Pose2Idle - Pose to Idle Animation Converter (Full Body Sway Support: 8.1)

This tool is a wrapper around other people's hard work + my own. It would not exist without any of these contributors and there efforts for the community.

❗XAT — Xande's Animation Toolkit by Asgard / Etheirys (BSD 3-Clause) Performs every Havok operation involved: reading and writing containers, FBX conversion, and the animation compression. This is the load-bearing dependency. XAT in turn builds on AnimAssist and fbx2havok, which solved this problem for the community first.

❗Havok — animation middleware by Havok / Microsoft. FFXIV's animation files are Havok containers. The SDK is proprietary and is not distributed with this tool.

❗VFXEditor by 0ceal0t — used to find game paths and verify what a mod replaces.

❗ Brio by Asgard / Etheirys — Pioneered the "Live Transform" framework (layering bone matrix offsets continuously over playing animations).

❗Simple Heels by Caraxi — Adapted this live transform logic into a standalone overworld module (/heels livepose), creating the native .livepose file format to store these offsets outside of GPose.

❗Anamnesis by imchillin and contributors — .pose files come from Anamnesis, and its documentation of the format made the conversion possible.

❗Claude Code (Fable 5) by Anthropic. Used to write and debug a good deal of this tool.

(Credits update: 8/18/26): if someone or something is missing/wrong please send a report! thank you to the people who helped so far!

## ❗ What is this ❗

Pose2Idle turns ANY pose into a working idle animation. No Blender, no
overly complex steps — one button does 99% of the work.

Drop in a pose, press Build, and you have a Penumbra mod ready
to import.

Your pose is applied as an offset over the game's own animation, not as a
replacement. That's why the result keeps the subtle breathing, the balance
shift and the seamless loop instead of freezing your character solid. Sliders
let you decide how much of that motion to keep.

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## 📋 How to use

1. Double-click Pose2Idle.cmd
2. Press Get game files once reads your FFXIV install, read-only, takes about 10 seconds
3. Pick your pose file and your Race / Gender
4. Press Build .pmp and import it in Penumbra

No game files ship with this tool. They belong to Square Enix and you already
have them.

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## ⭐ What's new in 8.1 — Balance

Your lower body is alive now.

Nobody stands perfectly still from the waist down. The game gives every race a
small weight shift while it idles, and it's most of the difference between a
pose that reads as a living body and one that reads as a mannequin.

You can finally keep it. Balance is safe at any setting, it cannot make your
feet slide.

⚖️ The new Balance slider

- The shift is one bone, n_hara, sliding the whole skeleton — 4mm on Miqo'te F, up to 14mm on Roegadyn M
- The leg bones barely rotate. What little they do is the counter-motion that keeps the feet planted while the body travels over them
- Balance drives them together, because neither half means anything alone
- All 16 races have it. Miqo'te F is the subtlest, Roegadyn M the largest

🦶 Feet that actually stay put

The game's counter-motion was choreographed for the game's own stance. Put a
pose on the legs and it stops cancelling — 12 to 26mm of skate depending on
race, and lopsided, since a pose rarely moves both legs the same.

So it's re-solved against your pose, every frame.

Feet travel at full Balance:  under 0.01 mm, all 16 races
The game's own idles:         0.12 mm to 2.55 mm

That's steadier than vanilla.

🦵 New Knee stiffness slider — 0–150%, default 100%

At the default your knee bends 0.6°, against vanilla's 2.5°. Raise it and
the knee stiffens further, but the leg can no longer absorb the whole shift and
the feet begin to travel. 125% is the stillest a knee gets, at about 2mm of foot
movement. Past that it bends more again, so there's no reason to go higher. try 0% if you notice weird movement.

✨ New "Natural" preset — Breathing plus the balance shift. This is the new
recommended default.

🔧 Fixed

- "Legs & hips" could never have worked. The bone carrying the entire weight shift was grouped with the root bones, so raising that slider moved the legs without the body they were balancing against. It was incapable of doing anything but skating, at any setting.
- 0.6mm of foot drift from a rounding shortcut — a rotation helper treated anything under 0.081° as "already aligned". At leg length that's over half a millimetre, and no amount of extra solving would touch it.
- The solver was pinning the wrong bone — a shin helper 62mm below the knee, instead of the real ankle 394mm further down. That left the whole foot free to swing beneath the pinned point.

🔁 Changed

- "Legs & hips" is now "Balance", and it defaults to 100%. Want the old lower body back? That's the Breathing preset, or set Balance to 0.
- Mod names: the L in the tag is now B — Idle - mypose [S55 A0 B100 E0 T100] 4f458a. Knee stiffness adds K only when it isn't the default, so your normal builds keep the names they've always had.

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## ❗ Features ❗

Both pose formats
- .pose (Anamnesis/Brio/livepose or compatible)
- Converts absolute values to offsets automatically
- Every race and gender, all 18 skeletons
- Standing and sitting idles, plus /cpose variants

Motion control
- Presets: Natural (recommended), Breathing, Statue, Experimental
- Individual sliders for chest, arms, balance, knees, tail and everything else

Fixes what usually goes wrong
- No sliding — each body region is controlled separately
- No floating — foot-to-floor is measured per pose
- Manual height nudge in centimetres for special cases

Gets its own game files
- One button reads your FFXIV install, read-only
- Pulls every race idle and skeleton, 500+ files

Built-in checking
- Verifies the finished animation against the pose you gave it
- Catches race-to-path mismatches before you build

Quality of life
- Auto-fills race, slot, skeleton and game path
- Automatic naming, so rebuilds never collide in Penumbra
- Light and dark themes, first-run tutorial, hover explanations on everything

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## 🦴 Custom skeletons (YAS)

Custom skeletons let you pose bones the base skeleton doesn't have — YAS adds
62 IVCS bones, 5 physics bones, and tails to some female races.

1. Get YAS from Heliosphere — pick the Skeleton variant in the dropdown
2. Settings → untick Hide the Skeleton .sklb line
3. Browse → select the downloaded .pmp
4. Build as normal. The log tells you which extra bones it found

⚠️ You need a body mod using that same skeleton for these bones to do anything.
Only YAS is supported so far.

🦊 Borrow tail animation — Square only animated tails for Miqo'te, Au Ra and
Hrothgar. Advanced → Borrow tail animation copies the sway from a race that has
one.

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## ⚠️ Please read

Personal use only. Made the pose yourself? It's yours, do what you like. If
you downloaded it, the pose is still the creator's — ask them before sharing
anything built from it.

Poses transfer between races, but proportions differ, so expect to nudge things.

There are over 200 race and gender combinations and I can't test them all. If
something's badly off, tell me and I'll fix it.

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## 📜 Previous versions

8.0 — Custom skeleton support, part 1
Added YAS skeleton support, so bones outside the base skeleton (IVCS, physics,
extra tails) can be posed. Added Borrow tail animation for races Square never
gave one. Fixed imported expressions, and confirmed Hrothgar as tailed with a
43° swing.

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## ✅ Scans clean

- 0 detections / __ engines on VirusTotal
- No launcher .exe — the app is plain Python source you can read
- Standard library only, no networking code at all. It cannot download or send anything
- Ships no game files and no third-party skeletons

SHA256: F6497A3152AFBFD5BDD1F8997276EDF2F999E124991CF86AB8A533F3950E681C
Size:   18,044,458 bytes

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## 🔮 Future plans

- Custom skeleton support, part 2 — more skeletons than YAS
- Battle stance and battle-ready animations with weapon poses
- Animation injection — isolating tracks by bone group from other idles

Having issues? Reach me on Discord: Riskbreak

enjoy :)