There is no denying that the animation workflow based on Maya remains one of the most outstanding 3D production tools on the market today. Maya's well-known customizable workflow has allowed many auxiliary tools to emerge in an endless stream, and their tight integration has greatly improved the efficiency of animation and special effects content production.
And we'd like to share a rigging system for Maya today! Baguette is a free node-based rigging system released by French and Canadian rigger, Nims Bun. Get to know about the talent rigging supervisor and his self-developing rigging tool Buguette with XRender!
| Baguette
Baguette is a node-based rigging system for Maya creation. Described by the developer, "Baguette is a drag, drop, and connect system rig. Each item you create is a module which carries all the data of that item. The goal of this system is to provide the ability to easily develop rigs by any riggers from all levels."
Although Baguette was released this month (March, 2023), the system has been in development for ten years since 2013, and according to the developer Nims Bun, "bloomed at Pixomondo".
According to an interview by 3DVF with the Nims Bun, who worked as Rigging Lead in project Midway, Baguette played a significant role and "handled the rigging side" for the whole project. In addition, Midway was also the "first project Baguette had to deal with face rigs".
How does Baguette work? The video above is an example made by developer: the rigging result of a FACS-based facial completed in 3 hours. Baguette enables riggers to create rigs simply by wiring together nodes to create joints. There are readymade node types for body parts like heads, legs, arms, quadruped legs, hands and feet, plus different types of joint chains, which can be connected to quickly create custom rig layouts.
Users can pick from a list of preset shapes to use as rig controls, or assign their own custom shapes, with the option to edit the control shapes directly in the Maya viewport.
In addition to being convenient, easy to use and free, the biggest advantage for those who understand development is that half of the code is open source, so you can develop better functions on this basis!
There isn't much written documentation yet, but you may give a watch of more videos shared by Nims Bun in his Vimeo channel. And if you'd like to have a try with Baguette, click here to download on Github.
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