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.

The post Animcraft 5.5: Stability, ribbons, and MetaHumans first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Basefount has released Animcraft v5.3, the latest update to its collaborative animation library and editor for 3D DCCs including 3ds Max, Maya, Blender, Unity and Unreal. Professionals working in animation, VFX, game development, and realtime engines will want to upgrade—just don’t skip pipeline testing before deploying in production.

What’s New in Animcraft 5.3?

Released June 2025, Animcraft v5.3 added these 3ds Max-specific animation cleanup tools:

Onion Skin viewport overlays for comparing poses

Motion curve optimization via redundant keyframe removal

Mesh topology conversion from triangles to quads

Additional refinements to polar vectors and bone shaping

Onion Skin: Keyframe Clarity

A new Onion Skin tool overlays multiple frames semi-transparently in 3ds Max’s viewport. This mimics traditional tracing-paper workflows, helping animators compare poses at a glance and fine-tune transitional movement.

Curve Optimization: Clean Data, Smoother Flow

Animcraft now auto-prunes redundant keyframes in motion and deformation curves. It’s ideal for tidying motion-capture or hand-animated data, lightening curve load and making playback and iteration more responsive.

Triangle-to-Quad Conversion: Mesh Topology Made Easy

A topology tool converts triangular faces into quads, easing the way for subdivision modeling, deformation and UV work. This ensures cleaner inputs for rigs and animation pipelines.

What Is Animcraft?

Animcraft is a standalone animation editor and cross-platform library system. It lets studios extract, edit, retarget and reuse animations across characters, tools and engines. It supports FBX, BVH, Mixamo, MMD and more. Animations are stored in .ace asset files, which preserve metadata and allow for inheritance across future projects.

Animcraft integrates with Maya, 3ds Max, Blender, Unity, Unreal Engine, Substance, Cinema 4D and Mixamo. It includes bridge plugins and batch tools to eliminate repetitive DCC tasks. Rigging tools cover bipedal, facial, blendshape and bone workflows. Facial editing tools allow for non-linear editing and direct engine export.

Editions & Licensing

Standard Edition (approx. €240/year + tax) includes full animation re-targeting, rig conversion, a searchable animation library, preview thumbnails, Unreal asset prep, facial rigging, ribbon FX, and a multimedia library. Licenses are node-locked or floating.

Advanced Edition (approx. €570/year + tax) adds Maya/Max facial auto-rigging, Metahuman DNA editing, 3ds Max automatic ribbon/cartoon/body rig setup.

The optional Video Capture bundle offers 365 minutes/year of markerless video-based motion capture, processed locally via GPU. It includes smoothing, stabilization, and direct rig injection to any DCC.

Learn More in Motion

Basefount maintains an official YouTube tutorial playlist covering all major features of Animcraft, including animation retargeting, video capture, and engine integration. It’s a good place to verify compatibility before trying a tool in production.

Final Notes

Animcraft continues to be a practical addition for animation teams who need to unify mocap, keyframe, retargeting and asset management. 5.3’s additions make Max workflows more animator-friendly. As always, test thoroughly in your pipeline before production use.

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The post Basefount Animcraft: One-Stop 3D Animation Library & Bridge first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.