Contour Rig Tools vs Rigify

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.

Rigify is a free Blender add-on that generates character armatures by assembling rig components from a metarig template. Users position the metarig bones to match a character and start generation through Blender’s Armature properties. The manual lists Basic Human, Basic Quadruped, Human, Cat, Wolf, Horse, and Shark metarigs. Bundled rig types cover spines, limbs, fingers, faces, and skin, while feature set packages can add custom rig classes. Generation duplicates the metarig, identifies needed rigs, creates instances, and runs their generation methods. The generated rig interface can switch visible bone collections, change custom properties, and convert between IK and FK. A user-provided Python text block can apply customizations after generation, allowing them to be repeated on regeneration. Rigify requires Blender and runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. It assumes one Blender unit equals one meter. The manual advises keeping the metarig, since removing it or substantially changing the generated rig can interfere with later feature updates or adaptation to breaking Blender changes.