Danyal Rig Builder
Started as a simple human auto-rig skinned with ngSkinTools, and grew into a full rigging tool: bipeds, quadrupeds, vehicles, motorcycles and bicycles.
Where it started
Danyal Rig Builder began as a simple human auto-rig skinned with ngSkinTools. I kept adding what I needed on real projects, and it grew into a full rigging tool for characters, creatures and vehicles.
Characters and creatures
- Bipeds, quadrupeds and birds from placed guides, in an easy linked mode or a free mode.
- IK/FK limbs with matching, stretch, and rigs that scale cleanly with the guides.
- Extra limbs for creatures (more arms, legs, tails, wings) and a Dragon preset.
- Walk Mode drives a character with WASD and keeps the feet on the ground.
- Fly Mode for birds and dragons, and tail physics you simulate and bake.
Faces
- Per-vertex lid and lip joints, with a blink that orbits the eyeball and seals at any height.
- Smile, pucker, lip roll, jaw side and thrust, brows and one-click expression presets.
- 52 ARKit-style shape dials and webcam face capture using MediaPipe.
- Smart face binding that adds the face to an already-skinned single-mesh character without breaking the body.
Vehicles
- Cars, trucks and tanks with 2, 4, 6 or 8 wheels, and tank treads that follow the terrain.
- Drive Mode: drive with WASD, record it, and it becomes keyframes.
- Physics simulation bake, suspension with per-axle springs, turrets with aim, up to three trailers, cargo and crash damage that dents the body.
- Motorcycle rigs with fork, swingarm and lean, plus tyre tracks and burnouts.
Pipeline-ready
Rigs export as clean game skeletons for Unreal and Unity, a validator checks a rig before it ships, and animators need nothing installed: no plugins or custom nodes, only the rigger runs the tool.
Releasing it
The real question was whether anyone would use it. I released it free on GitHub, launched it on LinkedIn and listened: installs came in from the US, UK, India, Egypt and Pakistan on Maya 2022 to 2026. The first real bug report (Maya 2025's switch to Qt 6) was fixed within days, a request in the comments became the creatures update, and feedback about setup led to clearer docs.
Result
Free on GitHub with more than 250 downloads so far.
