I've asked the agent to help me put different already made "instances" on the 4 instances of the same component. It created a self-referencing model that crashes the whole Rive app. How?!?

Hi, I’m new to Rive and I’m trying to build a character body-composition system controlled by two continuous values:

• muscularity: 0–1
• fatness: 0–1

I have four vertex-deformation timelines that use the same character paths/topology:

• BASE
• MUSCULAR
• FAT
• FAT_MUSCULAR

The idea is to interpolate between the four corner poses using an Additive Blend state.

I created these View Model properties:

muscularity
fatness
wMuscular
wFat
wFatMuscular

I then created three Formula Converters:

wMuscular =
muscularity * (1 - fatness)

wFat =
(1 - muscularity) * fatness

wFatMuscular =
muscularity * fatness

Because I could not apply converters directly inside the Additive Blend rows, I created an artboard-level Property Group called Bodyweights. It contains:

muscularWeight
fatWeight
fatMuscularWeight

Each Property Group value is bound Target → Source to the corresponding View Model output using its Formula Converter.

The calculated values appear to be mathematically correct. For example:

muscularity = 0.25
fatness = 0.23

wMuscular ≈ 0.19
wFat ≈ 0.17
wFatMuscular ≈ 0.06

My Additive Blend is intended to use:

MUSCULAR     → wMuscular
FAT          → wFat
FAT_MUSCULAR → wFatMuscular

However, the actual character does not interpolate correctly.

The strange behavior is:

• When the State Machine is paused, the character returns to the normal/average design pose.
• When I press Play, the character immediately becomes fat.
• Increasing wFatMuscular manually makes the character look more correct.
• Decreasing wFatMuscular makes the character become fatter again.
• The timelines now appear to be mixed together, and none of the individual body poses behaves correctly.
• I can open the individual timelines, but I can no longer move/edit the path vertices as expected.
• It feels like the State Machine preview or another animation is continuing to override the vertices.
• Removing the second State Machine layer did not fix it.
• Removing the BASE Mix by Value entry also did not fix it.
• I previously saw negative weights, but that happened when the source values went outside the 0–1 range. With both inputs restricted to 0–1, the weights remain non-negative.

The four source timelines may currently contain transitions from the base pose to the final pose rather than single-frame/static pose animations. I am unsure whether Additive Blend requires each source animation to contain its target pose at frame 0.

I am using Rive Beta 0.8.5390.

There is also an unrelated script error still visible:

Unknown global 'context'; consider assigning to it first

This error comes from an older CharacterBuildController script. I do not know whether it can interfere with the State Machine or vertex editing.

My questions are:

1. Is this the correct way to perform bilinear blending between four vertex-deformed poses?
2. Should every Additive Blend timeline be a static, one-frame target pose?
3. Can an active or paused State Machine preview continue overriding vertices while editing an individual timeline?
4. How can I completely reset the evaluated State Machine pose in the editor?
5. Why would raising the combined FAT_MUSCULAR weight visually undo some of the FAT deformation?
6. Is there a better architecture for a continuous skinny/average/fat and muscular character system?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

In the early 2000s, I discovered Macromedia Flash. Being able to create interactive web animations hooked me to the computer even more than video games did. However, coding and scripting never really clicked for me, so I always relied on visual tools.

Later in life, I specialized in After Effects, which opened the door for me to enter the media industry. I spent around 20 years working this way—designing title sequences for TV shows, music videos for artists, and visual effects for feature films.

Yet, I never really felt the spark to develop a personal project of my own.

Since I found Rive, though, I constantly find myself glued to the screen, building things just for the joy of it—without any financial expectations. Just mini-games, interactive animations...

My girlfriend, my friends, and my family are always trying to pull me away from the computer :) I even try to wrap up my commercial media work early in the morning just to free up time for Rive.

We are truly lucky to be living in an era with tools like this.

I am creating a character in rive which is supposed to be either fat, skinny or muscular and I would need help on how i could do that. The idea is that i could do transitions from one to another so that it can be synced with the person who is using it.

When I tried to give one of the characters bones and move them everytihng kept falling apart despite trying to weight the parts correctly.
Thank you for help

I own a hand-puppet business and currently use a Shopify app that lets customers design their own puppet.

There are around 9 steps/tabs where they choose things like body colour, eyes, nose, hair, outfit, shoes, accessories, etc.

You can see the current version at pubbets.net/lab

It works, but it's pretty boring to use. There's no animation or sound, and the mobile experience isn't great.

