Charios
Browser-based 2D character animation tool for game makers. Drop a PNG, Charios auto-cuts every layer, snaps them to a fixed 17-bone humanoid rig, retargets motion-capture clips, then exports to Unity, Godot, Unreal or GIF.
What is Charios?
Charios is a browser-based 2D character animation tool aimed at game makers who already have character art but no rig. It is a Next.js web application on the public internet: there is nothing to download, compile or configure.
The workflow runs end to end inside one editor. You drop a PNG onto the page and Charios detects every alpha island — head, torso, limbs, accessories — and turns each one into a transparent layer. Those layers snap onto a fixed 17-bone humanoid skeleton: you never draw or paint bones, the tool works out which bone each sprite belongs to. Joint magnets, per-bone length and thickness, per-layer repaint and a pixel-level eraser handle the corrections, while linear-blend skinning — called smart-deform — makes sprites bend with the rig instead of riding it like a billboard, with live preview and no re-bake.
Animation comes from motion capture rather than from a timeline. A humanoid library ships in the box, although the site quotes its size inconsistently: 13 bundled Mixamo presets on the pricing page, 87 clips in the documentation and 343 animations in the public playground. You can also drag any humanoid .bvh from CMU, Truebones or Rokoko, or any .fbx from Mixamo, onto the editor; the retargeter normalises bone lengths and extrapolates hands and feet that the source rig does not expose. Anim-check plays nine clips at once on a 3x3 grid to catch the frame that breaks on one animation only, and a test-run modal lets you drive the character with the keyboard at 60 FPS.
Two generative features sit behind a credit meter: a full restyle that returns five variants at once — Ice, Molten, Royal Gold, Shadow and Nature — through a Gemini call in roughly 30 to 60 seconds, and single-layer regeneration, turning an open hand into a fist for instance. Background removal afterwards runs on-device in a Web Worker, so the canvas stays responsive.
Exports are real engine artefacts rather than a bare sprite atlas: an animated GIF, a Unity prefab with an AnimationClip and an AnimatorController, a Godot 4 scene with an AnimationPlayer, or Unreal Engine 5 Paper2D sprites with a Blueprint-building Python script. Bone positions and animation curves are baked in, and the export is generated locally — the documentation states that your art never leaves your browser.
What it does
- Cut a single character PNG into transparent, rig-ready layers automatically
- Snap those layers onto a 17-bone humanoid skeleton without drawing a single bone
- Retarget bundled or imported motion-capture clips onto the character
- Export a posed, animated character to Unity, Godot, Unreal Engine 5 or GIF
- Preview nine animations at once to find the one broken frame
- Play-test the character with the keyboard, in the browser, at 60 FPS
- Restyle a character into five AI variants, or regenerate a single layer
When to use Charios / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Charios is the right fit.
When to use Charios
- Indie game developers who need a posed, animated 2D character for Unity, Godot or Unreal without learning Spine or DragonBones
- Solo artists and illustrators who want to bring a finished character sheet to life without rigging it from scratch
- Game-jam teams that have to animate a handful of enemies in a weekend
- Marketing and design teams who need short looping character GIFs for social posts, landing pages and decks
- Mobile game makers exporting 2D characters into Unity or Unreal projects, who can work from a desktop browser
When not to use Charios
- Anyone animating non-humanoid creatures or needing a custom skeleton: the rig is fixed at 17 humanoid bones and you cannot draw your own
- Studios that require a rich animation toolset — the vendor openly trades tooling depth for a shorter learning curve
- Organisations with procurement or compliance requirements: no legal entity, no address, no GDPR statement, no DPA and no subprocessor list are published
- Users who need to work from a phone or a tablet: the editor is desktop-first and mobile is limited to viewing projects
- Teams that need a settled, documented product today, given a v0.26.0 release, a domain registered in May 2026 and several unresolved contradictions between pages
How to use Charios
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Sign in with Google One Tap from any page; there is no password to set.
- Drop a transparent PNG of your character onto the editor and watch the four-step preview read the file, detect layers, segment bones and fit the rig.
- Confirm the alpha islands Charios found, or Shift-drag your own rectangles; each crop snaps to its nearest bone.
- Adjust the result: move, scale, rotate and flip layers, nudge with the arrow keys, repaint a layer, or tune length and thickness bone by bone.
