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RIG SWAPPER
When I started on UNREAL TOURNAMENT the game was using ARTv1 rigs. I quickly discovered that it wasn’t easy to switch rigs to see a different set of player arms or even a full character to animated with. Since I had quite a bit of experience dealing with references and the problems of locked nodes and renaming hidden nodes in Maya, I took a stab at seeing what was involved in swapping our an ARTv1 rigged character. At first, I was a bit discouraged since the ARTv1 rig had a nested rig that was difficult to deal with since it had no namespace. However, after some trial and error I discovered a sequence of unloading, renaming, and loading which allowed the ARTv1 rig and its toolset to keep functioning. After that, it was just a matter of making a simple UI to access a list of usable rigs to swap from. Shortly after, I began work on FORTNITE, and that’s when the tool really became useful. With a few small updates, I was able to get the tool working with any ARTv1 project actually. This was largely due to how well organized and predictable the ARTv1 projects are structured. From there, the tool just started to grow in functionality, adding icons and attachments, etc. The concept is very simple, but amazing how powerful and useful it became over the years. To me it is the type of tool that is essential when you are dealing with large amounts of unique character skins and body types that all share the same base rig and controls.

<Rig Swapper Trailer


RIG SWAPPER · bpTools 2.0
·mel script

LANDING
Cody Bellimer

FIRST PERSON RELOAD
Brett Paton

TWIN BLAST EMOTE
Plastic Wax

DANCE MOVES
Ray Arnett

A.R.T. · Animation and Rigging Toolkit
Jeremy Ernst