Coming soon

About This Software

From a Drawing — or a 3D Model — to an Animated 2D Character

Donatello is a local desktop studio that turns characters into animation-ready 2D skeletal assets for Spine and DragonBones — completely on your machine, with no cloud uploads and no subscriptions. You can start from a single 2D image. Feed it a concept sketch or a piece of key art and Donatello builds a 3D character from it on your own hardware, then converts that into a cut-up, bone-driven 2D rig. Already have a rigged 3D model? Bring it and skip straight to the conversion. Either way you finish with sprites, a bone hierarchy and animations that drop into Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot, or any engine with a Spine or DragonBones runtime.

How It Works

• Start from a single reference image, or load a rigged 3D character (FBX, GLB, GLTF).

• Choose your angle — a 3/4 view or a side view, facing either direction.

• Generate — Donatello cuts the character into sprites and binds them to a 2D skeleton for you.

• Animate — pick clips from the built-in library, or bring motion from your own FBX, BVH, GLB or Spine files.

• Export — Spine JSON with a packed texture atlas, or a DragonBones JSON package.

Key Features

• Image to Character: Build a 3D character from one image with on-device AI (TRELLIS.2 or TripoSplat), then convert it to a 2D rig. Nothing is uploaded at generation time. Needs a reasonably capable GPU — the app checks your machine and tells you what it can run.

• 3D to 2D Conversion: Automatic sprite cutting and skinning from any rigged 3D source.

• Camera Angles: 3/4 and side views, in either facing direction.

• Built-in Animation Library: Hundreds of ready-to-use clips — walk, run, idle, attack, jump, reactions — adapted to your character. No source animation required.

• Bring Your Own Motion: Retarget from your FBX, GLB or BVH files, or append animations from an existing Spine project onto a character you did not make in Donatello.

• Animation Fine-Tuning: Per-clip controls for speed, amplitude, bounce, squash & stretch, follow-through and joint bias. Shape the feel of every motion without touching a keyframe.

• Auto-Rigging: Humanoid auto-rigging on CPU, Apple Silicon and NVIDIA GPUs. Adaptive rigging for non-humanoid characters on supported NVIDIA hardware.

• Beyond Humanoids: Bipeds are fully supported. Quadrupeds, arachnids, winged creatures, dragons, fish, dinosaurs and limbless characters ship as experimental profiles.

• Spine & DragonBones Export: Spine JSON (4.0 format) with texture atlas, or DragonBones 5.5-compatible JSON.

100% Local & Private: Everything runs on your workstation. Your models, reference images and generated assets never leave your machine.

Built for Game Developers & Technical Artists

• Whether you are an indie dev turning concept art into a playable character, a technical artist who needs a few hundred retargeted clips by tomorrow, or a pipeline engineer automating the 3D-to-2D step — Donatello does the tedious part so you can focus on the game.

• Spine and DragonBones output compatible with Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot, and custom engines.

• Works out of the box with standard humanoid rigs, including Mixamo.

• Complex source skeletons are simplified automatically to a bone count that performs well in 2D.

• Preview your character and scrub its animations before exporting.

AI workflow

Donatello uses AI to automate tedious work. Image-to-3D reconstruction and automatic segmentation are fast starting points; results vary by character complexity and will often benefit from manual review and small touch-ups.

System Notes

The core 3D-to-2D workflow runs on any supported machine. AI features (Image-to-3D, auto-rigging) require additional hardware — see System Requirements below. AI models are downloaded on first use and cached locally; they add between 2 GB and 15 GB to your disk usage depending on which models you activate.