This is the full production process behind Luvu 👋 sketches, color concepts, final look, 100+ unique animations, start to finish. And this is Luvu himself: companion and unofficial gym buddy to over 1 million people who probably didn't expect to bond with a cartoon character while doing lunges 😂 He doesn't do the "wave once and disappear" mascot thing, he sticks around. No transitions, no cutting away between tabs, he's just there the whole workout, judging your form (and he can really dish it out when it's off). Live voice with lip sync, every animation blending smoothly into the next through a full Rive state machine. He talks. He reacts. He has moods. Built with an ex-Duolingo team who basically dared me to make people addicted to opening a fitness app, which, fair warning, is a strange thing to be proud of 🙌 Shipped v1 in 6 weeks. Somehow ended up past 1M users. Still not over it. Product: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/luvu-home-fitness-workouts/id6747844405 Live Luvu Preview: https://rive.app/s/Z9lVdZjLk0qKPXkIJR2BaQ/?runtime=rive-renderer (use startLuvu trigger and pick 1-2 idle states)

Amazing 😍

This is my #RiveChallenge presentation on Contra, built from a character system I created for VDV Labs, Robert Vandervoort. All these little characters are part of an interactive system designed to create a band inside an app. The idea was simple: what if one rig structure could support many different performers? Instead of building every character and animation from scratch, I designed one reusable Rive system that can adapt to different animals, outfits, instruments, and performance loops. One component turns into a kawaii band: the characters change, the instruments change, and the performance evolves, but everything is still driven by the same reusable Rive structure. This was the biggest challenge of the project: building a system strong enough to handle multiple characters and outfits while keeping the animation readable and reliable. The amount of layers, states, controls, and visual variations made the work both technical and creative. I handled the full process: vector cleanup, character adaptation, animation, outfit design, state machine logic, and data binding. At the end, the project is more than one character animation. It is one flexible character system working across multiple performers in the same scene. Built in Rive.

You did an incredible job! That's definitely not an easy challenge, and the result is amazing.