If you're new to, or working on a Maya-based project and need a little help, there's plenty of plugins out there that may be able to assist. Some are free, others come at a cost, but all are guaranteed to make life easier.

Here, we've found 11 top Maya plugins to help you out, covering everything from animation and rigging to crowd simulations and camera views. • Read all our 3D posts 01.

May 30, 2016  Mac Autodesk Maya 3D animation software delivers a comprehensive creative feature set with tools for animation, modeling, simulation, rendering, matchmoving, and compositing on a highly extensible production platform. Japanese/Simplified Chinese Maya. Prepare Maya files containing Japanese or Simplified Chinese text Maya Help Get help Maya Help About the web browser. Notes and Procedures Troubleshooting Maya for Linux Using Maya with Mac OS X Notes and Procedures Troubleshooting Maya for Mac OS X Enter full screen mode Basics Reference Basics Menus File. Autodesk provides students, educators, and institutions free access to Maya software, in addition to learning tools. Get a free 3-year education license now.

• Platform: Windows, Linux • Price: 15-day trial The latest issue of high-volume particle rendering plugin Krakatoa, MY 2.3, comes with full Magma support, higher particle counts, and PRT surfacing over and above the previous verions. Creator has also fine-tuned existing features so that all platforms are now feature equivalent and more than fully capable of handling anything artists throw at them.

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• Price: Free Character rigging can be a tiresome, not to mention tricky, task. Aware of this, artist John Doublestein created the Andy (short of androgynous) Rig to save the students at the Savannah College of Art and Design the trouble. This brilliant customisable character rig is probably one of the most used, flexible and stable rigs around. Updated based on student feedback, this tool plays both male and female roles and has multiple hairstyles and textures readily available. The latest release includes features such as including IK/FK matching on arms and legs, squash and stretch and bendy arms and animatable pivots on feet, root and head to make the task of rigging as simple and as quick as possible. • Price: Version 1: Free, Version 2: $50 for one user lifetime license Designed by an animator, for animators, Miguel Winfield’s plug-in MG Tools has a number of features that aims to make the life of an animator that much easier. By downloading this plug-in, you'll benefit from a floating channelBox, specialised for animation, a selection of constraint tools to speed up the process, a MG to MA converter, motion path animation calculator and much more.

Dubbed the animator’s utility belt, MG Tools can seriously save time and create a more efficient workflow. Winfield generously offers the first version of this tool as a free download, with the latest iteration of the software coming in at a $50 for a lifetime license. • Price: Free Onion skinning is a technique used by animators to see multiple frames at once. By using this technique, artists can easily see how to alter or adjust an image based on the previous image in the sequence. This free script by animator and rigger Brian Horgan provides a different but helpful approach to onion skinning in 3D. Maya's in-built ghosting tool shows semi-transparent animated objects in a scene to give an overview of the animation created. But BHGhost takes it one step further, creating an onion skin that creates actual 3D outlines of your animation in the Maya viewport, making it easier to see the relation between poses and refine your animation even further.

• Price: Free Who better to get some free Maya tools from than the makers of the software themselves? The helpful bunch at Autodesk not only provide a huge amount of supportive information on their online community site Area, they've also uploaded this brilliant free collection of useful Maya scripts and plugins. Installation creates an additional pull-down menu, which provides easy access to a variety of every day tools and utilities. And so not to confuse you, tools have been organised to mimic the layout of the standard Maya menu sets, with each sub-menu containing a number of relating tools, which can be torn off and floated just like standard Maya menus. • Price: Free (express edition) If you want to create your own battle or crowd scene but have no idea where to begin, crowd simulation software Miarmy may be just the solution.

This complex Maya plugin offers a range of features, including the ability to enable agents to be affected by forces or Maya Fluids systems, for a believable performance. The professional version will set you back almost back almost $1000. But, if you're starting small, take advantage of the Express version, which, although limited to 100 agents, is free to download forever. • Price: Free Every animator out there will know how time-consuming keyframe animation can be. Created by 3D character animator Justin Barrett, the purpose of Maya plug-in TweenMachine is to greatly simplify the process of creating breakdown poses between key poses. TweenMachine significantly reduces the amount of steps it takes to create poses for your character with stepped keys. Barrett doesn’t claim tweenMachine creates perfect breakdown poses, but says it 'helps you get closer to your goal a lot faster than other methods'.