StudioNEST releases GEAR free and open source character animation tools for Softimage. GEAR provide a complete and modular rigging system for some pretty advanced character setups pretty quickly.
“StudioNEST Gear is a rigging and animation toolset for Autodesk Softimage. With StudioNEST Gear you have all the tools you need to ease the work of your rigging and animation department. Gear includes a complete and modular rigging system that will help you build advanced character rig easily.”
GEAR – Quick overview from Jeremie Passerin on Vimeo.
“GEAR is an open source project to provide a complete and production quality tool set for rigging and animation inside Autodesk Softimage. It includes a lot of tools to ease the rigging and animation process. The main focus on this first version is the rigging part. We wanted to be able to create and maintain production quality rigs easily. A couple of tools also been created to ease the rigging process, helping the manipulation of envelopes, shapes, weightmaps… Anyone should be able to built custom rig using GEAR. It has been designed to be flexible and easy to use. Even non-riggers can create advanced rigging and animate them easily. But the system is also open to further development so TDs can create their own components and use them inside of the GEAR Rigging System. Also everything is accessible through scripting with a complete API to automate as much as possible.
b. Historic GEAR is the mix of different experiences with different rigging and animation tool sets. It took its main source from gRig 1.0, a rigging system and rigging tool set for Softimage developed by Jeremie Passerin but we should also mention some other that were an inspiration. D2S_biped (developed by Benjamin Malartre and Jeremie Passerin for Def2Shoot), RigMachine (developed by Halim Negadi, Cyril Cosenza, Sylvain Audi and Jeremie Passerin for Pumpkin3D), RigSetup (developed by Josh Murtack and Aloys Bailet for Animal Logic).”