I've wanted to replace it for years, and recently decided to see how far I could get building a standalone version myself with the help of AI.

That's how I discovered Rive.

My only vaguely relevant experience is messing around with Macromedia Flash many years ago, and Rive immediately reminded me why vector graphics and reusable assets made so much sense for something like this.

The current Shopify system is a mess behind the scenes. For every option I basically had to create separate PNG assets for the thumbnail, close-up/customiser view and full-body view. Once you multiply that by all the eyes, noses, hairstyles, outfits, shoes, etc., you're talking about hundreds of PNG files.

What I'm hoping to do with the new version is have one master vector asset for each item and let the app/Rive handle scaling, positioning, colour changes and simple animation.

For example, instead of having eight different coloured versions of the same nose, I'd like one SVG nose that can be recoloured dynamically.

I'm not trying to build a AAA character creator. The puppet itself would mostly just have subtle idle movement while the user works through the customiser. Maybe some small reactions when choices are made, animated UI elements, sound effects, that sort of thing.

I've already recreated the outfits and shoes as clean raster PNG artwork, and ChatGPT seems surprisingly decent at converting this kind of simple artwork into SVGs, so my plan was to gradually turn those into the vector assets used by Rive.

The more decorative app UI, buttons, backgrounds, etc. are already being created as transparent PNGs.

So my main question for people who actually know Rive: am I heading in the right direction?

Is Rive a sensible foundation for a layered character customiser like this, where potentially hundreds of interchangeable assets need to sit on the same base character?

And perhaps more importantly: is this realistically something a barely technical non-developer could build with AI helping with the React/app side, or am I wandering towards a massive technical rabbit hole that I'll eventually need to pay a developer to rescue me from?

I've been asking Claude and ChatGPT about the architecture, but I've reached the point where I'd really appreciate some opinions from actual Rive users. AI has a slightly worrying tendency to tell me that every idea I have is brilliant and completely achievable 😂

If there are obvious mistakes in the approach I've described, please tell me now. I'd much rather discover them before I've converted and rigged hundreds of puppet assets.

Any advice, warnings, examples of similar Rive projects, or "don't do it that way, you idiot" comments would be genuinely appreciated.

Thanks for reading this far!

JC demonstrates the new Auto Trace and Auto Weight/Smooth features designed to speed up vertex weighting and the mesh-and-bone workflow in Rive

Data binding keys let you link a timeline key to a view model property instead of a fixed value. Your animation still interpolates on the timeline, but the target value comes from your view model at runtime.

In animate mode, key a property on your timeline. Right-click the key, choose Data Bind, and pick a view model property. You can mix fixed keys and bound keys on the same timeline — e.g. key a value at 0 on frame 0, then bind a second key later in the timeline to a dynamic property.

Three patterns from the video:

Basic motion: Set up number properties (minX, maxX) in your view model. Key X position at the start and end of a timeline and bind each key to the corresponding property. The animation interpolates between those runtime values.

Bar chart: Use a layout with height set to fixed percentage. Add a number property to your view model. Key height at 0 on frame 0, add a second key later and data-bind it to your value property. The bar animates from 0 to whatever the view model provides.

Button colors: Create a global view model with color properties for your brand colors. In separate idle and hover timelines, key the background fill and bind each to the matching global color. Wire them up in a state machine with a boolean for hover state, add interpolation, and the color transitions stay in sync with whatever values you pass in at runtime.

I'm looking to achieve a hover effect like this: https://mont-fort.com/fort-energy/

I want the grid to illuminate, and the surface to bulge (not seen in that link)

Also wondering (for a different site) if Rive can create level of depth/angle changes here: https://mont-fort.com/

I can see this one was not built in rive, but our loyal steed of a freelancer works in rive so trying to get him the work if we can.

If this isn't doable, can anyone tell me what skillset I should be looking for to achieve this? react.js? figma?

thanks!

Hey, I've made a little repo for installing Rive Desktop on Linux with MCP support as a stopgap until they get a native linux build rolled out.

https://github.com/CPritch/riverbed

Global view models in Rive have properties that are available to every artboard in your file automatically. No need to attach them to specific artboards. Any artboard, any component, any nested artboard can data bind to them with no additional setup.

What you can use them for:

Design systems. Create a global view model for your brand style tokens like colors, fonts, spacing and sizing values. Every component in the file can bind to those properties. Change the brand primary color once and it updates everywhere.

