Armature is a free AI-assisted standalone character rigging tool
FabricatorStudio – aka games artist Adrian Melian – has released Armature, an AI-assisted standalone character rigging and skinning tool for games, animation and VFX work.
It imports 3D character and creature models in standard 3D formats, generates a rig and skin weights, and exports a USD file that can be used in Maya, Unreal Engine or Blender.
Maya users also get the option to generate a control rig using a separate toolset.
Armature itself is free to indie artists, while the pipeline toolset is free to artists and studios with under $2 million/year in revenue.
Created by a former developer of in-house rigging tools for major game studios
Although there are a number of well-established automated rigging toolsets, particularly for Maya, Melian has a good pedigree in tools development.
He was previously Lead Technical Artist at Call of Duty series developers Sledgehammer Games, where he worked on in-house rigging tools, and also worked at Ubisoft and Meta.
“My whole career, I built tools like [Armature] for big studios,” he says. “When I sat down to build my indie game, I realized my personal toolbox was empty, so I built them all from scratch again.”
Automated rigging and skinning for 3D characters and creatures of all shapes
Armature offers a simple, automated workflow for rigging and skinning characters.
Users import a character model in standard 3D formats – USD, OBJ, FBX or glTF/GLB – and orient it appropriately. Armature fits a skeleton to it and generates skin weights automatically.
There are readymade rig templates for bipeds, quadrupeds and props, or you can assemble modular components, making it possible to rig creatures like this squid.
Skinning is done in two by two engines, both of which run locally on a user’s machine.
The first uses geodesic voxel binding – also used in Maya’s native Smooth skinning tools – and runs on any system; the second is an AI engine, and requires a NVIDIA GPU.
The rigged and skinned character can then be exported in USD format, making it possible to use it in any application that can read UsdSkel data: Armature is primarily designed for use with Maya and Unreal Engine, but Blender and Houdini should also be able to load the characters.
Tools for manually refining the raw AI output
Melian describes Armature as a “human + AI rigging tool”: the raw AI output is “good enough for a hobbyist”, but can be refined manually to “take it as far as a professional needs”.
The manual refinement tools can be used nonlinearly, and it’s also possible to reload a changed source model and keep the skinning Armature previously generated.
Separate free toolset builds control rigs for Maya users
Maya users also get the option to generate a control rig for the character, making it possible to animate it manually, rather than by retargeting existing animations or mocap data.
Doing so requires FabricatorStudio’s separate Maya toolset, which reads a custom key that Armature generates, and builds a control rig from it.
The toolset itself, which is also free to indie artists, is a “complete Maya-to-Unreal character pipeline” with a range of other functionality, including a pose and animation library.
Melian says that he is now working on a similar control rig builder for Unreal Engine.
Price and system requirements
Armature is compatible with Windows 10+ only. At the time of writing, the current release is 2.1.3. The AI skinning engine requires a NVIDIA GPU; everything else is hardware-agnostic.
The software is free for personal use, and free for commercial work to indie artists earning under $100,000/year. Paid perpetual licenses cost $149.
The Maya toolset is compatible with Maya 2022+ and is free to artists and studios with revenue under $2 million/year. You can see pricing for large studios here.
Download free standalone rigging tool Armature from the FabricatorStudio website
Read more about Armature in the online documentation
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