Maya Pipeline Tool · v1.0.0 — Production Ready
AXE
Face Rig
Ten years of feature film face rigging, packaged into one tool. Build a complete facial rig — eyes, lids, jaw, brows, lips, cheek — from a single guided UI. Rig untouched until you say build.
01 / How It Works
Place. Guide.
Build.
Define your skeleton
Select your facial joints or let AXE Placer guide you through placing locators at each landmark — brow, eye, lid, nose, lip, jaw, cheek. Named sets, not manual guesswork.
Configure the rig sections
Choose which systems to build: jaw, eye, brow, lip, cheek, skull. Set side behavior, control shapes, and naming convention once from the UI — no script editing.
Build
AXE Face Rig constructs the full hierarchy — NURBS controls, zero groups, constraint networks, blendshape targets, and SDK-ready attributes — in one operation.
Animate from day one
Hand the rig to an animator immediately. Easy/Direct control layers, gimbal rings, and micro-controls are all built in. Nothing to wire by hand afterward.
02 / Features
Everything you need.
Nothing you don't.
Easy / Direct Layers
Every major control ships with an Easy and Direct layer. Animators get the softness they need without losing precision access underneath.
Guided Placement
AXE Placer walks you through every landmark in order — brow arches, lid hinges, lip corners. No landmark gets missed, no landmark gets named wrong.
Non-Destructive Build
AXE builds alongside your existing skeleton. Remove the rig and the joints are byte-for-byte identical. Rebuild any section independently at any time.
Full Undo
Every build operation is wrapped in a single undo chunk. Build a jaw rig, decide you want a different shape, Ctrl+Z and rebuild. No manual cleanup.
80+ NURBS Shapes
Backed by the full Rig Center control library — rings, drops, dashed circles, clav, piton, box triangles. Every face control picks the right shape automatically.
Namespaced from Day One
Every node follows a strict NS_Side_Part_Desc convention baked into the builder. Referencing and shot work just work.
AXE Picker Included
The face picker ships in the same package. A bilateral button layout for every control — no setup, no mapping file, open and animate.
NGSkinTools2 Integration
Mirror-all and flood-weights for the current layer are one click from the Long Winter menu. No switching tools mid-rig.
Drag-to-Install
Drop the installer into the Maya viewport. Python package, menu entry, and userSetup block — all in one shot. No manual path editing.
03 / Included Tools
The full AXE suite.
All included.
AXE Face Rig ships three tools in one package. The rig builder handles every facial system from jaw to brow. The animator picker gives your team a bilateral face control layout from day one. Rig Center handles control creation, CV editing, and curve color from the same panel.
All three tools live under the Long Winter menu after install. One drag-and-drop, one menu, everything in reach.
The control library is JSON-based and user-extensible. Build a shape once in Maya, save the definition, and it's available to every rig you build from that point forward.
04 / Specifications
What it
runs on.
Built and used in production at Long Winter Studios.
Get AXE
Face Rig.
One-time purchase. Drag-and-drop install. Full face rig in an afternoon.
Get Access · $45 →One-time purchase · Windows & macOS · Maya 2023–2026