Pose Lib for Maya - Save Your Poses!

Pose Lib - free at http://www.studiolibrary.com

Pose Lib is a great free tool for managing poses and animation in Maya.  It's a super-useful free script for animators; you can use it to record a pose for any object in Maya, meaning that you can build a library of poses for your characters.

To use Pose Lib, download the tool, select your character, hit the "new pose" button, and a pose file is created in the relevant directory, along with the corresponding icon (a .bmp file).

What is PoseLib?

Pose Lib is a plug-in for Autodesk Maya allows you to build a library of poses for your characters.  Maya doesn't come equipped with this feature, but any animator who has worked on a feature film will be familiar with similar interfaces, because they are so useful (on a big project, they are essential). Now animation students can build their own pose libraries - absolutely free.

Blending
You can blend between your current pose and one you have selected by holding down the ALT or CTRL key and clicking on a pose.

Icons
Pose Lib lets you choose the icon size you like (from 32×32 to any custom size/ratio up to 512×512).
You can also apply only specific channels from a pose simply by selecting them in the channelBox.

Referencing
Pose Lib works with Referenced and Unreferenced characters (you can even choose the namespace on the flight).

Organisation
Pose Lib lets you organize your poses by characters and categories (e.g.: Face, Body…). You can rename, delete, replace or move any pose from any character or category.

How to install
1. Download and unzip the studiolibrary.zip file.

OSX
2. Use ⌘+Shift+G in the finder and copy the studiolibrary folder to
~/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/scripts

Linux
2. Open the file manager and copy the studiolibrary folder to
~/maya/scripts

Windows
2. Open the file explorer and copy the studiolibrary folder to
C:/Users/USERNAME/Documents/maya/scripts

3. Start Maya and run the following code in the Python script editor.
import studiolibrary
studiolibrary.main()

And, of course, it's completely free. To see a video demonstration, watch the YouTube video below:

You can download Pose Lib here.

To find out more about Animation Apprentice, click here for a link to Frequently Asked Questions. To sign up for our next classroom at Animation Apprentice, follow this link.