OpenSim Creator

A UI for building OpenSim models

• 📥 Want to download it? Download the latest release here
• 🚀 Want to install it? It's explained in the documentation
• 📚 Want to learn the basics? View the documentation online
• 📖 Want to cite the project? See the citation section of this README
• 🧬 Want to know more about the project? See www.opensimcreator.com
• ❓ Have a question? Go to the discussions page
• 🐛 Found a bug or want to request a feature? Post it on the issues page
• 🏗️ Want to build it from source? There's a development section in the documentation

👓 Overview

OpenSim Creator (osc) is a standalone UI for building and editing OpenSim models. It's available as a freestanding all-in-one installer for Windows 10 (>= 1507), MacOS (>= 14.5, Sonoma), and Ubuntu (>= 22.04, Jammy Jellyfish).

osc started development in 2021 in the Biomechanical Engineering department at TU Delft. Architecturally, osc is a C++ codebase that is directly integrated against the OpenSim core C++ API. It otherwise only uses lightweight open-source libraries that can easily be built from source (e.g. SDL) to implement the UI on all target platforms. This makes osc fairly easy to build, integrate, and package.

📖 Citing/Acknowledging

OpenSim Creator doesn't have a central written software publication that you can cite (yet 😉). However, if you need to directly cite OpenSim Creator (e.g. because you think it's relevant that you built a model with it), the closest thing you can use is our DOI-ed Zenodo releases (metadata available in this repo: CITATION.cff/codemeta.json):

Kewley, A., Beesel, J., & Seth, A. (2025). OpenSim Creator (0.5.24). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15720627

If you need a general citation for the simulation/modelling technique, you can directly cite OpenSim via this paper:

Seth A, Hicks JL, Uchida TK, Habib A, Dembia CL, et al. (2018) OpenSim: Simulating musculoskeletal dynamics and neuromuscular control to study human and animal movement. PLOS Computational Biology 14(7): e1006223. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006223

🌲Sustainability, Archiving, and Mirrors

We have taken the following steps to ensure that you can always access, build, and use every release of OpenSim Creator:

• OSC's central repository is public access and hosted at https://github.com/ComputationalBiomechanicsLab/opensim-creator
• During a release, we:
  • Mirror the central repository to https://gitlab.tudelft.nl/computationalbiomechanicslab/opensim-creator
  • Upload a snapshot of the release's source code to Zenodo (see citing section, above).
  • Upload a snapshot of the release's source code and binaries to https://files.opensimcreator.com/releases/
• Each release of OSC's source code is permissively licensed, verified to be compile-able via gcc, clang, and MSVC with many warnings/lints enabled to ensure the source code has a strong chance of being compile-able far in the future as architectures, operating systems, and compilers evolve.
• The project includes all of its library dependencies in-tree. It doesn't use git submodules, internet downloads, or package managers. This means that everything that's needed to build OpenSimCreator (apart from widely-available compiler toolchains) is available in this repository and not dependent on external services that might change over time.

❤️ Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative which currently funds OpenSim Creator's development through the "Essential Open Source Software for Science" grant scheme (Chan Zuckerberg Initiative DAF, 2020-218896 (5022)).

We would also like to thank the Department of Biomechanical Engineering at TU Delft, which has provided the necessary institutional support required to keep OpenSim Creator's development supported and stable.

Finally, we would also like to thank the wider open-source community. OpenSim Creator wouldn't be possible without using and learning from high-quality open-source libraries and technical literature from thousands of contributors.