Rive for Qt Quick and QML

rive-qt-plugin plays Rive files in Qt Quick. Add a RiveView to your QML, point it at a .riv, and it renders with Rive’s own GPU renderer, then hands the frame to Qt’s scene graph without a copy.

It is free and open source under the MIT license: hypernuclear/rive-qt-plugin on GitHub.

import Hypernuclear.Rive

RiveView {
    anchors.fill: parent
    source: "qrc:/animations/hero.riv"
}

Exactly what Rive renders

Most ways of getting Rive into another toolkit reimplement Rive’s drawing on top of that toolkit: Rive hands over paths and paints, and the integration draws them its own way. Every feature Rive’s renderer has, that integration has to build again, and the newer ones tend to be missing. Feathering (Rive’s soft edges and glows) is the usual casualty: the paint’s feather value is accepted and then ignored, and the soft edge comes out hard.

rive-qt-plugin doesn’t draw anything itself. It runs Rive’s GPU renderer, the same one in Rive’s own players, on the graphics device Qt is already using for your window, and renders the artboard into a texture there. That texture goes straight into the scene graph as a node:

• Zero-copy. No CPU rasterization, no readback, no per-frame upload. The frame Rive draws is the frame Qt composites.
• Pixel-for-pixel with Rive. Feathering, blend modes, clipping, image meshes and text all come from Rive’s renderer, so what you see in the Rive editor is what your app shows.
• New Rive features arrive with the runtime. The plugin pins an upstream rive-runtime release. Updating it brings Rive’s renderer changes with it; there is no second renderer to catch up.

What it covers

• State machines, advanced on the scene graph’s frame clock, with stateChanged signals and the current state’s timeline and playhead.
• Data binding. Read and write the artboard’s view-model properties from QML: numbers, booleans, strings, colors, enums, triggers, nested view models, lists, images and artboard references.
• Input. Mouse, touch and keyboard go to the state machine’s listeners by default, mapped through the fit into artboard space.
• Layout. Every Rive fit and alignment, plus Fit.Layout with layoutSize for responsive artboards.
• Linear animations, including frame-accurate scrubbing for timelines you drive yourself.
• Audio (through the OS, or handed to your own audio stack), scripting (Luau) and text with a process-wide font fallback.

The full surface is in the QML API reference.

Platforms

RiveView picks the backend that matches the graphics API Qt chose for the window (its QRhi):

Platform	Backends
macOS	Metal (Vulkan through MoltenVK, optional)
Windows	Direct3D 11, Direct3D 12
Linux	OpenGL, Vulkan

It needs Qt 6.5 or later (tested through 6.12). Every change is built and render-tested on macOS (Apple silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux before it lands.

In production

hypernuclear built it for hypershot, our screenshot app for Mac and Windows. hypershot’s onboarding and permission guides are Rive files played through RiveView.

Where to go next

• Getting started: add it to a CMake project and show your first .riv
• Viewer: open your own .riv files and try every control before writing any code
• QML API reference: every property, method and signal
• GitHub: source, issues and the standalone viewer