What's New
The release history of Kinetiq Engine, newest first. Each feature has its own dedicated page in the sidebar with deep workflow guides.
🪄 Kinetiq Engine v1.5 — "Auto-Rig"
Release date: June 26, 2026.
Rigging, solved. Drop any humanoid mesh and Auto-Rig builds the skeleton, binds the skin, and lands the character in the editor ready to animate — you never hand-place a single bone. 100% in your browser, nothing uploaded.
🪄 Auto-Rig — drop a mesh, it rigs itself
Drag in a humanoid .glb, .gltf or .fbx. Auto-Rig auto-detects the joints, fits a clean canonical skeleton, and binds skin weights with no bleed at the joints — the step Mixamo and AccuRIG still make you do by hand. Then the avatar lands fully riggable, ready to retarget, polish and export.
- Auto-detect, not bone-placing — you review the markers it found instead of clicking every joint; Symmetry mirrors a fix to the other side.
- Live Influence Map — a weight-color heat map of how each bone grips the mesh, with per-bone Reach sliders that re-solve the skin live.
- Fingers measured from your mesh — an optional finger rig read from the real geometry, with a thumb-roll dial and left/right symmetry (or skip hands for a clean body-only rig).
- Watch it move, then Done — test Idle / Walk / Sit / Jump on your own mesh before you commit; the rig lands with hand & foot IK and a live timeline.
→ The Auto-Rig button in the editor toolbar · Full guide
Auto-Rig is in Beta — it works best with a T-pose today; A-pose and more input formats are on the way. For non-humanoid or unusual rigs, Rig Studio gives you hands-on control.
⚙️ Kinetiq Engine v1.4 — "Settings & Autosave"
Release date: June 16, 2026.
The editor grows up around you. A proper Settings home gathers your look and makes it stick, local autosave quietly protects your work, and a new Performance tab trades resolution for FPS.
⚙️ Settings — your workspace, remembered
Open File → Settings: a tabbed, draggable panel (Appearance · Viewport · Performance · Files · About).
- Theme, lighting preset, grid style and viewport layout now persist across reloads — set it once, it's yours.
- Reset to defaults in one click; drag the panel by its header to wherever you like it.
🛟 Autosave & crash recovery
- Local autosave on a timer you choose (in minutes) — 100% on your device, nothing uploaded.
- If the browser closes unexpectedly, reopen to a "Recover unsaved work?" prompt with a thumbnail of your scene.
- Optionally also drop the
.trzinto a folder you pick (Chrome / Edge) — your saved files stay yours.
With a folder set, save your project once (File → Save) so the file gets a name — otherwise autosave writes a generic Kinetiq Project.trz. Even without a folder, crash recovery keeps your work safe on this device.
⚡ Performance
- Render Scale (50–200%) — trade resolution for FPS instantly; lighter on weak GPUs, sharper when you want it.
- Expanded STATS panel — live FPS, frame time, draw calls, triangles and JS-heap memory (top-left of the viewport).
→ File → Settings in the editor
⏱️ Kinetiq Engine v1.3 — "Timeline Editing"
Release date: June 15, 2026.
The timeline grows up. Mark a stretch of animation with Set Start / Set End, then act on it right there — Move it in time, Trim down to it, Cut it out, Clear it, or Copy/Paste it — no menus. A redesigned timeline toolbar groups every control by what it touches, and a violet paste-ghost keeps Copy and Move from ever stepping on each other.
✂️ Region tools — mark a stretch, act on it
Set a Region on the timeline (the loop Set Start / Set End markers). The cyan band becomes the editing hub:
- Move — grab the cyan band and slide that stretch of motion in time. The keys follow; one clean
Ctrl+Zundoes the whole drag. - Trim — keep only the marked range and re-base it to zero (trims the start/end). Perfect for cropping a clean export out of a longer take — like dropping a T-pose lead-in.
- Cut — ripple-delete: the stretch is removed and the tail slides left to close the gap, shortening the clip.
