Opening the app.nz motion, VFX, and terrain commons
Three pose-capture backends, retargetable character motion, configurable Three.js effects, deterministic terrain, and procedural object generators — open, searchable, and available through web, CLI, API, desktop, and MCP.
Animation tooling is usually split across incompatible demos: pose estimation in one repository, character retargeting in another, particle effects as screenshots, and terrain generators that cannot reproduce yesterday's result.
We have opened a practical first pass at one shared library: Motion, VFX & Terrain Commons. It contains source-linked pose backends, retargetable motion, configurable Three.js effects, deterministic terrain recipes, and seeded per-object generators.
Three video-to-motion paths
The VRM animator now describes one normalized capture contract with three backends:
| Method | Best fit | Output | License boundary |
|---|---|---|---|
| YOLO Pose | Multiple people and tracked footage | COCO-17 → humanoid | Ultralytics AGPL-3.0 |
| MediaPipe Pose | Local, low-latency browser capture | BlazePose-33 → humanoid | Apache-2.0 |
| NVIDIA BodyPose3DNet | Depth-aware GPU studio capture | 34 3D joints → humanoid | NVIDIA model terms |
We intentionally preserve those boundaries. Our adapters, schemas, recipes, and procedural previews are MIT. An NVIDIA model weight does not become open source because an open adapter can call it.
VFX that are parameters, not thumbnails
Explosion, smoke, surface fire, splashes, waterfalls, electric arcs, portals, rain, and snow are expressed as small recipes. Each has a stable seed, intensity, emitters, color, and renderer target. The library preview is a real WebGL scene, not a prerecorded marketing video.
Terrain works the same way: biome + seed + scale + erosion produces noise, materials, playable landmarks, and export targets for a 16-bit heightmap, splatmap, GLB, and the original recipe. Rock, tree, building, and asteroid generators use the same serializable shape.
Use it from anything
app animation search "fire smoke" --kind vfx
app animation terrain --biome volcanic --seed 73 --scale-km 8MCP clients get search_animation_library, download_animation_asset, create_image_to_3d_recipe, and generate_terrain_recipe. The Go desktop MCP host exposes matching local bridge tools, and the REST API is available at GET /api/animation-library plus POST /api/animation-library/terrain.
The source packages live under `open-source/` and include dependency-free JavaScript modules for motion normalization, VFX recipes, terrain generation, and procedural objects. A publication script mirrors the versioned manifests to R2 so applications can pin a stable CDN path.
This is the base layer, not the finish line. Next comes more motion capture clips, GPU sprite/volume bakes, richer collision-aware water, and community-submitted presets with visual regression captures before publication.