DoodleMate: Animate Your Child's Hand Drawings Without Generative AI

Hi HN!

I made an app that takes a photo of a paper drawing and, in a handful of seconds, creates a fully rigged character that can be used in an animation or little story. It doesn’t use any image-to-video generative AI models. Instead, I built it using the years of insights I’ve picked up studying children’s drawings and character animation.

Today we’re releasing a community beta. I respect this community and would value any feedback you offer. It’s easy to try- you don’t need to create an account to check it out. We’ve got several free stories to drop your character into, and a Mother’s Day eCard.

I’m also working on a tool, DoodleMate Studio, to easily allow people to author their own stories instead of using premade templates. But what form that takes is going to be highly dependent on the type of feedback we get from the community with this beta.

How this came to be:

I’ve worked in this space for a while. Here’s an old HN post related to a popular tech demo I did ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30469321) and another one from when I open sourced the data and code ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35561203). I also wrote a SIGGRAPH paper about the methodology (https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3592788).

I’d moved on to other things, but had always felt like there was such potential in this space. Last year I decided I was over big tech and, with a lot of encouragement from my family, finally decided to pursue this seriously. Since then, my wife and I have been building this together. We’re bootstrapping at the moment, trying to give ourselves time and space to make sure DoodleMate turns into something wonderful and wholesome.

Thanks, Jesse