Like most painting tools, Blue Pencil 2 (opens in new tab) benefits from drawing tools that include the pencil, brush, eraser and eye dropper. The useful plugin features a grease pencil tool that allows artists to plan, annotate and illustrate shots.

If you're a 2D artist making the move into 3D, you should check out this sketchpad for Maya, Blue Pencil, which provides 2D drawing to Maya's 3D viewport. This is a brilliant, time-saving tool, and will have your characters up and running in no time.

Since working on various feature animated films such as Happy Feet and The Legend of the Guardians, technical director Oyvind Nostdal developed Advanced Skeleton (opens in new tab) to make character creation a much more efficient process.Ī collection of Maya tools for doing character setup, this useful plugin creates a complex motion system from a simple joint chain.

Price: Free / Commercial license from $750.

Maya's in-built ghosting tool shows semi-transparent animated objects in a scene to give an overview of the animation created.īut BHGhost (opens in new tab) takes it one step further, creating an onion skin that creates actual 3D outlines of your animation in the Maya viewport, making it easier to see the relation between poses and refine your animation even further. This free script by animator and rigger Brian Horgan provides a different but helpful approach to onion skinning in 3D.

By using this technique, artists can easily see how to alter or adjust an image based on the previous image in the sequence. Onion skinning is a technique used by animators to see multiple frames at once. Winfield generously offers the first version of this tool as a free download (compatible with Maya 7 to 2010), with the latest iteration of the software starting at $70. By downloading this plugin, you'll benefit from a floating channelBox, specialised for animation, a selection of constraint tools to speed up the process, a MG to MA converter, motion path animation calculator and much more.ĭubbed the animator’s utility belt, MG Tools can seriously save time and create a more efficient workflow. Price: Version 1: Free MG Tools Pro3: from $70ĭesigned by an animator, for animators, Miguel Winfield’s plugin MG Tools (opens in new tab) has a number of features that aims to make the life of an animator that much easier.Save time and effort with this animation tool

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