RAV: Rive Animation Viewer

RAV: Rive Animation Viewer. Open. Inspect. Ship.

What it is

RAV is the viewer I wanted between the Rive editor and production. It is a free, open-source desktop app (macOS and Windows) that opens a `.riv` file from disk and plays it with the official Rive runtime, so you can check how a file actually behaves before it goes to a developer or into an app.

What it does

RAV reads a file's artboards, state machines and ViewModels and turns them into live controls. You drive the file the way an app would, watch the events it fires, and then export either a self-contained HTML demo, a copy-paste instantiation snippet, or a recording. An MCP bridge lets an AI agent (Claude Code or any MCP client) open files, set inputs and read state in the same session.

Features

• Auto-discovered ViewModel controls, including nested ViewModels, dynamic lists, authored instances, image properties and global ViewModels
• Timeline scrubber for linear animations, artboard and state-machine switching
• Event console with source filters (native, Rive user, UI, MCP) and a JavaScript console/REPL against the running runtime
• Script editor for the runtime instantiation config (autoplay, autoBind, artboard, state machines, layout, canvas size), applied live
• Canvas and WebGL2 renderers, every layout fit and alignment, explicit canvas size, background control, runtime version selection
• Export: standalone HTML demos with the runtime embedded (plays offline), and instantiation snippets limited to the properties you pick
• Media export: video (H.264, H.265, WebM, ProRes 4444), animated images (GIF, APNG, WebP), stills and image sequences, including recording a state machine under live pointer and ViewModel interaction
• Built-in MCP server: a native Rust `rav-mcp` sidecar with 56 tools, no Node.js needed
• Opens `.riv` files from Finder/Explorer, with a document icon and automatic updates

Capabilities

Use it to QA a handoff, find which inputs and ViewModel paths a file exposes, reproduce a bug against a specific runtime version, produce a client-ready demo page or a screen capture, or let an agent exercise a file while you watch.

Compatibility

• macOS 11 or later (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows 10 or later; a web build also exists
• Rive web runtime with selectable version; latest-line API handling (singular `stateMachine` on 2.41+, plural before)
• Reads Rive file format 7.4 (bundled parser tracks runtime-v0.1.384)
• Any MCP client for the agent bridge

Availability

Free and open source (GitHub: ivg-design/rive-animation-viewer). Current version 2.5.9, released 2026-10-02; the first desktop release was 1.0.0 on 2025-11-11. Downloads on Forge and GitHub Releases; macOS builds are Developer ID signed and notarized.

Under the hood

Tauri 2 shell with a web frontend and the Rive web runtime, a CodeMirror 6 editor, a bundled WebAssembly file-inspection module (the RF Parser) that reads each file once before the runtime loads it, and a native Rust MCP sidecar.