I spent 14 years as a TA in AAA, most of them in character tech art at studios like Double Fine, Ubisoft, Camouflaj and Sledgehammer Games. This year, like a lot of us, I am on my own.
When I sat down to build my own game I realized that I had nothing. So I built a whole pipeline and I am releasing it. It is free for solo developers, indies, and any studio under 2 million a year in revenue. Not a trial, not a crippled tier. The only paid add-on is a set of advanced ribbon modules, and rigs built with them animate for everyone regardless.
What is in it:
- Rig Fabricator: network-driven modular rigging. Scene-is-truth: the Maya scene and its network nodes are the source of truth, blueprints are just the starting recipe. Drop limb fragments, mirror with either orientation convention (Unreal-style mirrored behavior or +X down the bone on both sides), one-button Build, and a real Edit Mode so you can restructure and rebuild without losing work.
- AutoSkin: AI skinning powered by SkinTokens (autoregressive, runs locally on your GPU). It has been by far the best skinning result I have gotten from any automated method, and I have tried most of them.
- Animation & Pose Studio: a cross-rig portable pose and anim library.
- FBX exporters (static, skeletal, anim) with a rig-binding contract aimed at Unreal, so what leaves Maya arrives in-engine the way you expect.
- Reggie, an AI technical artist wired in over MCP. It can inspect your scene, your rig, and the build report, and hand you a diagnosis and a fix script. It is read-only by design; it never touches your scene.
Honest state of the project: this is v1, production-tested by one person, on one machine, on Maya 2025, and a little on 2027. It has rigged real characters and shipped them into Unreal. What it has not had is other people’s environments, which is exactly what starts today. I am calling the first users founding users because they will shape where this goes: public issue tracker, public request board with upvotes, visible changelog. No ETAs and I will decline most requests honestly, but everything gets read and the upvotes genuinely steer.
License, stated plainly: Business Source License 1.1. Source-available, not open source. Free under 2 million a year in company revenue; above that a flat yearly studio license (1,000 a year at the 2 to 5 million band, so crossing the line costs less than a Maya seat). Every release converts to GPL-2.0-or-later four years after it ships, automatically.
The studios that can afford a Technical Artist help keep it free for everyone who can’t.
Site and docs: fabricator.studio
Source: GitHub - adrianmelian/FabricatorStudio: Animation Pipeline Tools · GitHub