News

Update 6: Explore Library

10/26/2025 | Scott Petrovic

The biggest change is the new explore page where you can quickly change between skeletons and see all the available animations. This is now the default page when you visit the application. Previously you had to manually configure a rig before seeing the animations. For quick testing and trying out the application, this is a much better experience. You can always switch to the Create page if you want to import your own 3d model and hook that up.

A lot of energy and time went into creating new control rigs for all the skeletons. I spent a lot of time reading and watching video tutorials. A big thank you to Rich Stubbs Youtube channel. This helped me understand how to create more advanced rigs. There are more improvements that could be made for the rigs, but it is much better than what was previously there. This work won't be obvious looking at the application, but will make animations easier when the library gets built out more. More bones were added in a few spots as well to make deformations better such as the wings in the bird. There were also mouths added for the bird, dragon, and quadruped rigs to be more expressive.

Explore animations page

Quickly preview and switch between skeletons to see all available animations. This makes it much easier to try out the application without having to import your own 3d model first. This is now the default landing page when you visit the application.

New control rigs

Other release notes

• Add a bit of floor transparency for animations that go below floor
• Add contribution guide from Contribution page for instructions on how to contribute.
• Add a transform space toggle from world to local when rotating bones
• Fix a small typo with how to spell Quaternius in contribution guide
• Added some new quadruped/fox animations to the library using new control rig.
• Replaced the human custom animation with a new custom tired animation using new control rig.
• Added stomach bone for quadruped and dragon rig to help preserve volume during animations.
• Add a bit more range to the human A-Pose slider for better T-pose correction.

Next up...

Maybe I will spend some time creating animations and build out the library more. Or possibly fix some bugs depending on what type of feedback I get. If there are animators interested in contributing, I might spend some time making a Youtube walkthrough with how to create animations and submit them.

Update 5: Unleash the Dragon

9/24/2025 | Scott Petrovic

This release is light on new features, but has a lot of improvements that improve the overall user experience. Most of these organizational changes and improvements won't be visible when using the application.

I'm starting to build guides for animator contributions. If you take a look at the GitHub repository, you can see the the state it is in now. I am also working with a couple animators with how to structure the rigs and animations. Rigging characters can get very technical. I read a book on rigging game characters recently, but still have a lot to learn.

New Dragon rig

Added a few animations to get started. Current animations are coming from me so they won't be too good until a real animator steps in. New option is available for the model and skeleton to use the dragon rig.

Sliders for skeleton scale and A-Pose correction

Added sliders for skeleton scale and A-Pose correction (Nathan Fenner) to improve the rigging process. This should be a little easier than selecting numeric values and hitting the apply button multiple times.

Improved 3d import options

Previously the GLTF import wasn't working. This is because GLTF files themselves are mostly just configuration files that reference other files. To make this work, the upload model now supports ZIP format for bundled models. GLTF files need to be zipped up and include GLTF+BIN+textures. GLTF files by themselves isn't enough to import. I added some error handling as well if the import fails. There will probably be some error situations I am not catching depending on what people do.

I also added the ability to import a new 3d model format DAE. Similar to GLTF, this also needs to be grouped together in a ZIP file so all the data is loaded in together. I tried it out on a couple models and it seemed to work, so I will need some feedback to see if there is more to do with this.

Other release notes

• Added mouths to all the animal rigs
• Added Docker file and instructions for easy deployment (eternity336)
• Add Modeler readme for modelers to github repository
• Add Animator readme file for animating to github repository
• Make the floor plane one sided in the scene so you can see model from below
• Show count of filtered animations when filtering list
• When using animation player, pause the animation while scrubbing (Nathan Fenner)
• Update Cloudflare configuration (wrangler.jsonc) to use new worker configuration
• Show origin marker when loading 3d files to help with troubleshooting positioning
• Force people to select skeleton type before proceeding. This helps with making the mistake of continuing with the wrong skeleton
• Fix loading animation previews if you go back and change skeleton type after finishing
• Show messaging when there are no animations available after filtering listing
• Start adding attribution link for contributors at the top. A dialog appears that will show contributions.
• Improve tooltip display using tippy.js library
• Blender source files. Use library overrides pattern to have separate blender files for each animation. This required a files and folders to be re-organized
• Blender source files. Have a Blender python script that combines all animations into a single GLB file for the app
• Update skinning algorithm to have smoothing applied where joints bend using 'adjaceny map'. Not sure if this will be better or not.
• Add a few more animations for bird rig
• Show indicator in download button to see how many animations will be included.

Next up...

I need to figure out a better way for animators to download rigs, do some animations, and upload their work back to the project. Github might be the best way for me technically, but not sure if that will be too complicated for 3d animators. If this is something you could help with, let me know!

Update 4: Video Previews, Theming, Navigation improvements

8/14/2025 | Scott Petrovic

I was feeling productive last week outside of work, so I had a chance to work on some new features for the app. Eventually I will start concentrating more on "content" like the animations, but context switching for me is pretty painful. I will stick on platform features until things are more stable and complete enough.

Animation video preview

I built out a system to bring in GLB files, cycle through each animation, and record them to small video files. This was kind of fun to figure out how to do. It should be easy to regenerate them in the future if there are changes. I had to update the UI a bit to accommodate for these larger animation items. It is all done via a URL. See the preview animation readme in the GitHub repository for more information with how it works.

Better navigation between steps

Each step has a back button if you do something wrong. I had this on one step before, but now it exists on all the steps. Someone mentioned this on GitHub and I thought it was a good idea. It is probably the most useful if you accidentally pick the wrong skeleton type, which I frequently do.

Dark & light theme toggle

While I like dark themes, I occasionally just want a break from everything dark. A new toggle button appears where you can switch the theme. This setting gets saved in a cookie, so it should remember what theme you used last.

