Most animators are waiting on somebody else for a rig. I spent fourteen years being the person they wait on, and I got tired of being the bottleneck, so I built the tool I wanted to hand them.
Armature is a standalone Windows application that takes a character mesh and gives back a rigged, skinned, animation-ready asset. It runs on its own, outside Maya and Blender, and hands the finished work to whichever package you animate in.
Load a mesh as USD, OBJ, FBX, GLB or glTF. Fit the proportions against a height reference. Assemble the skeleton from modules, or start from a whole-character template. Press one button for skin weights. Then paint, if you want to.
Two biggest helpers in the toolset. Hammer and chisel.
Hammer melts a bad patch into the surface around it. Chisel does the opposite, carving the patch rigid and sharpening its boundary. Armour plates want chisel. The cloth underneath wants hammer. Both are incremental, so you tap until it looks right and stop wherever you want.
That is the shape of the whole application. Press one button and the result carries a blocking pass. Keep going and there is enough depth to take it as far as a production rig needs.
Everything leaves as a single USD file carrying the mesh, the skeleton, the weights and the control rig build data. A Maya control rig builder ships alongside, so what you export arrives as something you can animate rather than a bare skeleton.
The skinning solve runs on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded.
Free for personal, learning and portfolio work, and free for commercial work under $100k a year. Full details and the download at https://adrianmelian.itch.io/armature
Adrian Melian, Technical Artist. Double Fine, Ubisoft, Camouflaj, Sledgehammer.