- Pick a clip from the bundled mocap library, or drag your own .bvh or .fbx onto the page and let the retargeter normalise it.
- Switch on smart-deform and the skeleton overlay to check how the sprites bend against the rig.
- Run anim-check to play nine clips at once on a 3x3 grid and spot a frame that only breaks on one animation.
- Open the test-run modal and drive the character with the arrow keys, WASD, shift and space at 60 FPS.
- Optionally spend credits on a batch of five AI variants, or on regenerating a single layer.
- Click Export in the top-right and pick GIF, Unity, Godot or Unreal; a single zip downloads to your machine.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- No install and no build step: the editor runs in the browser, and the documentation claims most users ship a first export within ten minutes
- The fixed rig removes the most expensive part of 2D animation, since you never draw or weight bones
- Open mocap import — .bvh from CMU, Truebones or Rokoko, .fbx from Mixamo — with automatic bone-length normalisation
- Four genuine engine exports with baked bone positions and animation curves, so characters land posed instead of collapsed at the origin
- A permanent free plan with every editor feature unlocked, capped only at three active projects and requiring no payment card
- Exports are generated locally and, according to the documentation, your art never leaves the browser
- Failed generations are refunded automatically, top-up credits never expire, and VAT and sales tax are handled by Polar as merchant of record
Cons
- The site names no legal entity, publishes no postal address and has no legal-notice page
- The word GDPR appears nowhere on the site: no DPA, no subprocessor list and no Article 27 representative
- Several pages contradict each other: Pro at $20 per month on the pricing cards versus $12 in the homepage FAQ, Polar versus LemonSqueezy as the payment processor, a 30-day versus a 7-day refund window, and Studio versus Team as the name of the team plan
- Export scope is stated inconsistently, with PNG sequence, JSON and Godot presented as shipped in some places and as roadmap in others, while the mocap library is quoted at 13, 87 or 343 clips depending on the page
- The editor is desktop-first; on mobile you can view projects and share previews but not rig
- The humanoid rig is fixed, which rules out non-humanoid creatures and custom skeletons
- The product is very young — v0.26.0, domain registered in May 2026 — and support runs through a single generic address answered within 24 business hours on Asia/HK time
Pricing & Plans
Charios operates on a freemium basis. A permanent free plan is available at no cost, limited to three active projects and 30 monthly credits, with every editor feature unlocked and no payment card required. The lowest paid entry point is the Pro plan at USD 20.00 per month, which lifts the project cap and raises the monthly credit allowance to 500. A Studio plan is offered at USD 45.00 per seat per month, and a one-off Founders lifetime licence is advertised at USD 50.00. Credit top-up packs start at USD 5.00 and never expire. Prospective buyers should note that the homepage FAQ quotes the Pro plan at USD 12.00 per month, which contradicts the pricing page.
- 3 active projects
- 30 credits per month
- all editor features
- 13 bundled mocap clips
- community support
- unlimited projects
- 500 credits per month
- priority asset processing
- higher upload cap
- PNG sequence and JSON export
- email support
- everything in Pro
- 2
- 000 pooled credits per seat
- self-serve seat management
- shared asset library
- audit log
- one invoice
- priority support
- every Pro feature forever
- a one-off 5
- 000-credit bonus
- 30 credits per month
- 25% off every top-up pack
- founder badge
- $5
- $20
- $69 or $199 for 100
- 450
- 1
- 800 or 6
- 000 credits
- stacking on any plan and never expiring
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Charios handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is no GDPR implementation to report. The word GDPR appears nowhere on the site: a search across every archived page, HTML included, returned no occurrence. No Article 27 EU representative is designated, no data protection officer is named, no Data Processing Agreement is published or offered, and no subprocessor list exists. The privacy policy, dated 23 May 2026, states no legal basis for processing, no retention period and no international transfer mechanism. What it does offer is operational rather than legal: you can delete your account at any time from the dashboard, which removes your projects, assets and profile, and you can request an export of your data by writing to hello@charios.com. The publisher's legal identity and postal address are absent from the site.
Who owns the data?
Under the terms of service, you keep all rights to the assets you upload. Charios receives only a non-exclusive licence to store, process and render those assets so that the editor can do its job, and you remain responsible for holding the rights to whatever you upload, whether it is original art, licensed art or public-domain work. The FAQ confirms that everything created in Charios, including exports and derivatives, is yours and can be used commercially. The privacy policy states that Charios does not sell, share or monetise your data with third parties, while noting that staff can reach the database and storage for support and reliability purposes.
