Make it move
Blend two walks so the feet never skate, then check the arcs of the head, tail and paws as lines on the floor.
How to make it →Kinematic / Who it's for / Game devs
Characters, props and worlds for your game.
Sculpt a character, cut it down to a mesh your engine can afford, unwrap it, bake it and paint it. Rig it, give it a run, erode the land it lives on, and send it all to Unreal, Unity or any engine that reads FBX or glTF.
- Character artists
- Environment artists
- Technical artists
- Indie teams
- Game jams
- Students
- Sculpt
- Retopo
- Paint
- Animate
- Terrain
The work
Make the assets for your game.
Every step you take in the viewport lands on the canvas as a node. Change the third step after the tenth and the asset rebuilds from there.
01
Characters
Sculpt it, cut it down, rig it and make it move.
Sculpt from a ball
Pull horns and ridges out of a sphere. The mesh adds fine detail only under the brush.
How to make it →
Cut it down and unwrap it
Draw a clean low mesh over the sculpt, mark seams, relax the stretch and pack the islands.
How to make it →
Rig and skin it
Place the joints, bind the mesh, and paint the weights where the bend looks wrong.
How to make it →02
Props
Hard surface, painted wear and textures that tile.
Paint a prop in layers
Wood, roughness and dirt that only lands in the dents, each on its own layer with a mask.
How to make it →
Kitbash a hull
Click detail pieces onto a hull plate, each copy a little different in size and turn.
How to make it →
Put a decal on it
Stick a label on, slide it into place, and it goes out with the crate when you export to glTF.
How to make it →
Make a wall that tiles
Bricks you can resize, wear and recolor, used for color and height in one material.
How to make it →03
Worlds
Block out the level, grow the land, set the mood.
Block out a level
Model buildings by hand in the viewport. Every step stays on the canvas, so a wall you placed early still moves later.
Model in the viewport →
Carve a canyon
Water cuts the channels into a plateau and steps form in the rock bands.
How to make it →
Plant trees on the slopes
Mask the land by slope and height, then put a tree on every point, so the steep faces stay bare rock.
How to make it →Light a foggy set
Pillars sunk in colored fog with a light sweeping through, to find the mood of a level before it is built.
How to make it →04
2D and the store page
Sprites for a 2D game, and the pictures that sell it.
played back
Render a run cycle to sprites
Render the rigged fox side on with a clear background, then pack sixteen frames of one stride into a single sheet.
Render frames from the terminal →Spin a turntable
A camera that circles your model once, saved as a video for the store page or your portfolio.
How to make it →Cut the trailer
Put your captures in order, trim them, add fades and a title, and export an MP4.
Cut a short video →Stream the devlog
Go live on YouTube or Twitch from the same app, with your scene or your camera on screen.
How to go live →The work you know
Send it to Unreal and Unity.
Exports know the engine on the other end. A landscape goes out in the layout the landscape importer expects, and a character comes in standing up, at the right size, with the bone names the engine already uses.
peaks_height.pngheight, 16-bit
peaks_normal.pngnormal, DirectX green
peaks_ao.pngambient occlusion
peaks_weight_snow_mask.pngsnow layer
peaks_weight_rock_mask.pngrock layer
peaks_weight_grass_mask.pnggrass layer
Heightfield Unreal export writes the 16-bit height and one weight mask per layer, plus a small file that keeps the height range, so the landscape comes in at its real size. Heightfield texture export bakes the normal, occlusion, slope and curvature maps beside them. Unity gets RAW16 and splat maps from its own export.
3DGeoHeightfieldErodeHydro→3DGeoHeightfieldUnrealExport→3DGeoHeightfieldTextureExport
format fbx axis_preset unreal # Z up, centimeters bone_names unreal_5 # hips become pelvis, the left thigh thigh_l root_joint add # one root bone above everything fbx_version 7500 # binary
- TakesRig clip export writes each take on its own as an FBX take or BVH, with the same names and root, ready to import onto that skeleton.
- Unity, Blender, MayaPick their axis preset on an FBX or character export and the scene comes in standing up, at the right size.
- Any engineglTF and GLB keep PBR materials, textures, a second UV set for lightmaps, and four bone influences per point.
The work you know
Simulate fire, destruction and cloth.
A torch, a wall that breaks, a soft body that lands, a burst of sparks. Each one starts as a single node with presets, and opens into the full chain when you want to take it apart.
- Fire and smokeA sparse grid with combustion, buoyancy and turbulence. Bake it to OpenVDB frames, or render it to an image sequence for a flipbook.
3DGeoFluidSimpleSolver - DestructionVoronoi fracture with glue that holds until something hits it hard enough.
PhysicsWorld - Cloth and soft bodiesOne XPBD solver for cloth, hair, grain and soft bodies. Pull too hard and cloth tears.
PBDSimSolver - ParticlesEmitters, forces and a solver, with sparks, trails and swarms on the GPU.
3DGeoParticleSimpleEmitter
Fire and smoke knobs change while the sim runs. Any moving mesh goes out as an Alembic cache or as a mesh sequence, one file per frame.
What Kinematic adds
Make the sound effects and the music too.
