A while back we had a sneak look at the upcoming Anzovin Rig Tools for Maya (ART), which represents a fundamental shift in character rigging that promises to take out the almost delicate Jenga style workflows and esoteric process usually involved with rigging a character for animation. Recently, Anzovin Studios has released more information about what stage Anzovin Rigging Tools is currently at, and more in-depth information on ART’s features.

Unlike auto-rig tools like The Setup Machine, which organizes existing Maya rig nodes to provide a pre-defined rig, ART provides it’s own nodes, letting you build characters from the ground up with powerful new bones and deformers

I must say, going over all the new information for Anzovin Rigging Tools for Maya, it all looks spectacular, even though the premise of Anzovin Rigging Tools is to simply modernize the rigging process and to bring a long overdue line of control to the Maya rigging process.

ART lays out this undertaking by going as far as creating its own joint system but also providing features such as unparalleled spline-based rigging and deformation, simplified weight painting, intuitive high-level controls and built-in pose-space deformation, providing great deformation of thick objects, constrain transform nodes with VPPS, easy to multithread, and ART is being built to fit a real pipeline.

If you really want to see the power of what they are proposing, simply watch the video they created for their Indiegogo campaign page which shows in fact that when they throw around the words “paradigm shift in rigging”, they are quite serious.

The Anzovin Rigging Tools are in pre-alpha stage right now, and they are even thinking of stand alone products and expanding it into products beyond the host of Autodesk Maya, and with your help, it can get done a lot faster by supporting the Anzovin Rigging Tools crowd-funding campaign.