How to Use Studio Library for Maya

Now that all our animation students at BNU are working remotely, it's more important than ever for our students to be aware of the many free plugins that are available to help them work from home in Autodesk Maya.

One of the weaknesses of Maya is the difficulty of copying and pasting your animation from one character rig to another, and Maya also lacks a user friendly interface for saving out and re-using your character poses.  To solve this problem, the free Studio Library tool offers Maya animators a Python script for managing poses and transferring animation in Maya.

aTools - The Animator's Swiss Army Knife

aTools - "The ultimate free utility belt for Maya Animators"

aTools is a free download for Maya that describes itself as "The ultimate free utility belt for Maya animators."

aTools was created by Portuguese animator Alan Camilo, and is extremely useful for all kinds of animation tasks in Maya.

The Top Three Free Maya Plugins

Maya 2016

What free plugins do Maya animators need? Each time Autodesk release a new version of Maya they fix many things that don't appear to need fixing - such as the design of the overall interface, but leave many long-established weaknesses in place.  Luckily for us, there are a number free plugins that can easily be accessed by Maya animators to make our lives easier. Here is our shortlist.

PAIE - a free Plugin For Maya

Maya, industry standard software

Autodesk Maya is a powerful piece of software, free for students to download, and now the industry standard for 3D animation around the world.  But Maya does have its weaknesses, and one of them is the difficulty of copying and pasting your animation from one rig to another. Got some great animation you want to copy on to a new rig? Computer says no. But now the free PAIE plugin by Jacob Weiner has made it all much, much easier.  Here is how it works.

How to use the free Parent Master plugin for Maya

The Parentmaster - a free Maya plugin

Autodesk Maya is free to students, and a result of this it has a huge user base around the world. Many Maya users have sought to improve the software, developing free plugins that can (as the name suggests) be plugged in to your free copy of Maya, adding to its usability and helping to solve some of the trickier problems associated with digital animation.

The ParentMaster is a plugin created by Paolo Dominici which greatly simplifies the business of attaching and un-attaching objects in Maya. Say you want to animate a character picking up a ball and then dropping it. This free tool will make your life much, much easier.

The TweenMachine - the Animator's Best Friend

One of the many advantages of learning to animate in Maya is the wide range of free plugins developed by the user community around the world. A free plugin is just that - a piece of code that can be added to your copy of Maya, free of charge. One of the most useful is the tweenMachine, created by Justin Animator, which helps animators to create breakdown poses in Maya on stepped curves. It's a time saving tool that takes much of the labour out of breaking down your character poses once you are happy with the timing of the main blocking of your animation.