- Clear — wipe a stretch of keys cleanly and bridge the motion across the gap (no leftover keyframes).
- Copy / Paste — copy the region, then a violet paste-ghost appears; drag it to a clean spot and drop. Solid cyan = move keys · violet dashed = drop a copy, so duplicating never disturbs the original.
→ On the timeline's Region group, and in Polish → Range · Full guide
Move relocates a stretch · Cut removes it and closes the gap · Trim keeps only it. Three verbs, three clear results.
🎛️ Editing polish
- Redesigned timeline toolbar — grouped by what it acts on (Transport · Modes · Keyframe · Region · View · Settings), uniform spacing, nothing clipped at 1080p.
- Grab cursors on the region band and on individual keyframes — it's obvious what you're moving.
- Click an empty stretch of timeline to deselect;
Ctrl+AthenDeleteclears the whole selection. - Every region edit is one clean, undo-able step — no spikes, no history clutter.
→ Timeline & Keyframes guide · Editor Guide
🎭 Kinetiq Engine v1.2 — "Bento Alive"
Release date: June 12, 2026.
Faces, finally alive. This release ships Bento Alive™ — a full Face Expressions Studio for Second Life living inside the editor — plus real project files in the File menu.
🎭 Bento Alive™ — Face Expressions Studio
Pose a face on a live 3D head (working eyes, teeth and tongue), mix presets with per-ingredient weights, fine-tune 60+ facial sliders, chain faces into looping expression sequences, and export a standard Bento .anim that plays on any modern mesh head. Includes the ⭐ Mine library, portable .trz expression files you can share, an exact live meter against SL's upload limits, and a built-in 2-minute guide.
→ The Bento Alive pill in the editor toolbar · Overview · Studio Guide · Export to Second Life
.anim export from Bento Alive is free for everyone through August 2, 2026 — then it's included with the Starter plan.
📁 Project files (File menu)
- Save (Ctrl+S) / Save As (Ctrl+Shift+S) — real
.trzproject files on your machine, silent re-save after the first one. Zero cloud, total privacy. - Open (Ctrl+O) — restores avatar, timeline and animation exactly where you left them.
- Recent Files — with viewport thumbnails, zero permission prompts.
- Install Kinetiq as an app and double-clicking a
.trzopens the editor.
🎯 Kinetiq Engine v1.1 — "Refine & Precision"
Release date: June 11, 2026.
v1.0 gave you Capture, Retarget, and Refine. v1.1 finishes the Refine toolkit and makes manual editing surgical — new Polish tools, a complete Foot Locking rebuild, physics you can bake into real keyframes, and a long list of precision fixes (including the oldest bug in the codebase).
✨ New in Polish
🌊 Smooth
One slider melts mocap jitter and softens arcs while keeping the performance. Works on the whole clip or just the Region, on all bones or only the selected ones. It stacks — apply, judge, apply again — and it's non-destructive (Ctrl+Z undoes it like any other edit).
→ Polish → Smooth
🛤️ Trajectory View
Draws the selected bone's motion path right in the viewport, color-coded by smoothness: green = silky, red = jagged. It updates live while you drag the Smooth slider — you literally watch the path turn green.
→ Toggle it from the right-side viewport toolbar (the spline icon)
✂️ Range tools
Set a Region on the timeline (the loop Set Start / Set End markers), then Clear / Copy / Paste that stretch of animation. Stretch and Re-bake are on the honest roadmap for v1.2.
→ Polish → Range
🦶 Foot Locking — complete rebuild
The headline feature of v1.1:
- Detection finds every planted frame and paints the red footprint trail under the feet.
- The live fix now bends the leg naturally instead of dragging the foot bone — no more feet buried under the floor, no mesh stretching.
- Live correction feedback — emerald rings mark where each foot is being held; a colored vector plus a per-foot cm readout in the panel show exactly how much slide is being killed, in real time, while you tune.