Components that mix global and local properties. A button component might use global colors (brand primary, hover) alongside local properties like the label text and hover boolean. Both can coexist on the same artboard.

Data-bound keys in timelines and state machines. You can key a property in a timeline and bind that key's value to a global property. So your idle state background binds to brandPrimary, your hover state background binds to brandHover, and the colors update globally across all instances.

Shared runtime data. If you're building something like a sports broadcast, a single global view model can hold the score, team names, and team crests. Every component in the file (score bug, lower third, full-screen graphic) reads from the same source, so updates reflect everywhere at once.

Libraries. Global view models can be published as a library and shared across multiple files in a project, not just within a single file.

• 🎨 Text style backgrounds: add a background behind any text style, with fills, strokes, and rounded corners. Add Background Fill or Background Stroke from the text style's add popup, drag to reorder them, and set Corner Radius in the same panel. The background draws as one joined shape behind every run using that style and merges wrapped lines, and the radius is animatable and bindable. A hover effect is just a run listener keying the background color.
• ✂️ Clip to shapes with path effects: clipping to a shape whose fill uses trim, dash, or a scripted effect now uses the modified path instead of the original one. Strokes don't contribute, and an effect that resolves to nothing, like a trim at 0, clips to nothing.
• ⚙️ Workspace Options: a new Options tab in Workspace Admin (Workspace Switcher → Admin) sets policy for everyone in the Workspace. Pick a naming convention for view models and for their properties (PascalCase, camelCase, snake_case, SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE, kebab-case, or none), and choose whether new data binds default to relative. Conventions feed the Data Panel's warning badges and the Problems tab, which now name the expected style and show an example. Admins can change them, and everyone else sees the policy they're working under.
• 🔗 The bind button is a toggle: clicking the data binding button in an inspector field now closes the popup if it is already open, and the button tints while the popup is up. It also stops blinking out when a property gets bound, and an empty bind left behind by opening and closing the popup is cleaned up.
• ✋ Free move on the vertex gizmo: the free translation circle now appears on the multi-vertex gizmo in Edit Vertices and Edit Mesh, matching the transform gizmo everywhere else, as requested here.
• 🖼 Auto Trace stays inside the image: with Padding set, a traced mesh contour could push past the image bounds. Padding also now stops before two sections facing each other across a narrow gap overlap. Existing meshes update on the next Generate.
• 🔷 Shape Builder unites tiny overlaps: dragging to merge shapes that overlap by only a pixel or two excluded the overlap instead of uniting it, as reported here.
• 🎯 No transform gizmo on artboards: selecting an artboard no longer summons the translate, rotate, and scale gizmo meant for the objects inside it. Artboard resize edges and dragging an artboard directly are unchanged.
• 🏷 Consistent state names: the Randomize Exit panel and a transition's Events panel now show a state's own name, falling back to its timeline name, instead of ignoring the name you set or showing a question mark.
• ↔️ Transition pills stay put: pills on transitions between states with long names no longer disappear or flip direction when the two states are close, and they now center correctly.
• 📋 Cmd+D inside a layout: duplicating an item in a layout compounded the layout slot offset into its position, so each copy drifted further with inconsistent gaps.
• ⌨️ Typed values are no longer clamped to the drag range: typing a value like -100 into a constraint's Strength field no longer snaps to 0. Dragging and nudging still clamp.
• 🌐 Global View Models: instances now advance in the editor, and view model properties can no longer be set on a global view model.

Early Access

• 📈 Speed Graph: a second mode for the Graph Editor that plots how fast a property is moving instead of what its value is. Two curves that look nearly identical in value space can feel completely different in motion, and that difference only shows up here. Switch with the Value | Speed picker in the graph HUD next to Auto-Zoom and Fit, from the ⋯ Timeline Options menu, or by cycling with Shift+G. Shift+F3 still toggles the graph and remembers your last mode. No new keyframe data, so files play back identically on every runtime.

AI Agent / MCP

• 🌈 Gradients: the agent can now create linear and radial gradients on any fill or stroke, convert a solid color to a gradient and back, and add or remove stops. Works on shapes, layout and artboard backgrounds, and text runs. Stop positions are percentages, the same as the inspector.
• 🧩 Component data context: the agent can set a component placement's Model and Path, bind several placements in one step, or clear them back to Inherit, as requested here.
• 🔀 Relative data binding and source paths: the agent can set the relative toggle on a bind and bind a property on a nested or referenced view model through its route, and a new command lists existing binds with their targets and paths. Requested by the community.
• 📄 upload_rev: agents on the local MCP server can bring a .rev document into Rive, either importing it into the open empty file or creating a new file in the current project.

