V1 Freeform Tools are a way to give back to the Animation and Game Development communities by providing professional Rigging and Animation pipeline and workflow tools for students and professionals to use, learn from, and contribute to.

This toolset was initially developed for V1 Interactive as the internal toolset to rig and animate all characters for the game Disintegration. The concept came from my previous experience working at Bungie along with chats with my co-worker Rick Lico about the ideas behind freeform animation.

As the lone technical artist supporting V1 Interactive I knew I needed a flexible toolset that would require minimal code upkeep to develop and update characters. To solve this I leaned heavily on a data driven approach, allowing users to fill in data about the character that the tools respond to in order to create rigs. In production this allowed even non technical animators to create asset rigs without any iteration with me, which was key to keeping up with the work from the rest of the studio.

Skip ahead to today, through school and professionally I've recognized a distinct lack of openly available tools for creating rigs. While there are options out there, the general consensus is that none of them provide what professional development needs, so every company spins up their own. I'm hoping these tools will be able to fill that empty space, providing Indie developers and AAA alike a common platform to use and build together.

V1 Interactive has always been in favor of open source tools. With the success we've had with the tools internally we started thinking about opening them out to the public. And as a small studio if we can bring other studio's together around the toolset, we see it as a win-win where everyone can benefit from each unique challenge the tools are used to solve.

-Micah Zahm