Thursday, August 15th, 2019 Posted by Jim Thacker

Screenspace creates pickers for Maya rigs that act as HUDs


Eddie Hoyle’s free Screenspace plugin enables character artists to attach pickable shapes directly to the Maya viewport to create rig controls like this custom facial picker. Character rig: Game Anim


Animal Logic software engineer Eddie Hoyle has released Screenspace, a handy free Maya plugin that enables users to add pickable shapes to transforms that behave as if attached to the viewport.

The plugin enables character artists to create rig controls that function like a custom HUD.

Create custom Maya rig controls that function like heads-up displays
Screenspace enables users to assign simple geometric shapes – squares, circles or triangles – to transforms, then position them at any point in the Maya viewport.

The objects to which they are assigned can then be selected by clicking or dragging over the pickables themselves, as if they were a custom heads-up display.

The most obvious use case is probably to create facial pickers for character rigs, as shown in the image above, but Screenspace could also be used for hard-surface rigging.

Availability and sytem requirements
Screenspace is available free under an Apache 2.0 licence for Maya running on Windows, macOS and Linux.

You will need to build the plugin directly from the source code, but Eddie Hoyle’s Github repository includes full instructions on how to do so. You can also choose which version of Maya you build it for.

Get Screenspace from Eddie Hoyle’s Gitub respository


Hat tip to Lester Banks for spotting this neat free tool.