Prompt Meshy for rigging and animation

Last updated: October 12, 2026

Meshy Rigging fits a skeleton to a character mesh and plays a preset animation on it in one run, returning a GLB you can drop into an engine. Pick it when a humanoid character is modelled and the job is making it move: an idle, a walk cycle, an attack, a spell cast.

Let the agent write it

You don't have to set any of this up yourself. The Layer agent knows how to prepare a mesh for each model it runs, from the same guidance this page is built on. Attach the mesh in chat, name the model and the motion, for example: Rig this with Meshy Rigging and play the Cast Spell animation on it. If the character still has to be built, ask for that too, and the agent builds it in an A-pose first. It shows you its plan, and runs it when you approve. Use the rest of this guide when you want to prepare the mesh yourself, and see Write a brief for the agent for how to brief it.

When to use it

Use Meshy Rigging for textured humanoid characters with a clear body and separate limbs: heroes, NPCs and enemies that need standard game motion. Its presets cover idles, walks and runs, jumps and climbs, attacks, blocks, hit reactions and deaths, spell casts and dances.

It does not rig props, vehicles or untextured meshes, and it has no presets for choreographed one-off motion or facial animation. For those, export the rigged mesh and animate it in Blender or Maya, or retarget your own clips onto its skeleton. To build the character first, see Choose a model and our guide to Meshy for image-to-3D.

Versions on Layer

Meshy Rigging

Rigs a mesh you already have and, with a preset in its Animation slot, plays that motion on it. To rig while you generate, turn on Rigging (and add a preset) in the Meshy V6, V7 or V7.1 form instead; use Meshy Rigging for a mesh that is already on the board.

How to write the prompt

Meshy Rigging takes no prompt. The motion is a named preset you add to its Animation slot, and without one the run only rigs. What decides the result is the mesh you feed it, so the "prompt" work happens upstream, in the image you build the character from:

Full-body 3D game character render of a young fire mage for rigging: fitted red hooded tunic that ends above the knee, leather bracers, slim trousers, brown boots, a belt with two small pouches, empty hands, no cape, no staff, nothing held. Front view, straight-on orthographic-style camera at chest height, the whole figure from head to boots in frame with a little margin. A-pose: arms straight and angled down about 45 degrees away from the body, fingers relaxed and slightly apart, feet shoulder-width apart, legs not touching. Stylised hand-painted game art look, clean readable shapes. Plain flat light-grey background, soft even studio lighting, no cast shadows, no text.

Empty hands, fitted clothes, limbs apart, a rest pose: each of those removes a way the rig can go wrong. Build the mesh from that image with Pose set to A-pose, then rig it.

What works

A mesh built in an A-pose or T-pose

Build the character with the generation form's Pose set to A-pose or T-pose, then rig it. We rigged the same mage twice with the Cast Spell preset: once built in an A-pose, once with his arms down as drawn. Both rigs played the cast. On the A-pose mesh the raised hand stayed a clean open hand; on the arms-down mesh the hand and the cloak edge it touched stretched into long strips as the arm went up.

Pick the motion as a preset

Click the Animation slot and choose a preset by name: Idle, Walk, Run, Sword Strike, Cast Spell, Hit Reaction. One preset plays per run; run the rig again with another preset for the next clip.

Limbs apart, hands clear

Parts that touch are bound to the same bones and move together. Arms away from the body, legs apart and hands clear in the mesh give the rig something to separate.

A forward-facing, grounded character

The character has to face forward, stand on the ground and be centred; a mesh facing another way fails pose detection. Meshes Meshy generates already face forward.

A reasonable polygon count

Keep the mesh under 300,000 faces, which is the limit; under 100,000 rigs faster and runs better in an engine. A clean, quad-based mesh bends more cleanly at elbows, knees and shoulders.

What to avoid

Props in the character's hands

Anything the character holds is skinned to the skeleton. In our test the mage's staff bent like a rope through the whole cast, both when it stood beside him and when it was in his hand. Rig the character empty-handed, generate the prop as its own mesh, and attach it to the hand bone in your engine or DCC.

Long capes and skirts

There is no cloth simulation: fitted clothing deforms with the body, but a long cape or skirt stretches and folds where the legs and arms move. Keep costume fitted on a character you will animate, or plan to fix the cloth by hand.

Non-humanoid or untextured meshes

Props, vehicles, creatures with a body plan the rigger cannot read, and meshes with no texture do not rig. Generate the character with textures on.

Settings that matter

Source mesh is the character to rig; it fills from the mesh you open. The Animation slot takes one preset; leave it empty for a rig with no motion. The result is one GLB with the mesh, its skeleton and the clip; open it in the viewer to watch it play.

Prompts to start from

Meshy Rigging has no prompt, so this is the image prompt for a character that rigs cleanly; build the mesh from it with Pose set to A-pose.

Rig-ready character source

Full-body 3D game character render of a young fire mage for rigging: fitted red hooded tunic that ends above the knee, leather bracers, slim trousers, brown boots, a belt with two small pouches, empty hands, no cape, no staff, nothing held. Front view, straight-on orthographic-style camera at chest height, the whole figure from head to boots in frame with a little margin. A-pose: arms straight and angled down about 45 degrees away from the body, fingers relaxed and slightly apart, feet shoulder-width apart, legs not touching. Stylised hand-painted game art look, clean readable shapes. Plain flat light-grey background, soft even studio lighting, no cast shadows, no text.

Use it in Layer

  1. Add the character mesh to a session's board.

  2. Click View on the mesh to open it full-size, where the 3D tools are.

  3. Choose Animate mesh, click the model name and choose Meshy Rigging, then click Add animation and pick a preset such as Cast Spell.

  4. Click Animate. The cost shows on the button before you click.

  5. When the run finishes, the rigged mesh opens in the viewer and plays the preset. Run it again with another preset for the next clip.

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