For AI agents¶
cutan ships artifacts for coding agents alongside its code. This page lists
them, says where each lives in the repository, and points at the
machine-readable copies of this documentation.
Skills¶
Skills are folders holding a SKILL.md (the Agent Skills format): a description that tells an agent when to use it and a body with the procedure. Install one into your agent with gh skill (any host: --agent claude-code, copilot, cursor, codex, gemini), or use the copy bundled in the wheel.
cutan-production-pack¶
Helps a writer or director turn a story idea, script or scene into a production pack for a cut-out animated film rendered by the cutan/an pipeline. The pack holds the scene file (shots, staging, motion, dialogue with emotions), the cast (character looks, builds, hats, hair, colours, voices), environments and backgrounds (sky gradients, drawn SVG plates, parallax layers), props, title cards, voices and a visual style (a custom look, or a named one such as South Park, OverSimplified, Kurzgesagt, Gilliam, Reiniger or Norstein), all in the exact formats cutan reads. Use when someone wants to write, plan, storyboard or spec a cut-out cartoon, an animated short, a character, a set, a background or a prop for cutan, or says “production pack”, “scene.md”, “cast”, “make a character for the animation”, “design the set”, “write the scene for the animation pipeline” or “in the style of” one of those shows.
gh skill install thorwhalen/cutan cutan-production-pack --agent claude-code
Source: skills/cutan-production-pack.
cutan¶
Use when making a cut-out animated character video with an: rigged characters, faces and expressions, lip-sync, turning and facing, motion, impacts, and named cut-out styles (South Park, OverSimplified, Kurzgesagt, Gilliam, Reiniger, Norstein). Triggers on “make a character”, “an character new”, “lip-sync”, “expression”, “turn around”, “walk”, “cutout”, “in the style of”, or any scene with a character entity.
Source: .claude/skills/cutan.
cutan-art-package¶
The artist-facing contract for an an character — folder layout, the skeleton, required parts, slot and attachment conventions, licence fields — and how to check a delivery offline before anyone is paid for it. Use when commissioning, reviewing, receiving, or authoring character art; when writing a brief for an illustrator; or when an character validate reports something. Triggers on “art package”, “commission a character”, “the artist delivered”, “character contract”, “brief for an illustrator”, “an character validate”, “an character contract”, “rig an SVG”, “skeleton”, “pivots”.
Source: .claude/skills/cutan-art-package.
cutan-dev-expression¶
The facial expression vocabulary of the an repo — the axes and their ranges, additive-over-rest composition in the compile-time face solver, emotion × viseme by set selection, the expression leaf action and its dialogue sugar, gaze, baked-face refusal, and the licence boundary. Load before touching cutan/expression/, _add_face_clips, the viseme@<preset> sets, presets, Dialogue.emotion, brows, eyelids, pupils, or any demo/corpus scene that authors a face. Triggers on “expression”, “emotion”, “preset”, “gaze”, “saccade”, “brow”, “eyelid”, “pupil”, “face solver”, “blendshape”.
Source: .claude/skills/cutan-dev-expression.
cutan-dev-lipsync¶
Lip sync in the an repo — where co-articulation sits (in the compiler, over the provider’s raw track), the pass order (symbolic → lead → decay → a minimum hold that votes by dominance), the condenser that HOLDS and votes instead of dropping, the Rhubarb recognizer rule, word-timing retention and its cache rule, the alignment-model licence trap, and the two standing measurements. Load before touching an/audio/*lipsync*, an/audio/pipeline.py, _add_viseme_clips, _LEGACY_MIN_VISEME_GAP_S, an/adapters/cutout/coarticulate.py, any viseme test, or a dialogue corpus scene. Triggers on “lip sync”, “viseme”, “Rhubarb”, “whisper”, “word timings”, “co-articulation”, “condenser”, “aligner”.
Source: .claude/skills/cutan-dev-lipsync.
cutan-dev-rig-contract¶
How a character descriptor becomes a scene tree in the an repo — which fields are load-bearing, which are declared and dead, and the invariants that broke when they were ignored. Use when touching an.stage.rig.build_rig_subtree (the old _build_svg_character_subtree), cutan/characters/schema.py, extract_part/promote, the descriptor→scene mapping, part sizing or placement, viseme_map/asset_sets, the character migration, or anything that decides what an illustrator’s art does on screen. Triggers on “the art doesn’t change anything”, “part is stretched”, “aspect ratio”, “bones”, “slots”, “skins”, “attachment”, “view_box”, “descriptor”, “rig”, “missing part”, “white rectangle”, “an character validate”.
cutan-dev-swap-channels¶
How swap channels work in the an repo — the one generic replacement-animation mechanism (an#87) that viseme, eyelid, hands, body_facing, view and every future set ride, plus whole-character swaps and swap_poses (an#197). Use when touching asset_sets, the per-slot projection in compile.py, applySwap/applyProperty in runtime.js, VisualJSON.asset_sets, swap validation, texture aliases, or when adding a new swap set or authoring swaps from scene.md. Triggers on “swap channel”, “asset set”, “attachment swap”, “texture swap”, “viseme special case”, “the mouth doesn’t change”, “unknown swap key”, “add a hands set”, “turnaround”, “body_facing”, “eyelid”.
cutan-style¶
Use when the user wants a script or scene made “in the style of” a named cut-out animation look — South Park, OverSimplified, Kurzgesagt, Terry Gilliam / Monty Python, Lotte Reiniger silhouettes, Yuri Norstein / Hedgehog in the Fog — or asks what a style needs, how expensive it is, or whether a render looks like the style. Triggers on “in the style of”, “make it look like South Park”, “OverSimplified-style”, “Kurzgesagt look”, “silhouette film”, “Monty Python cut-outs”, “does this match the style”, “style lint”. Applies a style spec to an an scene, renders, measures the render against the spec’s targets, and adjusts.
Source: .claude/skills/cutan-style.
Instruction files¶
Files agents read before working in this repository.
CLAUDE.md: read by Claude Code
Machine-readable documentation¶
This site publishes the same documentation in forms that fit an agent’s context window:
llms.txt: an index of every page with a one-line description (llms.txt format)cutan.md: the whole documentation as one Markdown file<page>.html.md: a rendered Markdown twin of every page, advertised from each page’s<head>with<link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown">objects.inv: the Sphinx inventory: a symbol-to-URL index (sphobjinv convert plain objects.inv -)