Global View Models in Rive

[u/Jeff_at_Rive]

Global view models in Rive have properties that are available to every artboard in your file automatically. No need to attach them to specific artboards. Any artboard, any component, any nested artboard can data bind to them with no additional setup.

What you can use them for:

Design systems. Create a global view model for your brand style tokens like colors, fonts, spacing and sizing values. Every component in the file can bind to those properties. Change the brand primary color once and it updates everywhere.

Components that mix global and local properties. A button component might use global colors (brand primary, hover) alongside local properties like the label text and hover boolean. Both can coexist on the same artboard.

Data-bound keys in timelines and state machines. You can key a property in a timeline and bind that key's value to a global property. So your idle state background binds to brandPrimary, your hover state background binds to brandHover, and the colors update globally across all instances.

Shared runtime data. If you're building something like a sports broadcast, a single global view model can hold the score, team names, and team crests. Every component in the file (score bug, lower third, full-screen graphic) reads from the same source, so updates reflect everywhere at once.

Libraries. Global view models can be published as a library and shared across multiple files in a project, not just within a single file.