Animation is one of the hardest creative disciplines in the world. You’re managing hundreds of assets, dozens of feedback rounds, tight deadlines, and a team that’s often spread across time zones — all while trying to keep the creative vision intact from the first storyboard to the final render.
We built Cotoon because we kept running into the same problem: the tools weren’t built for us.
Why We Started
The typical animation studio workflow looks something like this: files scattered across Google Drive and Dropbox, feedback buried in email threads, revision notes on screenshots that no longer match the current version, and a Gantt chart living in a spreadsheet that nobody updates.
Every hour spent managing chaos is an hour not spent making something great. That felt wrong to us.
We wanted a single place where your assets, your feedback, your schedule, and your team could all live together — connected, in sync, and built specifically for the way animation pipelines actually work.
What Cotoon Does Today
Since our early access launch, teams have been using Cotoon to:
- Review 3D assets directly in the browser — GLB, GLTF, OBJ, FBX, and more, with no plugin required
- Leave frame-accurate feedback on videos — annotate directly on geometry, lock notes to specific frames, and preserve the camera angle with every comment
- Plan production on a live Gantt chart — with working-day calculations, dependency tracking, and automatic timeline updates
- Collaborate with clients and external reviewers — shareable links that give the right people the right level of access
We’re a small, focused team and we’ve been building in close contact with real studios. Every feature exists because someone needed it on a real production.
What’s Coming Next
We’re deep into two things right now:
The Desktop App & Blender Plugin — a native app with background upload, resume support, and a Blender add-on that syncs your render folder directly to your production stages. Render, and it’s published. No manual steps.
Mobile & Tablet Review — review dailies from anywhere, annotate with Apple Pencil, and get push notifications when something needs your attention.
Both are coming soon. If you want early access, sign up and let us know — we’re onboarding teams directly.
A Note to the Community
Cotoon exists because of the Blender community. The open-source spirit, the tutorials, the generosity with knowledge — it shaped how we think about building software. We want to give back by making the production side of animation as open and accessible as the tools themselves.
This blog is where we’ll share what we’re learning: technical deep-dives, workflow guides, behind-the-scenes on how Cotoon is built, and stories from the studios using it.
Welcome. We’re glad you’re here.
— The Cotoon Team