The Return of Anzovin Rig Tools

Long ago, when the world was young (so about 2010 or so), the ancient Rigging Masters of Anzovin Studio received a vision of an extraordinary new character rigging tool, built for the needs of modern character rigs. For years they toiled, until their labor bore fruit as a Maya plug-in. They named their creation Anzovin Rig Tools, and they saw that it was good.

But then came The Day Of Too Many Cash Flow Problems, and Anzovin Studio fell into darkness. In the ruin of that great house, many believed that Anzovin Rig Tools had perished forever. But Anzovin Rig Tools could not be killed so easily! It survived. It changed its name and went into hiding. It learned how to survive in the wastes. It learned kung-fu. It learned the secret names of the immortal space wizards, and bound them it it’s service. It learned how to juggle and make artisanal flower arrangements. And it bided it’s time for the right moment to return.

That time is now! I’m very happy to announce that the tool formerly known as Anzovin Rig Tools, now called Contour Rig Tools, has been acquired by a new company called Notional Pipe, and is finally being released! You can grab the demo and an example rig right now.

For those of you who may not be familiar with it, Contour Rig Tools is a spline-based rigging tool that Tagore Smith, Brian Kendall, and I created at Anzovin Studio (by a strange coincidence, we’re also the three principals of Notional Pipe. Not sure how that happened.) The central concept of Contour is that characters are mostly made out of tubes--arms, torsos, fingers, tails, etc--and that if you had a really great way to deform tube-like shapes, you’d solve a huge amount of the problems riggers face on a daily basis. Contour’s bones, constraints, and Ik handle are all based around a novel spline deformation method that produces near-perfect deformation for almost any curve.

Now, spline deformation has been around basically forever, and isn’t very commonly used--most rigs that use splines at all use them to drive joints rather than to deform a mesh. The reason for this is that, well, most implementations of spline deformation kind of suck for most purposes. Think about rigging with wire deformers--there’s a reason we don’t do that very much.

Contour...is not very much like a wire deformer.

Note that I haven’t painted a single weight here, but the bend and twist deformation is basically perfect. This is about the simplest thing you can do with Contour....and it’s the equivalent of a very advanced and complex conventional rig. Here’s what Contour looks like when used to create an entire character rig:

Because I’m one of the developers, I’ve been able to use Contour in production for years. Just about every single thing you’ve seen from me in the last eight years or so used Contour in some way, and every single Ephemeral rigging example I’ve shown on this blog has used Contour for deformation. I can’t stress enough how much this has changed deformation rigging for me. It’s drastically easier.

As an example, here’s a production I recently worked on for the Boston-based studio Hero4Hire:

I was in charge of all the character rigging, animation, and rendering, assisted by Katie Taccone and Karen Webb of Open Pixel. This production was completed in three weeks, starting from an animatic and completed character model but with no rigging or layout. It definitely has some rough edges due to the compressed schedule, but that it was achievable at all is pretty much down to Contour and the Ephemeral system. Notably, although this character goes through a bunch of cartoony distortions and has a very full-featured rig, rigging him with Contour took about four hours.

Contour Rig Tools is completely free for animation use (you only need a license to create or modify rigs), and the demo offers full rigging functionality for 30 days, so there’s no reason not to check it out! We’re still working on integrating payment and subscription management into the site, but you can absolutely buy Contour--you’ll just need to get in touch with us. The Get Contour page of the site has more details!

Just don’t call it Anzovin Rig Tools. That man is dead. Only Contour remains.

(As a side note, in addition to publishing Contour Rig Tools and eventually the Ephemeral system, Notional Pipe is open for consulting work on animation tools development. If you need experienced Maya developers to implement rigging, animation, or general pipeline tools, please get in touch).