Grab a bone. Drag it. Key it.

Pose-to-pose animation for rigged Blender characters, like Pivot. Drag bones to pose them, and save your animation back into the .blend.

Download View source

MeshAnimate posing a robot with onion-skin ghosts and the timeline below

Video

A one-minute walkthrough: open a .blend, make a walk cycle, and save it.

Features

Pose, move to another frame, pose again.

Pose by dragging

Each bone has a handle at its end. Drag it to move the bone. The orange square moves the whole rig. Rotate and move tools are there for fine control.

IK

Limbs that use Blender IK are posed by dragging the hand or foot. Poles point the knee and elbow. The result matches Blender.

Onion skin

See the poses before and after the current frame as ghosts. You can also show the first frame as a ghost at all times.

Timeline

One row of keys for the whole pose. Drag keys to move them, box-select, set easing, and loop part of a clip.

Snapping

In front, side or top view, handles snap to a grid and bones turn in fixed steps.

Walk cycles and reference

Mirror a pose, or key the mirrored pose half a cycle later. Put an image or video behind the model.

Screenshots

The app with a sample robot rig.

Dragging an IK foot target onto the side-view snap grid — Moving a foot onto the 5 cm grid in side view.

Swinging a forearm in 15 degree steps — Turning a forearm in 15° steps.

Timeline with a preview range and box-selected keys — A preview range, selected keys and onion skin.

Posing against a reference image — Posing with a reference image.

Saving

MeshAnimate uses Blender to open and save .blend files.

Backups. Each save first copies the file to .meshanimate-backups/ next to it. The last 20 copies are kept.
Only your changes. Only the actions and bones you changed are saved. The rest of the file is not touched.
Normal Blender actions. New actions get a fake user and their own NLA track. Renaming a clip renames its track.
Plays like Blender. Playback uses the same curves and easing as Blender.
Outside changes. If you save the file in Blender while it's open here, MeshAnimate reloads it. If you have unsaved work, it asks whether to merge.

Some rigs move the mesh with other constraints, like Rigify's Copy Transforms, Stretch To or drivers. You can still animate and save them, but the preview may not match Blender exactly. MeshAnimate tells you when this is the case.

Shortcuts

Press ? in the app for the full list.

`Space`	Play / pause
`←` `→`	Previous / next frame
`Shift`+`←` `→`	Previous / next key
`K`	Key the current pose
`M`	Mirror pose
`Shift`+`M`	Mirror to half-cycle
`S`	Snapping on / off (hold `Ctrl` to switch it for one drag)
`Num 1` `3` `7`	Front / side / top view (`Ctrl`: opposite side)
`[` `]`	Preview range start / end
`\`	Clear preview range
`Q` `E` `W`	Pose / rotate / move tool
`O`	Onion skin
`Shift`+`O`	First-frame ghost
`Ctrl`+`S`	Save into the .blend

Requirements

You need Blender installed (tested with 5.2). MeshAnimate finds it on its own, or you can set the path in Preferences. Your .blend needs an armature. Skinned meshes and parts parented to bones both work.

bun install          # or npm install
bun run dev          # run with hot reload
bun run test         # unit tests
bun run build:linux  # or build:win / build:mac