It’s finally here. The first release of Modular Rigging Tools for Maya is available for download. When I wrote the first draft of MRT, I didn’t intend to make it public. I wrote it for personal use to rig characters using tools that worked the way I wanted without going into lot of details about getting it done out of the box using Maya. At that time, the draft version of MRT was rudimentary; it required knowing how it worked at the source level, and it also meant that it didn’t account for most of error handling which it does now. Over time, I changed and got rid of unnecessary features and added new functionality, until I realized it needed to be more organized. I re-wrote a lot of the code to keep it up with correct naming conventions, which was necessary for MRT to classify and correctly identify scene objects that it generated and handled. I also organized most of the UI elements to keep it simpler. While working my way for a public release, I had to come up with a better solution for making the control rigging framework within MRT, which was entirely re-written. This was done so that it be extended by a user if needed, without modifying the original source code. This wasn’t possible with the draft version of MRT, where you had to add /modify methods in the existing source and the control class types were entirely segregated. This was more like an ad-hoc implementation and made things a little messy.

Anyway, I’ve tried my best to make it work as easy for everyone. It’s not perfect, and there still might be errors that I’ve overlooked; so keep them coming. If anyone’s reading this and if you’re using MRT, please comment. As always, I’ll try to improve upon and add new features to it during my time. Please view the documentation and tutorial for using Modular Rigging Tools.

To download, see the Resources page.