Maestro
by Rashad Redic

If you ask someone into 3d what they like to do, they’ll tell you they like to model. Maybe they like to texture, or maybe they like to animate. Chances are though, you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who blurts out rigging, at least not followed by expletives. I’ve met more people who were put off by having to rig than any other facet of character creation, myself included. Thankfully, there are a few solutions out there for people who just want to get on with the animation, and that’s a good thing. Enter Maestro, a character rigging plugin for Lightwave. Even with the strides that Lightwave has made in the rigging department, it still isn't as easy or interactive as it is in Maya or Softimage so I am especially thankful when I have to deal with it as little as possible.

Before I go on, I have to highlight the excellent documentation. There’s a nice pdf that gets you up and running, but what I really like are the quick video tutorials that clearly explain how to use the rig controls. I’ve seen this with other software and I hope this becomes the trend, because I was certainly able to get up and running by watching these much faster than by reading the manual.

The setup process is similar to another auto rigging plugins like Auto Character Setup 4 (ACS4). You’re given a library of skelegons to fit whatever you might be making, be it a biped, a quad legged animal, or something with a tail and wings. You fit the skelegons to your mesh then import them both into layout. This part actually goes fairly quick.

fitting skelegons to your model is fairly quick and easy.

Once in layout, you load the plugin, select the type of rig you used, load the Maestro controller, click a couple of buttons and you’re done. Within a few seconds you’ve got a working rig. The rigs are very stable and fast. One of the shining features of Maestro is the ease with which you can add multiple characters to the scene. This was way too much work in ACS4, but here each character can be added to it’s own tabbed panel for easy selection and organization. Kudos for making this work extremely well. Depending on what you are doing you may still need weights to help parts of your character deform better, but the rigs, in particular the torso area are designed to work with as few weights as possible, and they generally work as advertised.

Now, Maestro’s innovative feature is the Maestro Character Controller(™). It’s an interactive panel with a control picker that allows you to select various parts of the rig. That in itself is not uncommon but the cool thing is that you can select and drag over movable, customizable hotspots to control the rig. It sounds really cool, and it is cool, but I just couldn’t get used to controlling a character that way. I prefer my rig controls to be on or around the character. There are some on-character controls, but I would have liked to have seen more options. In light of this, I preferred the rig controls of ACS4 and T4D. However, anyone who has either rigged or animated should realize how subjective animation controls can be, so my preference is definitely someone else's pain, and vice versa. Having said that, the way Maestro is set up, to be controlled from the controller panel, is thoughtful and it does make sense.The cool thing about Maestro is how customizable it all is. It’s totally possible to add the things you want to see on the rig.

this is where you load the rig template that maestro uses for rigging.

The Maestro Character Controller(™), is what makes Maestro Maestro, and a lot of work is expected to be done in it. You can set keyframes, hand pinning, and access a few handy functions you would normally have to access in a different panel. Most convenient! Now when I say “character”, I don’t mean just humans and animals. Almost anything can be a character, be it machinery or other inanimate objects, lights, cameras, etc.. You can even assign attribute changes such as subpatch levels, light intensity or camera focal length. Even if Maestro didn’t autorig, there is so much you can do with the character controller that autorigging is almost a bonus. Maestro is much more than an auto-rigger? For example, when you click and drag a hotspot box in the panel, you can link this box to the rotational or translation axis of the object. Or another shining feature is the ability to combine hotspots to drive multiple values. You can set one hotspot to control one thing, another hotspot to control something else, and overlap them together. Then, you can click and drag within the shared area to control the animation properties of both boxes. Now that is cool!

The Character Controller where all the magic happens.

If I were going to gripe about anything, I’d ask for a physical rig as robust as the animation abilities from the controller. I’m sure theres going to be a lot of animators who prefer the traditional way of being able to grab various IK handles on and around the rig and there aren’t enough handles for my taste. My other issue is that some of the hotspots have two-way directional control, some have four-way directional control, and some change function with left or right mouse clicks, but you wont know whats what until you fool around with it. And finally, ACS4 did a better job of arranging the schematic view and making it easy to find select things in this view. I’m not sure if Maestro does anything with the schematic view at all.

Ultimately, if you want something that’s going to assist with the process of rigging for Lightwave, there’s not a whole lot of options out there. There’s ACS4, the T4D Tools, Setup Machine (which I believe is no longer supported for Lightwave), and Maestro. I’ve used them all and they all autorig well enough, but none come remotely close to the versatility of Maestro and it’s Character Controller(™). For that reason alone it’s head and shoulders above the other autoriggers out there. Maestro feels like the shiny new toy on the block, and it’s definitely worth the cash.