Octostudio:
Animation Blocks
Character Rigging, Asset Preparation, and Animation for Octostudio
Design: Charmaine Yu
Studio: Froghouse
Froghouse Studio brought me in to help build a highly requested feature for OctoStudio, MIT Media Lab's free coding and animation app for kids. The feature would let characters switch between poses to create simple animations — giving young creators new ways to tell richer, more expressive stories.
That work became the foundation for OctoStudio's shipped "Animate with Costumes" feature, using new "play costume" and "set costume" blocks.
The assets that existed couldn't do what the new animation blocks feature needed.
OctoStudio's existing emoji assets, based on Google's Noto library, were disorganized merged vectors — not built for animation. To support the new feature, they needed to be redrawn and grouped intuitively for movement, all within a tight 128×128 pixel art board, and simple enough for kids to manipulate without the rig breaking apart visually.
I rebuilt 50+ characters to actually move.
I redrew and restructured each character into puppet-ready assets within those constraints, then built proof-of-concept frame-by-frame animations (with a limitation of 2-4 frames) to demonstrate how each one could come to life.
Simpler wasn't the compromise — it was the better choice.
For animal walk cycles, I explored two rigging approaches: one with legs split into two segments for smoother, more lifelike movement, and one with legs kept as a single group — stiffer, but more intuitive to manipulate, with a quirky charm that suited the characters. Given OctoStudio's young users, I chose the simpler rig, and it became the approach applied across most animal walk cycles.
That same thinking — simplifying where it made sense, while still allowing for a range of movement — carried across the rigs built for people and other animal characters too.
The feature is live — the impact is still being written.
"Animate with Costumes" launched in July 2026, giving kids a new way to bring characters to life through simple, expressive animation. It's early — we don't yet know how kids will use it, or what they'll build with it — but the rig system behind it was built with exactly that open-ended creativity in mind.