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, MacOS (>= v14, Sonoma), and Ubuntu (>= v20, Focal Fossa).

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 (0.5.20). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14755649

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

❤️ 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.