Contour Rig Tools vs dpAutoRigSystem

Contour Rig Tools is a spline-based rigging system for Autodesk Maya, designed for animation production and technical directors. Contour joint chains generate splines that serve as single deformer influences, potentially reducing weight-painting work. Its volume-aware spline deformation handles bends and twists and is designed to avoid pinching and candy-wrappering. Contour Bones include length and stretch controls, and bone CVs can be used as spline control points. Built-in IK includes stretch and anti-pop features, while constraints drive transforms and relationships between Contour chains. A Python API can create, modify, and query Contour nodes, accepting strings, pyNodes, and MObjects. The tool can drive conventional Maya joints for game-engine export. Version 1.0.12.1 supports Maya 2020 through 2026, except Maya 2023.0, 2023.1, and 2024.0; downloads are provided for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Animator Mode is free for animating with rigs and adding bone CVs. Creating or modifying rigs requires Rigger Mode, starting at $40 a month billed for twelve months.

dpAutoRigSystem is a free, open-source Python script for automating rigging in Maya. Its modular, multilingual, object-oriented design lets users assemble components into rigs. The documented process uses guides as rig blueprints, then parents them, sets rig attributes, adjusts controller shapes, skins the model, and prepares it for animation. A rebuilding feature supports updates to an existing rig. Skinning tools can create skinCluster nodes and change joint influences on selected geometry. Skin weights can be copied by closest-point or UV-space methods, or exported and imported as JSON files. Installation involves placing the dpAutoRigSystem folder in Maya’s scripts directory or another MAYA_PATH, then launching it with Python in Maya’s Script Editor. It runs with Maya on Linux, macOS, and Windows. The project says it was created to help users make rigs themselves, is GPL-2.0 licensed, and links to a wiki for documentation; maintainers invite questions, suggestions, and comments.