Crytek TD updates open source Maya rigging toolkit
Crytek UK technical animation director Mark Jackson has updated Red9 Studio Pack, his open source collection of rigging and animation tools for Maya.
We missed Red9 Studio Pack when it was first released in 2011, so version 1.28 (it adds a new UI for creating mirrored set-ups, apparently) was entirely new to us – but it looks like one to bookmark.
Tools that should have been in vanilla Maya?
Jackson says he created the toolkit “out of frustration at Autodesk’s reluctance to add some of these core features into Maya itself”, and that it is intended to make it possible for small studios without in-house R&D teams to implement a modern animation pipeline within Maya.
The Studio Pack includes a lot of tools for manipulating and debugging rigs, including options for copying keys and attributes, and the option to save and reapply poses with relative pose loading.
There are also new snapping and animation offset options, and tools for tracking and stabilising objects.
Other useful features include a new UI for searching through scene nodes, the option to lock rig channels individually, and record simple mocap data with your mouse.
And for anyone working with complex rigs, there is a complete system for assigning and working with metadata.
More details in the video
We’re only scratching the surface here, but Jackson’s new video demo (above) does a good job of introducing the key features. You can also find a lot of more detailed videos on his Vimeo channel.
Red9 Studio Pack is available to download from CreativeCrash. The tools have been validated on Maya 2009+.
Download Red9 Studio Pack from CreativeCrash (Includes full list of features)