- Three sliders: Lock Threshold (below this speed = planted), Floor Y, and Anchor Follow (0% = foot glued to its plant spot; higher = follows slow choreography while still damping fast slide).
- Bake to Timeline — the fix becomes ordinary editable keyframes: undo-able, Simplify/Smooth-able, and it survives export to any platform (Second Life, Unreal, Blender…). Live = preview; bake = commit.
✨ Jiggle Bones → Bake to Timeline (BETA badge removed)
Tune hair / cape / tail / skirt physics live, then bake the simulation into editable keyframes. Validated on mocap, retargeted, and from-scratch clips — Jiggle Bones graduates out of BETA.
📊 Quality Score — real numbers now
All ground/motion metrics are now measured in world space (they used to read local bone offsets — the scores were largely decorative). Smoothness, Foot Contact, Loop, and Balance finally mean something, and Fix All no longer mangles legs — its foot pass only runs when sliding was actually detected. Inline result line replaced the popup toasts.
🛠️ Editor & precision fixes
- Rotate gizmo trustworthy again (the oldest bug in the codebase, ~1 year): rotating an arm no longer spins the legs; rotating a thigh no longer fights back; Second Life shoulders no longer "tear away" from the mesh; feet rotate clean too.
- Gizmo drags now auto-pause playback — posing happens on a frozen frame, standard pro-DCC behavior.
- Mirror Animation works on every rig — Second Life Bento center bones (mPelvis / mSpine / mNeck…) were never detected, so swapping limbs left the spine behind and mangled the legs. Fixed — and Apply is now undo-able (
Ctrl+Z) like every other clip tool. - "Press & Hold" A/B buttons removed everywhere (Loop Fixer, Foot Locking, Mirror) — live preview + Cancel/
Ctrl+Zare the professional A/B. - Squad interpolation fixed — on baked/mocap clips some segments would spin the long way around. Now Squad is the smoothest of the modes, as intended.
- True orthographic Front / Side / Top views (grid-aligned 90°, Blender-numpad feel) and a Foot Align toolbar shortcut — feet to the ground in one click.
- Camera Focus / Fit / Reset fixed — dead since launch (1-year bug), now fully functional.
- Video Mocap graduates out of Beta; NEW badges retired from the Polish menu.
- Console hygiene: diagnostic logs are off by default;
kinetiqDebug(true)in the browser console re-enables them for support sessions.
Roadmap honesty note
We built and A/B-tested a "Heavy" AI model toggle for Video Mocap. It measured identical to the standard model (no quality gain) — so we dropped it. We don't ship a "Best" button that doesn't deliver.
🚀 Kinetiq Engine 1.0 — Public Launch
Launch date: May 4, 2026.
Kinetiq Engine 1.0 is our first official release — a browser-native animation editor built for animators, indie creators, virtual world makers, and small studios who want a professional toolkit without leaving the browser.
🪞 Mirror Animation — free for every tier
Mirror left ↔ right side of any animation in seconds. Three modes (L → R, R → L, SWAP), live strength scrubbing, and a viewport projector that shows you exactly which side is dictating the motion.
We treat Mirror as a verb of animation — like copy/paste in a text editor — so it ships free on every plan, including Free Style.
→ Open Mirror Animation guide
→ Shortcut: Ctrl + M
🔄 Loop Fixer — kill the seam pop
Looping clips that pop at the wrap point are the #1 quality issue in AI-generated and retargeted animation. Loop Fixer ships two strategies:
- Snap — hard cut, perfect mathematical loop.
- Blend — smoothstep ramp the last N frames toward frame 0 (recommended for most clips).
Live preview as you drag the blend duration slider. No manual keyframes required at the boundary — Loop Fixer samples on demand.
