Free open-source tool to instantly rig and animate your illustrations (also with mesh deform)

If you haven’t seen it yet, a model called see-through dropped last week. It takes a single static anime image and decomposes it into 23 separate layers ready for rigging and animation. It’s a huge deal for anyone who wants a rigged 2D character but doesn’t have hundreds of dollars lying around.

The problem is that getting a usable result out of it still takes forever. You get a PSD with 23 layers (30+ if you enable split by side and depth), and you still have to manually process and rig everything yourself. And if you’ve ever looked into commissioning a Vtuber model, you know rigging alone runs $500 minimum and takes weeks or months. That’s before you even think about software costs: Live2D is $100 a year, and Spine Pro is $379 (Spine Ess is $69 but lacks mesh deform which is required for these kinds of animations).

So I built a free tool that auto-rigs see-through models so you don’t have to spend hours doing it manually

I’m not trying to compete with Live2D, I’m one person. What I made is a mesh-deform-capable web app that can automatically rig see-through output. It handles edge cases like merged arms or legs, and only needs a few seconds of manual input to place joints (shoulders, elbows, neck, etc.) if you want to tweak things. I also integrated DWPose so it can rig the whole model for you automatically, though that requires WebGPU and adds a 50MB download, so manual joint placement is a totally fine alternative and only takes a moment anyway.

The full workflow looks like this:

Static image -> background removal -> see-through decomposition (free on HuggingFace) -> Stretchy Studio = auto-rigged and ready to animate

The app handles multi-layer management, separate draw order, and uses direct keyframe animation similar to After Effects. There are still bugs I’m working through, but all the core features are in.

On the roadmap:

• Export to Spine and Dragonbones
• A standalone JS render library for loading and displaying characters rigged in the app (similar to Live2D’s Unity/Godot/JS runtimes)

Live2D’s export format is completely closed with no documentation, so that one’s off the table for now.

Would love feedback, bug reports, or feature requests. This is still early but it’s functional and free to use.

https://github.com/MangoLion/stretchystudio