Download Autodesk’s free Maya 2023 Bonus Tools
Autodesk has updated the Maya Bonus Tools, its free collection of add-on scripts and plugins for Maya to support Maya 2023.
Maya Bonus Tools 2019-2023, the latest version of the toolset, adds ProSets, Mainframe North’s procedural modelling tool, previously a paid add-on, and a new UI-based app for creating interactive tutorials.
Full disclosure: the update was released in June, but we didn’t spot it until Autodesk released a video on the interactive tutorial app on its Maya Learning Channel earlier this week.
New ProSets tool for procedural modelling and motion graphics work
The Bonus Tools provide Maya users with a set of useful small features, particularly for modelling, UV editing and character rigging, on an ‘as is’ basis, without active product support.
The Maya 2023 Bonus Tools add two new tools, one of them previously a £40 add-on developed by Mainframe North, the original creator of Maya’s MASH motion graphics toolset.
ProSets creates procedural selection sets that can be used with any of Maya’s native modelling tools, opening up new non-destructive procedural modelling workflows.
Users can change the parts of a mesh to which any operation from its modelling history is applied: the video above shows a simple extrude being applied to different sets of faces, quickly resulting in complex 3D forms.
Create interactive tutorials using a conventional UI rather than Maya’s Node Editor
The other new tool in the 2023 update, Create > Interactive Tutorial, provides a more intuitive frontend for the system for authoring gamified interactive tutorials inside Maya introduced in Maya 2022.1.
Rather than having to wire together nodes in Maya’s Node Editor, users can create tutorial steps and monitor for trigger events via a conventional UI, with the add-on automatically creating the nodes required.
Updates to existing tools for modelling and character rigging work
In addition, seven of the existing tools get updates, including SpeedCut, the real-time Boolean modelling add-on introduced in last year’s update, and the Weight Editor for character rigging.
System requirements and availability
The Maya Bonus Tools are available free for Maya 2019 and above running on Windows, macOS or Linux.
Read a full list of changes in the Maya Bonus Tools
(Includes download link for the tools themselves)