Tuesday, June 28th, 2016 Posted by Jim Thacker

Fabric Software releases Kraken 1.2

Fabric Software has released Kraken 1.2, the latest version of its open-source cross-application rigging system, adding a faster new workflow for setting up biped rigs.

A node-based rigging system for Maya and Softimage
Originally developed in-house at Hybride and publicly released last year, Kraken is based on Fabric Software’s Fabric Engine tools development platform.

The system offers a node-based editor for constructing modular rigs intended to give consistent performance across DCC applications compatible with Fabric, including Maya and Softimage.

Faster biped workflow
To that, Kraken 1.2 adds a new system for creating biped rigs. The range of pre-built rig components has been extended, and menu items “quickly create pre-built biped guides and generate rigs from those guides”.

In addition, rigs now store metadata containing the guide description, enabling users to regenerate guide rigs from a source rig.

Other changes include the option to connect visibility attributes to solvers: for example, to drive the visibility of a rig’s IK and FK controllers based on the IK or FK blend value of the solver,

There is also a new Python logger capable of printing debug messages to the log window within the Kraken UI.

Availability
Kraken 1.2 is available now. You’ll need Fabric Engine 2.2, Python 2.7 and PySide 1.2 to run it. A pre-packaged version can be downloaded via the link below, or the source code is on GitHub.

Read a full list of new features in Kraken 1.2 on Fabric Software’s blog

Download a pre-packaged version of the open-source Kraken rigging system