Coming from DragonBones

Rigby2D opens DragonBones projects directly, so characters made in DragonBones Pro keep working on a desktop editor that is free and open source. (The DragonBones team's newer editor is LoongBones, a web editor.) Your characters become ordinary Rigby2D projects that you can keep editing, and export to every Rigby2D runtime.

#Open a DragonBones project

In DragonBones Pro, export the project as DragonBones JSON (data version 5.5 is the most common; 4.5 and 5.x work). You get three files, kept together in one folder:
- name_ske.json: the skeleton and animations
- name_tex.json: the texture atlas
- name_tex.png: the texture
In Rigby2D, File ▸ Open… and pick name_ske.json. The atlas and texture load from the same folder.
File ▸ Save keeps it as a .rigby work file.

The import report (in the status bar and View ▸ Log) lists anything that didn't come over.

#What carries over

DragonBones	In Rigby2D
Bones (with their inherit settings)	Bones
Slots, display index, color, blend modes (add, multiply, screen)	Slots with their attachment, color and blend mode
Image displays	Region attachments
Mesh displays, with weights	Meshes, with weights
Bounding box displays	Bounding boxes
IK constraints	IK constraints (one or two bones)
Skins	Skins
Animations: translate, rotate, scale, display, color, mesh deform (FFD), IK, z-order	The same keys, with their easing and curves
Frame events	Events
Nested armatures (weapons, effects and parts shown inside a slot)	Bones and slots under that slot, with their animations baked in
Frame actions that play another animation	An `action` event, with the animation's name, for your game to act on

DragonBones measures Y downwards and Rigby2D upwards: the importer converts every position, rotation, skew, mesh and deform key, so the character looks and moves the same. Rotations turn the way the DragonBones runtime turns them (the short way round, or the full turns a key asks for), and flags written as text ("bendPositive": "false") are read as DragonBones reads them.

#Nested armatures

A slot can show another armature: a weapon, a muzzle flash, a slash effect. Rigby2D's format has no armature inside a slot, so the importer flattens each one into the character:

Its bones hang from the slot's bone, placed with the display's transform, and are named after the slot and display (weapon_r/weapon_1502b_r/fire). Its slots draw where the slot draws, tinted by the slot's color.
Its animations are baked into every animation of the character, following the DragonBones runtime: the child plays its default animation, starts over each time the slot switches to it, plays an animation of the same name when the character does, and plays what the character's gotoAndPlay actions start (a weapon's fire during an attack).
It shows only while the slot shows that display.

The result plays the same in every runtime. To edit a weapon on its own, import its armature as a project too.

#Checked against DragonBones

The importer is checked against the official DragonBones runtime on DragonBones' own demo characters (mechs, a scorpion and a character with hair and dress physics, 55 animations): every bone, nested bone, image and color matches the DragonBones runtime within rounding (under 0.1 pixel).

#Not imported yet

Skew keys and surface deformers.
Sounds on frames (add the audio in the Film workspace instead).
Only the first armature of a file is imported when there are several.
Binary .dbbin files: export JSON instead.

Each of these is listed in the import report when a file uses it.

#Runtimes

After saving, export with File ▸ Export and play the character with the Unity, Godot, Phaser, JavaScript or Rust runtime: see Runtimes. File ▸ Get runtimes… downloads them.