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Elysium Designer

The cross-platform desktop authoring app for borderless, animated Python skins.

Elysium Designer is to the Elysium UI framework what Maya is to Arnold: an authoring environment for the .esk skin bundles your Python app loads at runtime. Author the look in the Designer, wire the behavior in your editor of choice via Code Link, and ship a borderless animated app.

Start with the butterfly

The fastest way to learn the Designer is the 45-minute Blue Morpho to Monarch tutorial. You will:

  • Import a Monarch butterfly 3D model.
  • Bring in a Blue Morpho photo as the texture reference.
  • Drop six landmarks pairing the photo to the model.
  • Run the recommended texture transfer pipeline and bake a PBR normal map.
  • Animate the wing flap.
  • Export the result as a .esk skin that the Elysium UI framework loads as a borderless animated app, the official Elysium logo.

Start the Blue Morpho to Monarch tutorial >>

What the Designer ships with

Capability Where to read
Texture transfer (9 methods, 2 recommended pipelines) Rendering > Texture transfer pipelines
Brush system (6 engines, 30 builtin presets, .abr / .sut / .elybrush import) Brush system
Aether agent (123 in-app tools across 15 modules) Aether
Borderless and animated window authoring Borderless windows
PBR rendering with 4 quality presets Rendering and lookdev
Joint-based rigging + 2-bone IK + paint weights Rigging
nCloth, hair, Bullet rigidbodies Simulation
MASH procedural scatter Procedural
Hot reload (Run > Hot Reload) Hot reload
Code Link to VS Code, PyCharm, Cursor Code Link
Maya parity hotkeys + concepts Migration > From Maya

Install

The Designer ships as a signed standalone executable per OS. Pick yours:

Each release of the Designer is available on the GitHub Releases page. The build-from-source guide explains how to build your own .app, .exe, or AppImage with pyinstaller scripts/build-designer.spec.

Tour the interface

When you launch the Designer for the first time, the layout is a familiar 3D DCC arrangement. The Interface tour walks every panel, menu, and tool. If you would rather learn by doing, skip the tour and start the butterfly tutorial above.

A note on platforms

Elysium Designer runs on macOS 13 or newer, Windows 10 or newer, and any reasonably current Linux desktop with X11 or Wayland plus OpenGL 4.1 or better. The brush system's pressure-aware dynamics consume Windows touch and pen input via WM_POINTER; on macOS the same dynamics curves stay inert (touch pressure is reported by some trackpads but not exposed through the standard event pipeline), and on Linux they activate when libinput reports tablet pressure.

The framework side

The Designer authors .esk bundles. The Elysium UI Python framework loads them at runtime. The two are designed together; their docs sit at docs.elysiumui.com. After you finish the butterfly tutorial here, the framework site's Butterfly Banner tutorial takes the .esk you exported and wires it into a running borderless animated app.