Ecosystem & Labs

BlackBox Animator is one piece of a bigger picture. Here's how it all connects.

The BlackBox Creative Suite

The creative apps. All in your browser. No installs. No gatekeeping.

BlackBox Skinner

Professional vertex weight painting for skeletal meshes. Paint bone influences directly onto your model with visual feedback. Fix that knee that bends weird. Smooth those shoulder weights. Make your rig behave.

Launch Skinner →

BlackBox Animator

You're here. Animation retargeting, FK/IK posing, spring bones, facial expressions, and universal model support. The animation powerhouse.

Launch Animator →

BlackBox Terraformer

Procedural terrain editor with sculpting tools, biome painting, and seamless export. Build the world your characters will inhabit — mountains, valleys, rivers, the lot.

Launch Terraformer →

poqpoq World

An AI-first metaverse. Take your animated avatars, custom animations, hand-painted rigs, and sculpted terrains — and bring them into a shared 3D space. Your creation, live and interactive.

Enter the World →

The Full Pipeline

Here's the dream workflow. Each step is optional — jump in wherever makes sense for your project:

Create Your Character Use VRoid Studio, Meshy3D, TripoAI, Ready Player Me, Character Creator, MakeHuman — whatever tool speaks to you. Export as GLB, FBX, or VRM.
Fix the Weights (Skinner) AI-generated characters sometimes have sloppy weight painting. Load your model in BlackBox Skinner and paint bone influences until every joint deforms cleanly.
Animate (Animator) Load your model in BlackBox Animator. Import Mixamo animations, retarget them, refine with FK/IK, add facial expressions, and preview spring bone dynamics.
Build the Terrain (Terraformer) Your characters need somewhere to exist. BlackBox Terraformer lets you sculpt landscapes with procedural generation, biome painting, and export to BBWorlds format.
Deploy (World) Export as optimized GLB and upload to poqpoq World. Walk around as your custom avatar on terrain you sculpted. Show off those animations. Live the dream.

Every step is optional

You don't need to use the full pipeline. Many users just load a VRM in Animator, retarget a Mixamo walk cycle, export, and ship. The tools are designed to work together but don't require each other.

Education Labs

Learning 3D animation concepts? We've built interactive labs that teach the fundamentals through play. These are standalone experiences — no animation expertise required.

Gimble Dragon Lab

Teaching Gimble the Dragon how to fly without flipping out. Learn 3D coordinate systems, transformation matrices, and why your model faces the wrong way — all through a narrative adventure.

Level: Beginner — 30–45 minutes

FrankenMesh Binding Lab

Dr. Frankenmesh's Monster Factory. Learn vertex weighting, bind pose, and skeletal hierarchy through gamified challenges. Build a creature and make it move without exploding.

Level: Intermediate — 45–60 minutes

Joint Constraint Explorer

Interactive constraint visualization. See how hinge, ball, and universal joints work. Drag the arcs. Feel the limits. Understand why knees don't bend backward (usually).

Level: Intermediate — 20–30 minutes

Great for classrooms

The education labs were designed with instructional design principles — scaffolded progression, multiple representations, and hypothesis-testing loops. If you're teaching 3D animation, these labs make excellent supplementary material.

Developer & Open-Source Tools

Under the hood, the BlackBox suite is powered by standalone libraries and utilities. These are open source — use them in your own projects, fork them, or just read the code to understand the math.

poqpoq IK Solver

Constraint-aware CCD inverse kinematics for Three.js. Swing-twist decomposition, octahedral bone visualization, biomechanical joint limits from AAOS data. The engine that powers every IK drag in the Animator.

View on GitHub →

BoneMapper

Universal skeleton mapping and platform detection. Feed it any humanoid rig — Mixamo, VRM, Meshy, TripoAI, CC3, RPM — and it maps every bone to a standard ID. The secret sauce behind cross-platform retargeting.

Part of Animator →

Legacy Converter

OAR-to-GLB world format conversions for the metaverse. Takes OpenSimulator archive formats and converts assets for use in poqpoq World and other WebGL environments.

View on GitHub →

Use them in your own projects

The IK Solver and BoneMapper are designed as standalone modules. Drop them into any Three.js project. The IK Solver handles constraint math — BoneMapper handles cross-platform skeleton detection. Together, they give any 3D web app professional animation capabilities.

All Repositories

Everything is built in the open. Find the source, report bugs, and contribute:

BlackBox Animator — the animation studio (includes BoneMapper & RetargetEngine)
BlackBox Skinner — vertex weight painting
BlackBox Terraformer — procedural terrain editor
poqpoq World — AI-first metaverse (includes Legacy converter)
poqpoq IK Solver — CCD with swing-twist constraints & octahedral bones

Built by poqpoq. For animators who refuse to be boring.