Get free Maya character rigging toolset mGear 5.2
Originally posted on 4 September 2025. Scroll down for news of the mGear 5.2 update.
The mGear development team has begun its 5.x updates to mGear, its open-source character rigging framework for Maya.
mGear 5.1 updated mGear’s RBF Manager to improve compatibility with Shapes, Brave Rabbit’s popular blendshape editor.
mGear 5.2 introduces a new system of Blueprint Guides and xPlorer, a Softimage-inspired alternative to Maya’s Outliner.
A versatile framework for creating modular character rigs
First released in 2015, mGear was originally based on Gear, Blur Studio technical animation supervisor Jeremie Passerin’s Softimage rigging framework, although it isn’t an exact copy.
It provides artists with a library of customisable rig components for different body parts, and is intended to generate “an infinite variety of rig combinations … without programming knowledge”.
As well as Shifter, the rigging framework, mGear includes a customizable Anim Picker interface, a RBF Manager, and shot-sculpting tool Crank
The toolset has been used by a range of VFX, animation and game development studios: the user reel includes projects by El Ranchito, Mac Guff, Unseen, and Pendulo Studios.
mGear is free and open-source, but lead developer Miquel Campos’s company, mcsGear, provides commercial support and rigging services, which fund development.
mGear 5.1: Update to RBF Manager resolves compatibility issues with Brave Rabbit’s Shapes
mGear 5.1 is a relatively minor update, but it includes quality-of-life improvements, particularly if you use Shapes, Brave Rabbit’s popular toolset for creating and editing blendshape targets.
Both mGear and Shapes use weightDriver, Brave Rabbit’s free Maya node for managing relationships driven through a RBF solver.
From version 5.10, released in late 2023, Shapes has used version 4.0 of weightDriver, which is not backwards-compatible with previous versions.
Since previous versions give better results in mGear, it supported both weightDriver 3.6 and 4.0, but that could cause conflicts with Shapes.
As of mGear 5.1, users can choose whether to use mGear’s own version of weightDriver or an external version, making it possible to update Shapes without issues.
There are also updates to Shifter, making it possible to match FK/IK set-ups to arbitrary limb lengths, and to ueGear, mGear’s new bridge to Unreal Engine.
Updated 28 January 2026: The mGear team has released mGear 5.2.
Highlights include xPlorer, a “fresh alternative to Maya’s Outliner”, inspired by the design of other DCC tools including Blender, Cinema 4D and the much-missed Softimage XSI.
A new system of Blueprint Guides makes it possible to define standardized rig setting that can be shared across multiple characters, with support for per-component overrides.
The Shifter UI has also gone through a “complete overhaul”, and now supports drag-and-drop, JSON-based configuration for file I/O, and comes with prebuilt templates for common tasks.
License and system requirements
mGear 5.2 is compatible with Maya 2025 and 2026, running on Windows, macOS and Linux. Some functionality is only available in Windows when using Maya 2026.
ueGear 1.04 is compatible with Unreal Engine 5.3+.
The source code for both applications is available under an open-source MIT licence, and the compiled binaries are free downloads.
Read a list of new features in mGear in the online changelog
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