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The studio opens soon. This guide shows how it works; sign-in, MCP keys and plans go live with it.

Chef & Spine

Animation toolkit.

Cooking through your own Claude Code? Give it Spine, and the Chef rigs and animates your mascot on your machine, then drops the export into the project. Or let our server pipeline do it for credits.

What you need

  • Spine Essential or Professional — your own licence from Esoteric Software. The Spine command line needs a licensed install, and Esoteric's runtime licence asks for one to ship games that use the Spine runtimes, as a slot with a Spine mascot does.
  • uv, which runs spine-mcp without any Python setup: brew install uv
  • Claude Code, connected to the kitchen — see Connect Claude Code.

1. Add spine-mcp

spine-mcp is a public MCP server that drives your local Spine. In a terminal:

claude mcp add spine -- uvx --from git+https://github.com/egorfedorov/spine-mcp spine-mcp

It finds Spine at /Applications/Spine.app. Installed somewhere else? Set SPINE_BIN to the Spine executable and restart Claude Code.

2. Check it

Ask Claude to run spine_doctor, the self-check: it tells you whether Spine was found and what is missing before any real work starts.

Run spine_doctor and tell me if Spine is ready.

3. Rig and animate

Ask for the mascot. The Chef rigs and animates it in your Spine and exports Spine 4.2 runtime JSON — the version the studio and the served game play. Name the animations idle, react, win and celebrate: those are the names the choreography timeline plays.

Rig and animate the mascot for my koi slot in Spine: idle, react, win and celebrate. Export it as Spine 4.2 and upload it to the project.

4. Upload the export

The Chef calls upload_url with kind spine: a one-time link, valid for 15 minutes, for the .json, the .atlas and every page image. The mascot lands in the Art Kitchen as an asset and the Chef places it with project_update. Uploading is free — your machine did the work.

Or: our mascot pipeline

No Spine at hand? The Art Kitchen cooks the mascot on our servers: a part sheet (175 credits), the rig (400 credits) and preset animations (30 credits each). Custom animations come with Pro and Studio. Every step stays in the studio, and the result is the same Spine 4.2 export.

Troubleshooting

“uvx: command not found”

uv isn't installed or the shell hasn't picked it up: run brew install uv, open a new terminal and restart Claude Code.

spine_doctor can't find Spine

Set SPINE_BIN to the Spine executable, then restart Claude Code so spine-mcp sees it.

The studio says “re-export as 4.2”

The studio plays Spine 4.2 only. Export again with 4.2 as the target version and upload the new files.