Animating a voxel character

Voxel models can be rigged and animated in place, then exported as animated glTF that game engines play directly.

Build the skeleton

Switch to Animate mode and add bones, each parented to the one above it - a root, then a spine, then limbs. A bone's pivot is the point it rotates around, and getting it onto the real joint matters more than anything else: From selection and From joint place it for you off the voxels you have selected.

Bind voxels to bones

Select the voxels that belong to a limb and bind them to that bone. Anything bound follows the bone; anything unbound stays put. The bone list shows how many voxels each bone owns, so it is easy to spot the ones you forgot.

Key the animation

Create a clip, move the playhead, pose the bones and set a keyframe. The dope sheet gives every bone its own track plus a summary row, and you can drag keys to retime them, right-click to delete, or scrub the ruler to preview.

Two things save real time here: mirror, which copies a pose across the body, and two-bone IK, which lets you place a hand or foot and solves the joint between. Bones can be multi-selected too, so a pose, reset or keyframe applies to the whole selection as a single undo step.

Export

Export as GLB and the clips come with it, as skinned or rigid-part animation depending on the model. Open Export diagnostics in the export dialog and the file your current settings would download is built and parsed on the spot - node, mesh and animation counts plus any structural problem found in the bytes. The heavier Khronos glTF validator is a build-time dependency, so it runs in CI over representative export fixtures rather than over the file you download, and one rigged fixture is imported into a headless Godot on each CI run to confirm the skeleton and the clips survive the trip.

Godot reads the GLB directly; Unity needs a glTF importer such as glTFast, as it does for any .glb.

Two caveats worth knowing before you rig: neither check is a promise about how a particular engine and importer version behave - test the clip in your own project. And the rigged export ships a single plain material, so emissive and metallic colours come across flat.