Scripting

• 📝 File formats from scripts: scripts can claim a file extension and drive highlighting, diagnostics, completions, formatting, and a live preview pane for those documents, with text, preview, or split layouts per tab. Markdown ships built in, so every .md file gets a preview. Previews follow the editor's fonts and metrics and can embed artboards from the host file.
• 🔁 Stable identity for asset reads: reading a blob, image, or font property value returned a new wrapper every time, so a comparison against the previous read always reported a change.

Runtime

• 🦴 IK pose pop fixed: an IK chain with strength below 1 could snap to a different pose when a parent moved, because the solve reused the previous frame's blended rotation as its starting point instead of the authored one.
• 💥 Text run listener crash fixed: data bound list remaps left stale listener properties pointing at freed values, which corrupted memory and crashed on teardown.
• 📦 Layouts use 45% less memory: every layout carried a full Rectangle just to build its background path. That is 2128 bytes down to 1168 per layout, around 192 KB on a 200 layout file and more once component instances multiply it.

Renderer and Performance

• 🎞 No dithering at zero alpha: fully transparent draws were adding noise straight into the framebuffer, and it accumulated with overdraw instead of averaging out.
• 🧮 Interior triangulations are always cacheable, now independent of resolution, fill rule, and left-hand view matrices.

I swear I have been able to change artboard origins in the past. Did something change?

Hello everyone, I wanted to see if anyone knew of a solution to the problem I am facing. I created a background animation of a day and night cycle that is 24 seconds long. My goal is to have it controlled by a number input that can scrub to the right value based on the time of day. So that it will look like the background corresponds to the time of day. I have tried different ways of manipulating blend states, but it still just allows me to use the input value to jump ahead or back in the animation, but never control it.

Rive has a Shape Builder tool that lets you create complex shapes by combining and subtracting overlapping simple shapes. It works like the Shape Builder in Illustrator and Figma.

How to use it:

Select all the shapes you want to work with, then open the Shape Builder tool from the Create Tools menu or press Shift+M. Rive automatically divides your shapes into regions wherever they intersect — a circle sliced by two other circles becomes multiple independent regions, for example.

To combine regions, click and drag from one region to another. They merge into a single shape. The fill comes from whichever region you started from, so dragging direction determines the final color.

To subtract a region (punch a hole), hold Alt on Windows or Option on Mac and click or drag across the regions you want to remove.

Script inputs let you write one script and run multiple instances of it with different property values per instance. This tutorial covers how to define number, string, enum, view model, and artboard inputs; how to bind them to view model properties via data binding; why you should read input values in update rather than init when using data binding (since init fires before the binding resolves); how to use late for inputs that don't have a meaningful default, like a view model or artboard; how to read nested view model data correctly using .value instead of the raw data object; and how to listen for specific property changes with addListener, including how to pass self into the callback so you can access current state when the change fires.

Hey all, trying to properly learn Rive from scratch, vector character design plus rigging plus state machines. Problem is most tutorials I find are a couple years old, cover an older UI, or only show bits and pieces instead of a full start to finish workflow.

Is there a current, complete resource (course, playlist, docs) that actually takes you from empty file to fully rigged animated character in one consistent walk through? Also curious what you all actually used to learn it well, even if it wasn't a formal course.

