As part of his MFA thesis at Savannah College of Art and Design, Ayan Akbar developed  Jiggle Box, a python driven tool for Autodesk Maya that automates much of the process of creating secondary animation for tails, fins, hair, fish bodies, and character rigs.

Jiggle Tool Features


  • Presets to suit different style of animation

  • Jiggle motion can be implemented on multiple body parts (belly, fleshy face, hips etc)

  • Flexibility to create multiple tentacle rigs within the same scene

  • Flexibility to make multiple tentacle rigs with different dynamic settings

  • Research based presets to hide the backend dynamic settings

  • Formation of groups to keep the hierarchy clean and tidy.

  • Option to create a shelf button to invoke the script.

  • Step by step instructions

  • Text notes to make each step more understandable

Jiggle Box essentially works in two modes with a “Jiggle” and a “Tentacle” tab, which can provide a lot of flexibility in different rigging or animation situations. Jiggle Box makes use of the Maya Muscle Skin Deformer system and nHair to create some of the effects.

The system is built to achieve basic secondary jiggle motion fairly quickly, so you can focus on creating your animation rather than teaching numbers and modifying rigs. One of the cool things is that the weights that get added with the Jiggle box tool can be edited or completely removed at any point of the production pipeline.

The Jiggle functionality will allow you to apply jiggle on multiple body parts of your character, or on multiple rigs in the same scene. It also contains some preset jiggle settings that correspond to realistic, stylized or semi-stylized animation. Jiggle Box will create a and keep its data in a cache file which is a separate file that it will read, and you are able to toggle the jiggle effect on and off at any time.

While in Tentacle mode, you can easily add dynamics to rope, trees, or tails and maintain manual or dynamic control of each “tentacle”.

To learn more about Jiggle Box, you can check out Ayan Akbar’s site here. Jiggle Box is provided freely here – JiggleBox Tool for Automating secondary motion in Maya.