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.

This is Bob, a fully interactive Rive character who decided to register himself in the Rive Interactive Character Challenge :)

For this project, I handled the vectorizing, rigging, animation, and the full state machine architecture: visemes mapped to speech, expressions, triggers, and outfit swaps, all built to scale from a single .riv file.

Bob lives inside the Ctuber app. You type a script, tag the animations with a few buttons, and the app builds the full talking video on its own, AI voiceover included. Type something different, and he reacts differently. The app was built by the Ctuber team, and they were kind enough to let me use it to produce some of these videos.

Funny how a challenge makes you finish something you'd been sitting on. Glad this one did.

Play with Bob live: https://rive.app/marketplace/28111-53105-bob-lip-sync-character-system-in-rive/ The product: https://ctuber.ai/

Bob is getting after it