For those who don’t know the tool: Animcraft by Basefount is a collaborative animation management and sharing platform used across Maya, 3ds Max, and Unreal Engine pipelines. It synchronises rigs, motions, and assets across DCC tools to streamline team workflows when it behaves.
Mocap finally holds its pose
Basefount’s new release of Animcraft focuses on reliability rather than new buzzwords. The video-based motion capture module now produces more stable poses and eliminates motion flipping that can occur during rapid or inverted movements. The changes are internal and system-level, not cosmetic. Artists can expect more predictable markerless capture in high-energy sequences, though Basefount provides no raw benchmark data.
Dragon Breath rewritten for realism
The 3ds Max Dragon Breath Ribbon System has been entirely rewritten. The update smooths solving, improves inertia and collision handling, and introduces a centrifugal force feature that produces physically believable motion for skirts and accessories during spins. Basefount describes it as informed by feedback from production teams rather than laboratory testing. The solver now supports continuous frame looping and stable simulation of skirt and shoulder armour, which should reduce secondary-motion cleanup in animation and game cinematics.
Unreal Engine preview rebuilt
Animcraft’s Unreal Engine library has undergone a full structural rebuild. Assets can now be previewed directly inside the editor without a separate environment. Higher engine versions remain backwards-compatible, meaning a UE 5.6 editor can view assets made for UE 5.4. This consolidation cuts disk usage, eliminates redundant preview assets, and removes the need for baking or PAK exports. All asset management is handled within a unified plugin across Unreal Engine 5.4, 5.5, and 5.6.
MetaHuman toolkit grows up
Animcraft 5.5 adds a more flexible MetaHuman editing workflow. Users can freely add or remove high-resolution LOD0 skeleton joints, edit DNA data directly, and write or locate RBF (Radial Basis Function) corrections from bone selections. Corrective pose frames can be created and updated within the same interface. Up-axis correction and solver tuning are now included, alongside official support for Maya 2026.
New Maya animation helpers
The Maya toolset gains two modest but practical features: Temporary Pivot and Curve Reverse. The first allows animators to quickly change a manipulation axis without breaking hierarchy alignment, while the second mirrors or inverts animation curves for symmetrical motion or loop creation. These are designed to reduce manual keyframe editing rather than reinvent workflows.
Unified system, less maintenance
With all plugins now synchronised across Unreal Engine versions, maintaining multi-project setups becomes simpler. Animcraft continues to position itself as a hub for virtual human production, motion sharing, and animation management across DCCs. The company lists fixes for retargeting keyframe issues, negative-scale ribbons, and IK/FK switch errors. As with any major tool update, artists should test the release in controlled conditions before integrating it into live pipelines.
