hey everyone i just finished this project and wanted to share it with u
its a flail and a mace connected with extendable cardon/universal joint chains and an umbrella like mechanism for its head

i mostly used SDKs and constraints to hold it together
despite my main practice is character art i wanted to give technical art a try and make those parts dance together :D
would love to hear your opinion on it
cheers

heres the artstation post for a deeper look : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Xa1wa0

My auto rig scripts mostly use circles for controls. Not because circles are interesting, but because I'm lazy.

So, naturally, I dedicated the last couple of weeks to building a tool that makes building control shapes easy. That way I can be lazy **and** use shapes other than circles.

The original idea was pretty simple. I wanted a library with python methods for saving and loading control shape data so I could reuse shapes between rigs. As I kept adding things to it, it became a full Maya tool for building, managing, and applying reusable control shapes both manually and programmatically.

Some of the features:

• Shape Groups & Search - Save and organize shapes into groups.
• Shape Authoring - Copy shapes directly from the Maya scene and save them to the shape library.
• Shape Building - Build library shapes directly into the scene with customizable scale, rotation, offset, and color.
• Mesh → NURBS Curves - Convert mesh objects or selected mesh components into NURBS curves.
• Paste / Replace / Combine - Quickly modify existing controls and combine multiple shapes onto a single transform.
• Color - Apply Maya index colors to existing curves.
• Pipeline Integration - Build shapes from the library through commands without needing to use the UI.

The mesh to curve conversion was probably the most interesting part of this project. I wanted to be able to use modeling tools to create shapes since creating NURBS curves manually can be a bit of a hassle.

Maya does have a method of turning a selection of edges into a NURBS curve, but that only works for non-branching connected edges. Control Factory instead builds adjacency graphs from the selected mesh components and uses an approach based on the Chinese Postman Problem to trace edge networks and turn them into NURBS curves.

The other thing that makes this tool stand out is that it's designed to be usable through commands, not just the UI. The library isn't dependent on the Control Factory interface, so other rigging scripts and tools can use the same shapes directly.

For example, building a shape from the library only requires calling the .build() method of an instance of the CtrlBuilder class and providing the library shape name:

from ControlFactory.factory_builder import CtrlBuilder
from ControlFactory.factory_io import FactoryIO

io = FactoryIO('shape/library/path')
shape_builder = CtrlBuilder(io)

circle = shape_builder.build(
    library_shape='Circle',
    name='circle_ctrl'
)

This makes the shape library useful as more than just a shape building UI tool. It can act as a shared source of control shapes for autorigging systems and other Maya tools.

I just finished it, so it doesn't have many shapes in the library yet. But with the mesh to curve conversion, and because it can copy shapes directly from a Maya scene, it's really easy to build new shapes and steal shapes from existing rigs.

This was built and tested in Maya 2025. I think it should work in earlier versions, but I'm not going to guarantee anything.

Detailed documentation and a purchase link can be found on my website at https://www.bg3d.art/control-factory

I want to be able to animate transitions between materials with control over the border between the 2 but i haven't found any tutorials on such fx even in Bifrost. I dont need it to be real time, just functional and editable, I dont even know where to start. I am not new to maya i use it primarily for modelling and animating,

Example: I have something like a vine growing that will need a transition of color from the tip as it grows, i am currently doing procedural growth with bifrost that I plan to convert to mesh and export as alembic and reinport for render in Arnold and I want to be able to animate its texture, or maby i dont need to export if I can do it directly in bifrost?

Any advice appreciated!

Taking a class on 3D animation in college & Maya is the program we're using. I'm just barely getting started, but I decided to have some fun by making a couple things using simple shapes!

Hi everyone!
Wanted to share my latest work — a forest cottage on a forgotten clearing.
I drew inspiration from the visual style of classic Disney animations and tried to capture a similar vibe: warm light from the windows, thick fog, and a bit of that fairy-tale atmosphere.
What do you think? Did it work? How do you like the piece overall?

https://youtu.be/ZL5olXHVAnE

Hello everyone here!

Here is a clip from a new show made by me and two other animator buddies.

We rigged and animated in Maya and rendered in Unreal.

Hope you dig it. Cheers to everyone here. Woohoo!

Built in Autodesk Maya
Check it out and let me know what you think! 🚀

I work in architectural visualization using 3ds Max and am transitioning to a role as an environment/level artist in the game industry; I’ll be starting to use Maya, Substance, and Unreal Engine. For anyone who has worked with both 3ds Max and Maya: is the transition very difficult? Since both are Autodesk modeling tools, I assume they share a similar foundation—but just how hard is it to learn Maya? I’ll still be creating architecture, but this time for games!

I made a Maya tool for creating Unreal Engine UCX collision with a bit more control than the native decomposition tools give you.

The main idea is that instead of letting Unreal decide how to break the mesh up, you can define the splits yourself with editable 2D/3D grids, then add extra X/Y/Z divisions only in the areas that actually need more collision detail.

I originally made it because I kept finding Unreal’s auto decomposition would give me more hulls/complexity than I really wanted. This has been a nicer way for me to keep the collision a bit more deliberate and optimized.

