Wednesday, October 14th, 2015 Posted by Jim Thacker

Miguel Winfield releases MG-Picker Studio 1.5

Miguel Winfield – aka animation TD Wenfeng Gao – has released MG-Picker Studio 1.5 for Maya, a new system for designing custom picker GUIs for character rigs, complete with a range of readymade templates.

Winfield’s previous application, animation toolkit MGtools, is used by artists at a number of leading studios.

Flexible, customisable, scriptable animation picker GUIs for Maya
MG-Picker Studio provides a range of readymade picker GUIs for Maya, including various full-body and facial control layouts and pose libraries.

The GUIs follow standard Maya navigation conventions, and multiple layouts can be displayed simultaneously.

If you want to create your own, picker buttons come in a range of shapes, and can be parented to one another; and there are options for assigning tooltips or marking menus; or using buttons to launch script commands.

Although the software provides a visual interface for designing custom picker layouts without the need for coding, the picker file can be edited – or even scripted from the ground up – in MEL or Python.

That’s really only scratching the surface of the feature set, so we’d advise anyone interested to check out the online Introduction to MG-Picker Studio 1.5 or download the PDF manual via the links below.

Pricing and availability
MG-Picker Studio 1.5 is available for Maya 2011 to 2016 on Windows, and Maya 2012 to 2016 on 64-bit Linux and Mac OS X.

The software is free if you only want to use the readymade picker layouts; commercial copies, which enable you to save your own custom layouts, cost $120 for a single node-locked licence, with a range of volume discounts.

Read more about MG-Picker Studio on the product website
(Includes download link)

Read a full list of features in the online Introduction to MG-Picker Studio 1.5

Read the online manual for the software