Animate
Puppets & character turns
Drop-in limbs that bend properly, dress them in your own art, and give any character real turns — pads, dials and sliders, up to a full 360°.
Character rigging in Kreativus is built from two ideas: limbs — poseable parts that bend the way anatomy bends — and turns — controls that blend a character between drawn or posed states, up to a full drawn-feeling 360° turnaround. No bones to place, no weights to paint.
Limbs
The Puppet flyout in the toolbar drops in ready parts:
- Figure — torso, two arms, two legs, assembled and attached. Drag an end to pose it.
- Arm — bends at the elbow; drag the wrist. Leg — bends at the knee, the other way; drag the ankle.
- Tail — curves smoothly and tapers to a point. Finger — a small one; drop several on a hand.
- Head — a short fat limb with round ends; shape the jaw with its side curves.
- Plain Limb — no preset: two handles, a bend, and a brushed stroke.
A limb is two draggable ends — Root and Tip — with the bend worked out between them, plus a Crease control for where the joint sits and Root/Tip Width for its taper. Flip Bend is a keyframable switch (it holds and snaps, like a real joint decision), so an elbow can reverse mid-swing — a limb swinging past the body has to change which way it bends. Roll turns the limb about its own axis.
Every end is keyframable, so posing is animating: key the wrist across three frames and the elbow solves itself in between.
Limbs wear your art
A limb out of the box draws as a tube with the vector-brush engine — which means the whole Animated strokes wardrobe applies: give an arm the Charcoal brush and a Boil and it’s a sketch that stays alive while it bends. But the real move is dressing: attach your own drawn artwork to a limb and it bends with it — your character’s actual sleeves, boots and fur, posed by two handles.
Limbs can also be procedural through their turns — side profiles let a limb present a different silhouette as it rotates toward or away from camera, so an arm reads correctly across a turn with no redrawn art.
Turns
A turn blends a layer (a group, or a vector, raster, image or text layer) between states. Three control styles, each fitted to a different kind of motion:
- Pad — a square you push, with four ends that blend and add — expressions, looking around. Push toward two corners at once and both mix.
- Dial — goes all the way round and wraps — a full turnaround.
- Slider — one axis from rest to full that stops at both ends — a blink, a mouth opening, a fist closing.
Set up a turn by posing or swapping the artwork at each end (each direction keeps its own drawing list, so the three-quarter view really is a different drawing than the profile), then drive it with the one control. The control’s position keyframes like anything else — scrub-proof, easable, loopable.
The 360° character
Turns compose. Put a Dial on the head, pads on the eyes and mouth, dials on the limbs’ side profiles — then bind them to one master turn, and the whole character rotates through a full drawn 360° from a single dial: body silhouette, head, and every limb’s profile swapping and blending in step.
The Puppet board
Every turn in the composition, in one panel — the only place a turn is made, switched, linked or deleted. It’s ordered and indented by the follow chain rather than the layer stack, because that chain is the character: the master is the control you reach for, and the parts under it are what it moves. No more turning the body, then hunting the layer stack for the head, then the jaw — this is where a character stops being a pile of layers and becomes a thing with controls.
Assembled parts can be saved to your own parts library and dropped into the next character.
Recipe — a blink that reads. Slider turn on the eyelid group: rest = open, full = closed. Animate the slider 0 → 1 → 0 across four frames with a Hold on the closed frame. Two keys and a hold — the classic blink.
Recipe — a head turn with life. Dial on the head with left/three-quarter/front/three-quarter/right drawings. Keyframe the dial with Overshoot easing from the easing library — the head turns past and settles, and every in-between is the app blending your own drawings.