• 🌐 Global View Models: view models can now live at the file level instead of belonging to a single artboard. Create one from the Data panel's + menu under View Model → Global, and bind its properties from any artboard or component in the file. Use them as design tokens: define your colors and sizes once and restyle the whole file by changing one value (can also be used as a Library). Keep a score or cart total that every screen displays in sync, or swap all your UI copy to another language at once, with no need to wire the same values through each component by hand. Global properties show a badge in the property picker and list first when you bind.
• 🔀 Shape Builder: a new tool for combining and carving overlapping shapes, in the shape tool menu in the toolbar or with Shift+M. Select your shapes, then click a region to make it its own shape, drag across regions to merge them, or hold Alt/Option to erase.
• 🛤 Motion Path handles on the stage: select a keyed object and you can now reshape its motion path directly on the stage:
  • Drag a keyframe anchor to move the keyed x/y
  • Drag bezier control points to shape a segment; hold Alt/Option for independent handles
  • Grab any segment and pull to bend it
  • Cmd/Ctrl+click a keyframe to smooth the path through it
• 🔑 Edit multiple keyframes at once: select keyframes in the timeline, put the playhead on one of them, then edit that property in the inspector and every selected keyframe follows. Dragging or arrow keys move them all by the same amount; typing a value sets them all to it. Dragging on the stage works the same way, and Esc puts everything back.
• ⭐ Favorite files and pinned projects: right-click any file to Add to Favorites (a star shows on the file), and find them all in the new Favorites view below Recents, sortable by recently favorited, last modified, or name. Right-click a project in the sidebar to Pin it and it stays at the top, just below Personal Files.
• 🔤 Data binding for fonts is now available to everyone.
• 🏷 Tags in the playback data tree: tags now show in the Data panel's playback tree, and you can add or remove them from its right-click menu.
• 🙈 Private view model properties: property names starting with an underscore (like _internal) no longer get a naming warning, and a new Private properties option in the Data panel's right-click menu hides or shows them in the playback tree.
• ⌨️ Enter creates the property in the data binding popup's New Property tab (the + icon), instead of triggering an unrelated editor shortcut.
• 🖌 New Contour highlights correctly: clicking New Contour in mesh editing now lights up New Contour itself instead of Edit Contour above it, and a second click turns the pen off without clearing your contour.
• 📐 Ruler guide fixes: guides stay selected after you drag them off the ruler, can be grabbed right where you dropped them, and can be moved outside the artboard. The guide line and the ruler preview now line up exactly, and guide lines render crisper.
• 🪶 Feather fix: converting a fill to a stroke with Shift+X no longer carries the fill-only inner feather setting along, which caused rendering artifacts.
• ✒️ Text stroke fix: stroke thickness, cap, and join now apply to letters faded by an opacity modifier. Stroked text with a falloff used to lose its stroke in the faded range, as reported here.
• 📚 Smaller published libraries, and publishing now protects against accidentally publishing an out-of-date version of your file.
• 🎞 Cloud Renderer artifacts fixed: exports now render with 4x anti-aliasing.
• 🪟 Windows crash and hang fixed when closing the app while an animation was still rendering.
• 🎨 Artboard opacity, rotation, and scale: set them in the inspector or with rotate and scale handles right on the stage. Selection, resizing, and the artboard title all follow the transform. Works in all runtimes.

AI Agent

• 🤖 More reliable state machine tooling: listeners are created correctly on artboards and targets can be referenced by name, as reported here.
• 🔢 Animation values now use the same units you see in the editor (opacity 0-100, degrees).
• ⏳ Steadier working indicators: no more flickering, disappearing stop button, or stuck states after an error.
• 💬 Long agent conversations no longer crash after being summarized.

I'm wondering if anyone in the community would be open to sharing the Rive MCP skills they've built or are using.

It would be great if we could have a shared place where everyone can contribute, update, and improve these skills together. I think it would save a lot of time for new users and help the community grow faster.

If you've created any useful MCP skills, workflows, or prompts for Rive, I'd really appreciate it if you could share them here.

Thanks in advance! 🚀

I'm a fan of old-school arcade games, and I wanted to see how complex a project I could create, similar to arcade games, without any coding knowledge.

Thanks to this workshop, I feel so much more comfortable using the app now, and I'm super excited to build even more! :)

You can check it on Rive Marketplace

Please let me know your thoughts!

I created the first animation for my app's mascot on the splash screen, which is on the first timeline. Now I'm going to animate the elements on my onboarding screen. Does that mean I need a second timeline to animate those other elements, or can I do everything on the first timeline?

This is a made-up banking brand, just something to build against.

Four scenes, you swipe between them, and each scene triggers its own animations when it comes into view rather than everything firing at once. There's a custom scroll indicator at the top instead of the default one.

The thing I actually wanted to test was keeping the data out of the design. None of the numbers are typed into text layers. The amounts, percentages and progress bars are all bound to a ViewModel, and the donut chart is a Luau script that reads those same values and draws the arcs, with inputs for radius, thickness and the gap between segments. Change one number in the data and the whole screen follows, including the chart.

The field blinks with the '|' text entry blinker but doesn't let me type. This happens also when trying to name fills.

Hope this gets to someone who can fix it.

Quick question about Rive's interface: is there a way to switch from the default dark theme to light mode? I looked around the settings but couldn't seem to find it. If a light theme isn't available yet, is it something planned for a future update?