The new tool allows you to quickly and easily create lightweight animation rigs in Maya 2020 and higher.
Development team Create 3d Characters announced recently that Hive Auto-Rigger, a long-awaited rig-building tool for Maya, is finally out of beta and is now available as part of Zoo Tools Pro, the team's extensive suite comprising over 90 tools designed to enhance animation workflows in Maya.
With Hive Auto-Rigger, users can efficiently set up lightweight animation rigs that can be effortlessly transferred to external software and game engines, thanks to the built-in Hive Export FBX tool. The new application also includes a robust Developer API, providing users with the ability to easily upgrade or reconstruct rigs either through the user interface or via the command line.
What's more, the rigs created with Hive are fully compatible with vanilla Maya, ensuring a seamless sharing experience with others who may not have Zoo Tools installed.
The tool features:
- FBX Export Tool (Hive Export FBX Tool)
- Animation Mirror Tool
- Joints To Hive Guides
- Multi-branch FK chains
- Spline Spine
- Limb Lower/Upper Stretchy Update
- Bendy for arms and legs, soft ik
- Limb guides build improvements
- Quad Leg component
- And much more!
"Hive is designed to be highly customizable and adaptable for production use," comments the team. "It features its own Hive API, built on top of Maya's API 2, to facilitate extension and modification. Our development efforts are currently focused on adding additional rigging and animation functionality to the platform. Hive is built on Python and Open Maya 2 and provides the option to create rig parts using both cmds and pymel."
Please note that Hive Auto-Rigger uses Maya's matrix attributes and, as such, only works with Maya version 2020 or higher. You can learn more and try out the new tool yourself by clicking this link.
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