Nightmare Puppeteer

Nightmare Puppeteer is an animation-making and puppetry tool. You design actors, perform them with keyboard controls, and create animations in 48 different scenes. You can add your voice, sounds, images and videos, including green-screen video, and use auto lip-sync with the actors’ heads or faces you draw yourself. Creations can include GIFs, music videos and short films.

Create scenes and characters

The character creator lets you combine heads, bodies, eyes, teeth, noses, hair and props. The game includes 60 scenes, 90 heads, 108 bodies and 90 props, and you can add more content through Workshop. You can also use your own models as props, create custom scenes with the level editor, and choose visual flavors for actors and scenes, including Krunchy, Wavey and Hyphy.

The keyboard puppetry system lets you control actors, cameras, lights and time. The level editor can be used to place elements in a scene, while the media compositing tools let you add images, text and video. A MIDI file or automatic beat detection can drive camera cuts, actor animations and changes to actors’ heads and bodies. Adding an SRT subtitle file displays its lyrics on screen.

Animate and perform

Actors can speak using recorded voices or a live microphone, with lip-sync handled automatically. The Human Misery Organ plays built-in presets or sounds you add yourself. You can record performances, including their key presses, in Remix Mode, then remix them or share them through Workshop.

Twitch Mode lets chat control the scene, including adding images, text and video. In that mode, viewers can also send visual feedback using hearts and mud. TV Mode uses random algorithms to generate procedural cartoons automatically, which Twitch chat can interact with. You can also add randomized AI-controlled characters, such as a bear driving an invisible car or a couple wielding dynamite and cigarettes, and a randomized AI commentator called Youtubrrr.

Capture and share

Nightmare Puppeteer can capture 360-degree images and image sequences, which can be converted into videos using other software. Workshop supports sharing custom scenes, voice files, actors and other content. You can also create animations and videos for your own use.