Record a door creak, reverse it, stretch it and give it a long reverb, and it is a whoosh. Clean up a field recording, cut and layer takes, run your own plugins, and patch a synth or a drum machine for the soundtrack.
Record and editReverse, stretch, reverbCLAP and VST3 pluginsSynths and drum machinesWAV, FLAC, OGG, MP3
InputAudioFile→AudioReverse→AudioTimeStretch→AudioPlateReverb→AudioFade
What Kinematic adds
Act out a move and put it on your character.
No suit. A plain webcam reads a body, the points become a skeleton, get smoothed and are retargeted onto your character while you move. Face capture apps on a phone drive the face, motion files come in as BVH or C3D, and when a hit lands the same rig can go limp as a ragdoll.
LocalAIImageToBodyPose→3DGeoRigFromPoints→3DGeoRigSmoothMotion→3DGeoRigRetarget
Put your dance on a character →
How it fits
Files, gear and scripts.
What crosses into Kinematic, what goes back out to the engine, and what you can plug in. Every format is on Works with.
Opens
FBX, with bones, weights and takesglTF and GLBUSDAlembicOBJPLY and STLBVH and C3D motionVRM avatarsHeightmaps .png .tif .raw16 .exrSplat scansEXR and image sequencesVideoWAV, FLAC, MP3, OGG
Saves
FBX with Unreal, Unity, Blender or Maya axesRigged characters as FBX, glTF, USD or VRMTakes as FBX or BVHglTF and GLB with PBR materialsUSDAlembic cachesMesh sequencesUnreal landscapeUnity terrainTerrain tiles and mapsOpenVDB fire and smokePNG and EXR sequencesSprite sheetsVideoWAV, FLAC, OGG, MP3
Plugs in
- Pen tablets
- Sculpt and paint with pressure and tilt.
- Gamepads
- Sticks, triggers and buttons as live values you can wire to anything.
- Webcams
- Body, face and hand tracking, with no suit and no markers.
- Phones
- Live Link Face, iFacialMocap and other face capture apps drive a face.
- VMC
- Trade a performer with VSeeFace, Warudo or SlimeVR, both ways.
- MIDI controllers
- Move a knob to map it to any setting.
Script the pipeline
Python builds and poses rigs, opens and changes graphs, and drives the exports, with or without a window. The command line runs a whole folder of graphs in one process, renders frames with no window, and fails a build on a lint warning.
$ kinematic batch props/ out/ --python export.py $ kinematic render fox.kin --out sprites/run_%04d.png $ kinematic lint --strict level.kin
Coming from another app
Geometry crosses both ways through FBX, USD, glTF and Alembic. These pages walk through the ideas you already know and what they are called here.
Where to start
Tutorials and demos.
Each tutorial takes one sitting and ends with something finished. The demos come with the app: find them in the Demos browser, press Play, then open the canvas and take them apart.
Tutorials
Sculpt a little horned creatureSculpt and paint a horned creature from a plain ball.Tutorial →
Model a little hutModel a hut with a roof, a door and a window from one box.Tutorial →
Shatter a ball into piecesCrack a ball into shards that fly apart and settle.Tutorial →
Light a torchLight a torch flame, then make it taller and warmer.Tutorial →
Turn a creak into a whooshTurn any short sound into a swelling whoosh for a game.Tutorial →
Render a demo to pictures from the terminalRender every frame of a demo to pictures with one command.Tutorial →In the Demos browser
Unreal exportRidged peaks with hydro and thermal erosion, written out for an Unreal landscape.In the Demos browser
Rig playbackA rigged fox from a glTF file, with its weights and its take, playing on a loop.In the Demos browser
Motion arcsA running fox with the arcs of its head, tail and paws drawn on the floor.In the Demos browser
Triplanar crystalA crystal shaded with a world-space triplanar blend, so its veins flow across the folds with no seams.In the Demos browser
Full body reachHands that stay on two drifting balls while the spine twists to help.In the Demos browser
Million-poly dragonA dragon of about 250,000 triangles, lit and circled live.In the Demos browser
Procedural wall textureA brick wall built from patterns and noise, with rain streaking down it.In the Demos browser
BowlingA ball rolls down a lane and scatters ten pins against the back wall.In the Demos browserFair is fair
What it does not yet do.
Better to know now. Missing something your team needs? Reach out.
- No engine pluginThere is no Unreal or Unity plugin and no live link into their editors. Work crosses as files you export and import.
- It does not package a gameKinematic makes the art, the effects and the sound. Your engine builds and ships the game.
- FBX carries simple materialsPBR materials come out as simple phong ones in FBX. glTF and USD keep them.
- No LOD groups or vertex animation texturesMake each level of detail with Poly reduce and export it as its own file.
- No path tracerRenders are live, with PBR materials, image-based light and shadows, and no path-traced finals.
- Other apps' project files.blend files, Maya scenes and Unreal or Unity projects do not open. Bring models across as FBX, glTF, USD, Alembic or OBJ.
Download Kinematic.
Free. No account, no license key, nothing owed when your game ships. macOS, Windows, Linux and Raspberry Pi.