Animation player

When you are in the animation listing, there is a mini player at the bottom where you can play/pause the animation, or scrub through it. Not sure how useful it will be, but it seemed like a fun idea.

Mini 3d view helper

This was something I saw online that three.js added somewhat recently. You can click on the axis and the view will snap to the top, bottom, left, or right views. This is replacing the manual view buttons I had when editing the skeleton.

Other release notes

• Updated mouse icons making them a bit thinner.
• Hide the circle joint on the skeleton when you are on the animation listing step. They don't add any value at this point.
• Turned "show skeleton" option into a toggle icon button.
• When you enter the animation listing step, the skeleton will be hidden by default.
• Build number isn't working, so just remove that for now
• When positioning mesh after importing, do a little animation for the rotation for polish.
• Display a slightly more friendly name for animation names instead of the snake case names
• Only show the A-Pose options for humans. This helps convert characters in an A-Pose to a T-Pose which the animations expect.
• Slight fog effect added to help with transition between floor and background.

Next up...

If I don't get many feature requests. I might start trying to create more animations/skeleton for the tool. They won't be great, but it will be something. You can see my masterful bird test animation that currently exists. I will throw my Venmo account on my GitHub page to potentially collect funds to hire an animator. I am not expecting any funds at this point, so be prepared for my janky animations.

Update 3: Undo System, Hand variations

7/31/2025 | Scott Petrovic

Added a few features that I just wanted to get out. I never know when work will consume my time, so it is probably better to have smaller releases more frequently than trying to do large cycle releases.

Undo/Redo system

Moving bones around can be frustrating when there is no undo, so it has been added. This was something I had in the back of my mind when building this, but thought it was kind of a secondary priority at the time. I scanned my messages recently and noticed a blue circle by the GitHub mailbox. Is this a message for someone giving me a large donation because all my hard work.... no. Alas, it was a bug report. A good one at that. For a person that is mostly isolated in a room all day, even a request or bug report is pleasant to witness. Oh yes, the usual shortcuts like Ctrl+Z work as well.

Hand variations

There are SO many finger bones in the human skeleton. Do we really need all of those? My model just has a brick for a hand.

That pretty much sums up why this next feature was added. When selecting a human skeleton, there are now a few options with the bones we keep for the hand. Less bones on the hand equals smaller file size. Less work to position the bones as well. The file size in the output isn't as big as I would have thought, but it is still pretty noticeable.

Filter animations list

This might be useful when more animations are added. It seemed like a good idea.

Next up

Not really sure. I will let this sit for a bit and see if anyone actually uses this. All updates will be applied the next time you visit https://app.mesh2motion.org/. If you end up using this, rattle some buttons or text on the GitHub page so I know people think this is useful.

Update 2: Weight Paint Previews

6/16/2025 | Scott Petrovic

This release includes numerous improvements and updates to weight painting, skeleton blending, and mesh handling features. There will probably be some fine tuning with the algorithm, but it now can deal with more extreme deformations.

Live weight painting display

Better algorithm for weight blending

UI toggles for bone controls

Improved UI toggle for changing between translate and rotate bone. Added UI toggle to change between weight painted model and textured

Other release notes

• Bone Positioning: Left click selects bone joints now
• Bone Positioning: Disable ability to move the root bone so that stays at origin
• 3D skeletons: Improved by adding "tip" bones. Three.js needs these to be able to manipulate bone directions
• 3D Models: Bird and Fox have higher polygon count to help see deformations with blending weights

All updates will be applied the next time you visit https://app.mesh2motion.org/

Update 1: Time to Fly!

5/22/2025 | Scott Petrovic

I will try to do these updates to summarize anytime I push out a set of changes. I thought about just slowly pushing stuff out to the site, but that seemed a bit chaotic for some reason. This app will remain in alpha until I decide it is feature complete and stable enough. Then I will move it to Beta.

This update focuses on adding a new skeleton type. I do have terrible focus, so it also includes other things. I want to really think about this application from a general rigging standpoint, so I want to think about how every change would affect every rig type (animal, human, bird, etc). I have more ideas ready to start coding, as well as make a few issues that people have contacted me about for a better experience.

• Feature: New Bird skeleton type added with a few animations
• Importing Model: When 3d model is imported, scaling only happens if it is too large or very small
• Importing Model: New button to move the mesh data above the floor. This happens when the mesh origin is in the model's center.
• Importing Model: Fixed Z-rotation when rotating model. It wasn't hooked up before
• Skinning: Added a debug option to show weight painted model for reference
• Animation: Keep the hip bone transform data with all skeleton types (previously only worked for humans)
• Blender 3D Source: More high-poly reference model for fox to help simulate deformations better
• Blender 3D Source: Added bird model along with separate animation file
• Blender 3D Source: Make bone naming more consistent across skeleton types
• Animation List: (Code-only) Allow for appending different sets of animations when viewing listing (Human now has an extra custom YMCA on top of the Quaternius animation data)
• Animation List: Have animation progress bar with currently playing animation
• Animation List: Alphabetize animation names to make finding easier
• Editing Skeleton: Add ability to rotate bones when editing skeleton
• UX: Show hover effect when mouse is over a joint that will be selected for visual feedback
• UX: Have skeleton joints and bones keep same size regardless of zoom level
• UI: Used fixed positioning for header so right click will work at the top of application
• Performance: Very large speed up for skinning process. This is because of caching and other optimizations

All updates will be applied the next time you visit https://app.mesh2motion.org/

Mesh2Motion Enters the Fight!

5/11/2025 | Scott Petrovic

Hello. This is a news post to represent the original release of the site and application. Updates will be sporadic as I am the only person working on this. I have a bit of a vision with how this will progress, so I probably won't be taking too many external contributors right now.