ZOBI ANIMATOR

Browser-Based Character Animation Tool

Browser-Based Character
Animation Tool

CHALLENGE

Animating a character for social content normally means a desk: a puppet rig, a desktop application, a quiet room for the voice recording, and a render at the end. By the time that setup is ready, the idea has usually cooled off.

I wanted to find out how much of that could run in a phone browser instead: record the voice, animate the character to it, fix the timing, and export a finished video, without installing anything.

APPROACH

The character comes in as a layered Photoshop file. The app reads the layers and assembles a puppet from them: body poses, mouth shapes, eyes, brows, blinks. Nothing is redrawn for the tool, so a character I design in Illustrator or Photoshop can be animated an hour later.

Everything after that happens on a timeline, the way an editor expects it: one track per aspect of the performance (pose, mouth, mood, gaze, blink, position), plus the voice recording underneath as a waveform. The mouth track fills itself. The app analyses the recording after it is made, not while it runs, which is what makes the quality possible: it can look at the whole take, go back over it, and revise an early decision once the rest of the sentence is known.

ROLE

Concept, interface design, and the build. I am a motion designer, not a developer. I wrote the application with Claude Code. I describe the behaviour I want, see it run, judge it, and change it. That is close to how I already work in After Effects, and it meant the decisions that matter stayed design decisions: what the tool does, what it refuses to do, and how it feels under the thumb.

RESULT

Exploration

A working tool, used for my own content.

Lip sync is the part I kept measuring. A small model trained on 200 speakers now places the right mouth shape 81 % of the time on speakers it has never heard, up from 51 % before it. Around it: an IK rig for poses the puppet does not have, up to four characters in one scene, a vector drawing area, automated subtitles, music, titles, and an MP4 export that renders every frame rather than recording the screen.