→ Open Loop Fixer guide
→ Builder Pro tier · Shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + L
📊 Quality Score — animation health, at a glance
A single dashboard summarizing how production-ready your animation is. Apple-Watch-style rings fill toward 100% across four metrics:
- Smoothness — minimal acceleration spikes, no jitter
- Joint Limits — no bone hyperextended past anatomical bounds
- Foot Locking — no foot sliding when a foot is grounded
- Balance — Center of Mass stays over the support polygon
→ Open Quality Score guide → Builder Pro tier
🦶 Foot Locking — eliminate skating
A live constraint that pins grounded feet in world space. Detects planted frames automatically, drops translucent footprint disks on the floor, and pulls drifting feet back to their anchor every frame. The classic "ice walk" artifact disappears.
Backed by our peer-reviewed whitepaper: DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17849581
→ Open Foot Locking guide → Builder Pro tier
🔒 Joint Limits — anatomical sanity check
Per-bone hyperextension report sortable by frequency. Identifies elbows bent backward, knees over-rotated, ankles past their range. Click a bone in the report → timeline scrubs to the worst-offending frame. Optional live clamp keeps animations within human ROM automatically.
→ Open Joint Limits guide → Builder Pro tier
⚖️ Center of Mass + Support Polygon
Live balance visualization that tells you whether your character is standing or falling. Three layers in the viewport:
- The CoM marker (mass-weighted center of the avatar).
- The Support Polygon on the floor (convex hull of the contact points).
- The Balance Pill HUD — green / yellow / red at a glance.
A teaching tool as much as a debugging tool.
→ Open Center of Mass guide → Builder Pro tier
✨ Jiggle Bones (BETA) — secondary motion physics
Verlet soft-body chain physics for skirts, hair, capes, and accessories. The motion that most browser animation tools skip entirely — Kinetiq runs it live in the viewport, tunable per chain (stiffness, damping, gravity, max stretch), and bakes into export.
→ Open Jiggle Bones guide → Builder Pro tier · BETA
🤖 Vision Capture (BETA) — webcam & video mocap
Real-time pose extraction from your webcam or any uploaded video, powered by mediapipe WebAssembly. Free for everyone — no install, no upload, all inference happens in your browser.
→ Open Vision Capture guide → Free tier · BETA
🔄 Retarget Studio · 🎯 Rig Studio · 📚 Pose Library
The full production pipeline:
- Retarget Studio — split-screen retargeting with bone mapping. Bring an animation from any rig (Mixamo, Bento, Humanoid) onto your target avatar.
- Rig Studio — quick rigging + auto-rig wizard for custom avatars.
- Pose Library — save/load favorite poses with thumbnails.
→ Retarget Studio · Rig Studio · Pose Library
📤 Multi-platform export
| Format | Target Platforms | Status |
|---|---|---|
| GLB / glTF 2.0 | Unity, Unreal, Roblox, Web, AR/VR | ✅ Live |
| BVH | Second Life Bento, MotionBuilder, Maya | ✅ Live |
.anim | Second Life direct in-world upload | ✅ Live |
| FBX | Maya, Blender, MotionBuilder, Unity, Unreal | ✅ Live (shipped post-launch — binary FBX 7.4, client-side) |
🤖 Amanda Co-Pilot — coming soon
The generative motion model (prompt-to-animation) is in active training. The Co-Pilot panel is already deployed inside the editor as a preview — closed BETA opens Q3 2026.
→ Read the Amanda Co-Pilot vision
🚧 What's next after launch
FBX Export— ✅ shipped: client-side binary FBX 7.4 with per-DCC presets.- Save Project (
.trz) — resume your editor session. - Settings panel — preferences, theme persistence, custom keybindings.
- Animation Layers — non-destructive layered editing.
- Marketplace creator tools — sell your own animations.
Track all upcoming work in the Roadmap.
Try it now
| 🎬 Open the editor | app.thirdrez.com/sandbox (free, no login) |
| 🎯 Logged-in workspace | app.thirdrez.com/kinetiq |
| 💬 Discord community | Join the Thirdrez Discord |
| 📺 YouTube tutorials | @Thirdrez |
Welcome to Kinetiq 1.0. Animate something beautiful.