Reuse rights
The terms place no restriction on what you do with your own output. You retain your rights, and the FAQ states explicitly that characters, exports and derivatives created in Charios can be used however you want, commercial work included. No further permission, attribution or licence request is required, and no revenue share is mentioned. The constraint sits upstream rather than downstream: you must already hold the rights to the artwork you upload. Brand assets are handled separately — the brand page allows free use of the Charios mark when you reference or link to the product, but forbids altering it or using it to imply endorsement.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Charios names its providers but not its jurisdictions. According to the privacy policy, account and project metadata are held in Postgres on Supabase, while asset bytes — the PNG layers you upload — sit in Cloudflare R2; both are scoped to each user by row-level security. The about page adds that the application itself is a Next.js app running on Vercel. No hosting country, no region and no data-residency option is stated anywhere on the site, so neither the applicable jurisdiction nor the possibility of an EU-only deployment can be established from the published material. A DNS lookup resolves the domain to an anycast address announced by Amazon in the United States, but that describes delivery infrastructure and is not a statement about where user data is stored. One point works in the user's favour: exports are produced in the browser, and the documentation states that nothing is uploaded to Charios servers during an export.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Charios.
- You cannot tell who you are contracting with: no legal entity, no company address and no legal-notice page appear anywhere on the site
- Uploading client or studio artwork to a service that publishes no GDPR statement, no DPA and no subprocessor list may put you in breach of your own obligations
- Prices and terms contradict each other between pages, so budget from the pricing page rather than the homepage FAQ and expect the refund window to be disputed
- Features described as shipped in one place and as roadmap in another can leave a project stuck at export time; test the export you actually need on a free project first
- The terms disclaim liability for data loss and tell you to keep your own backups, so treat the cloud project as a working copy rather than an archive
- Mocap libraries make it easy to ship motion nobody authored: leaning on stock clips can flatten a character's personality if it replaces deliberate animation choices
- AI restyling and layer regeneration produce art you did not draw; check that a generated variant has not drifted from your art direction, and remember you remain responsible for the rights to whatever you fed in
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low. Charios is a web application: no installation, no build step and no configuration. You sign in with Google One Tap, drop a transparent PNG, and the tool cuts the layers and fits the rig for you, so no bone drawing and no rigging experience are required. The official tutorial claims five minutes end to end, and the documentation says most users ship a first export within ten minutes. The real prerequisites are practical: a desktop machine with a precise pointer and a roomy screen, a recent browser, and character art already on a transparent background.
Deployment
Integrations
Behind Charios
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Charios.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to install anything to use Charios?
Can I bring my own motion capture?
Which formats can I export to?
Is the free plan really free?
How do credits work?
Can I use the results commercially?
Where is my data stored?
Is there a minimum age?
Should you pick Charios?
Charios occupies a narrow but genuinely under-served gap: the moment between finished character art and a rig that moves. By fixing the skeleton at 17 humanoid bones and refusing to let you draw bones at all, it removes the step that keeps most 2D artists away from skeletal animation, and the payoff is iteration speed. The mocap-first approach, open .bvh and .fbx import, the 3x3 anim-check grid and four real engine exports with baked curves make it a credible shortcut for indie developers, game-jam teams and marketing designers who need a looping character clip by tomorrow.
The reservations concern the publisher rather than the product. No legal entity is named, no postal address is published, and the word GDPR appears nowhere on the site; there is no DPA and no subprocessor list. Anyone buying on behalf of an organisation will find nothing to hand to a procurement or compliance team. The site also contradicts itself repeatedly: the Pro plan costs $20 on the pricing cards and $12 in the homepage FAQ, payments run through Polar on one page and LemonSqueezy in the terms, refunds last 30 days or 7 days depending on where you read, and the bundled clip count is quoted as 13, 87 or 343.
The risk is nevertheless cheap to take. The free plan is permanent, unlocks every editor feature and needs no card, so the tool can be judged on a real character before any money changes hands. Treat Charios as a fast, promising and very young utility rather than as an animation pipeline to build a studio around, and keep your own backups of anything that matters.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.