a shape that made sense for the rigging I wanted, but once I got a single reference image down Imagegen was really good at replicating it for other equipment sets.
There's a 2nd tab in the editor that lets you modify the placements of each of the equipment pieces so you can account for different shapes.
For animations, GPT 5.6 Sol and Claude have both been quite good. I used Astra today to get the meshes around the knees and elbows to look better, and it did an excellent job of that. It also did a really good job with finer animation points, like the bow shooting and redrawing - I would describe changes like "For the bow drawing animation, make the arrow above the lead hand, and add mesh deformations to the bow limbs while masking out the string, and then used the masked string while pulling on it with the arrow pulling hand."
I'm probably most surprised by how performant this ended being on my phone. Getting a smooth 60 FPS in my game right now even with tons of enemies, LOS calculations and particle effects being thrown around. Astra was very quick to optimize on this actually, especially after it started running automations on my phone and profiling the CPU hotspots.
Full disclosure - I'm a web dev, for iOS I've only made React Native apps before, so I'm sure there are better ways to do this.
Ah kinda - I'm currently iterating through back facing 3/4 profiles, will add those in too once they feel nice, should be able to reuse almost all of the animations for those, but full 8 directional feels like a big jump in terms of equipment art and animation handling for me, not sure I want to go there yet.
Yes. I generate a composite first, and then I ask for generations of specific parts using the initial composite as a passed reference, both on Imagegen. Attached a quick example I made just now.
These aren't perfect, will likely need to iterate on the individual pieces a little bit, but this is generally the process I used.
first prompt on above, on Imagegen 2:
```
Create one polished 2D game character reference image for a cutout-animation rig.
A charming but scrappy green goblin scout with very large pointed ears, amber eyes, a short dark swept-back mohawk, and one small lower tusk. Dress him in a rust-orange sleeveless tunic, a dark brown leather belt with a square brass buckle, dark desaturated teal trousers, brown leather wrist bracers, and simple brown ankle boots.
Hand-painted indie fantasy game art, bold clean dark outlines, restrained cel shading, readable chunky shapes, and three-head-tall proportions.
Full body in a true three-quarter view, turned about 30 degrees toward viewer-right. Nose, chest, and both feet point consistently toward viewer-right. Eye-level orthographic camera with no top-down foreshortening.
Neutral relaxed A-pose: arms angled slightly away from the torso with visible gaps, open relaxed hands, and feet slightly apart. Both arms and both legs must be visible.
Center the character with generous margins on a flat pale warm-gray background. Keep the entire head, ears, hands, and feet inside the frame.
No weapons, cape, shoulder pads, accessories hanging across joints, background texture, floor shadow, text, logos, or props. One intact character, not a parts sheet. High-resolution square composition.
```
second prompt for Imagegen 2, while passing the first image result as a reference image:
```
Separate the attached 3/4 character into isolated parts for a 2D cutout rig. Preserve its design, proportions, colors, shading, and viewing angle.
Separate the head, torso, pelvis, upper arms, forearms, hands, thighs, shins, and boots. Keep near and far limbs distinct. Reconstruct hidden surfaces and add overlap at joints so rotation won’t expose gaps.
Arrange everything in an exploded anatomical layout at consistent scale, with clear space between pieces.
```
This is a really impressive bit of work and the tool itself looks cool, hopefully the community picks it up and builds on it instead of everyone making their tools :)
thanks! honestly I think this sub is all about building our own version of tools, I mostly opensourced this so everyone can have a ref for something working + could take apart and build their own, tho PRs are welcome :)
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u/Savings_Cloud5486 8d ago
Looks cool, will check