All-purpose toolset MGtools: one of Brent Forrest’s pick of the 15 best Maya add-ons for animators.

 
Over the years, artists have written hundreds, if not thousands, of add-ons for Maya. So how do you decide which ones are essential parts of your toolkit, and which are just dead space on your hard drive?

For a start, you should check out animator and FX artist’s Brent Forrest’s list of his own 15 favourites, which he has just put together for LesterBanks.com.

Essential tools for riggers and character animators, may of them free
Forrest – whose own free BoolieMan rig for Maya we covered on CG Channel a few years ago – confines himself purely to animation tools, so modellers and texture artists should probably look elsewhere.

But if your work involves rigging or character animation, you should find a lot of useful suggestions on the list, which ranges from custom animation pickers to tweening and onion skinning tools.

The run-down includes some old CG Channel favourites, such as MGtools, Miguel Winfields’s general-purpose animation toolkit (shown in the video at the top of story), and all but one have free versions.

 
Read Brent Forrest’s list of the 15 best animation tools for Maya on Lesterbanks.com

Tags: add-on, animation, animation picker, attribute manager, Brent Forrest, Character Animation, download, free, grease pencil, Lester Banks, LesterBanks.com, Maya, motion trail, onion skinning, plugin, rigging, script, tool, tweening