Armature, a free AI-assisted standalone character rigging and skinning tool for games, animation and VFX work, has been released by FabricatorStudio, aka games artist Adrian Melian. It imports 3D character and creature models in standard 3D formats, generates a rig and skin weights, and exports a USD file usable in Maya, Unreal Engine or Blender. Maya users can also generate a control rig using a separate toolset. Armature is free to indie artists, while the pipeline toolset is free to artists and studios with under $2 million/year in revenue. Melian, a former Lead Technical Artist at Call of Duty series developers Sledgehammer Games who also worked at Ubisoft and Meta, built the tools from scratch for his indie game. Users import models in USD, OBJ, FBX or glTF/GLB formats. Armature fits a skeleton and generates skin weights automatically, with readymade rig templates for bipeds, quadrupeds and props, or modular components. Skinning uses two engines running locally: geodesic voxel binding, which runs on any system, and an AI engine requiring a NVIDIA GPU. The rigged character exports in USD format for applications reading UsdSkel data, primarily Maya and Unreal Engine, though Blender and Houdini should also load them. Melian describes it as a “human + AI rigging tool,” where raw AI output is “good enough for a hobbyist”