Tuesday, November 30th, 2010 Posted by Jim Thacker

Get Gear: new open source Softimage rigging system

Barcelona’s StudioNest has just released an interesting new modular rigging system for Softimage.

Designed to replace the classic biped and quadruped rigs, Gear enables artists to build up more complex rigs from a set of standard components. The system is designed to be simple enough for even non-TDs to use, although it is fully extensible via Python scripting.

It currently comes with templates for a chicken, dog, horse and a human arm, with more presets to come.

According to lead developer Jérémie Passerin, Gear is good for cartoon rigs, with a full range of stretch options – although with a little experimentation, it looks as if you could rig almost any character.

Download Gear here (For Softimage 2010 SP1)

Watch the Gear features overview

Watch the biped rigging tutorial