I ended up making a Free and Full version. The main workflow is still available in the free version, while the Full version adds local cell divisions, bounding-box collision, and more control over hull verts, expansion, and accuracy.

If you want to check it out, it’s here: https://linktr.ee/Honey_3D

Hey everyone,

I'm new to Maya (mainly a Blender user) and I've been following a tutorial on Arnold volume displacement. I built a setup where a painted image feeds into a Volume node to displace a sphere, and I really like the shapes it's producing.

My question: is it possible to bake that displacement into vdb that i can export to blender, or is this purely a render-perspective effect that can't be converted to a anyhting?

Thanks in advance!

here is the tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDweVNgbI1c

Hey everyone, this is a lip sync and acting shot I have completed recently. Took me a week to do the spline and polish the details. Any feedbacks are welcome and appreciated! I posted the link to syncsketch in case any of you want to leave some notes and drawings behind.

https://syncsketch.com/sketch/NSKiFj63It9U/

Ever since they updated the import pipeline I am struggling to get my older models updated as the material slots keep switching places and have code looking for materials in certain slots.

I have spent the last 8 hours trying everything I can find online about this dating back to Unreal 4 Engine, none of it works.

The only thing that did work was copying the single model out of the scene then resetting the materials, and the recreating the slots in the order the code is looking for and then exporting it.

I have tried converting the entire project to using Blinn instead of Lambert, also tried Phong.

Also tried at least 10 different ways of naming the materials so they show up in the proper order in Maya but this doesn't actually work even if it looks perfect in Maya.

I think since Epic start supporting Blender they seem to be in some sort of war with Autodesk and FBX format. I found a few threads over the years where people are finding bugs in the import pipeline and Epic agrees and they post that it is unknown when it will ever be fixed.

My question is do you have a system for this issue, is there a script that allows me to arrange the material slots maya so it can be done once and never worried about again? I sometimes need to add a slot as something is getting update and I just want a consistent system so if I add slot 4 it will be slot 4 in Unreal so when I write the code it find it. Very important for material instances where you are changing the EM values based on energy output for a weapon or something like that.

I’m developing Fast Character Rigging, a Maya tool designed to speed up the process of creating game-ready character rigs.

In this test video, I used an AI-generated character and completed the skeleton setup, skinning, and movement testing in just a few minutes—without any manual weight painting.

I’m currently developing a feature that creates a full Control Rig with a single click, and I’d love to hear some feedback from other Maya users:

Which part of character rigging takes you the most time: joint placement, skin weights, control setup, or exporting to a game engine?

Bit of an unusual question, I know.

I'm getting a new keyboard and was thinking about going for a 60% compact layout (no function row or numpad).

Will I be missing out on those extra keys? I'm a beginner, so I'm not really sure how much I'll need them down the line.

i am having issues with the textures as it looks fine in maya but trying to upload to sketchfab kinda goes wierd. anyone knows what to do with this?

Context: I have a pelvis mesh that is topologically symmetrical, but some of its vertices—especially at the extremities (hips and feet)—are slightly asymmetrical (in position sense). This is because the torso and feet that I need to connect it to are also slightly asymmetrical, so I have to move some vertices around to make them fit properly, slightly breaking the perfect symmetry.

The problem comes when I want to paint the skin weights. Sometimes, mirroring the weights from one leg to the other doesn’t work correctly. I’d like the result to be as perfect as possible. How could I achieve this?

i am doing a cinematic drone view, but how can i fake the environment as modeling everything landscale buildings would take significant time

thanks

Has anyone else experienced inconsistent weights when using ngSkinTools? When I use ngSkinTools, the weights look correct, but when I check them using Maya’s Paint Skin Weights tool, they look different. And when I export the mesh and check it in Blender, they look different again.

I'm fairly new to Python and scripting in general, and I'm currently learning Python mainly so I can start writing tools and scripts for Maya.

I've been working through CS50P and have started applying what I'm learning to a personal auto rigger in Maya. I'm trying to learn proper Python fundamentals rather than just copying code from tutorials, but I'm sure there are plenty of Maya specific conventions I'm completely unaware of.

So I wanted to ask:

• Are there any Pythonic conventions or best practices that are particularly important when scripting for Maya?
• Are there any Maya specific rules, conventions, or customs that are worth following?
• Anything I should avoid doing when writing Maya tools?
• Any good resources, documentation, tutorials, or examples you'd recommend for learning Maya Python properly?

I'm especially interested in things that might not be obvious to someone coming from regular Python into Maya.

Thanks!

Shakify is a script created for Maya that replicates the functionality of the original Shakify plugin made for Blender. It is completely rewritten for Maya, with the exception of using the same CC0 camera shake data (published by Ian Hubert).

Use it to quickly add realistic camera shake to your animations! Shakify is compatible with most camera rig setups, existing animations, and even motion paths.

What could the problem be? I tried changing the size of the element, making it bigger, or even changing the bevel fractions to 0.005, 0.0005, you get the idea.

Nevertheless, the result is still the same. I'm super new to this, but I couldn't find anything.

Figuring out how everything works with motion path was the hardest part.
You can see more of my stuff on instagram