Animo Animation Toolset by Ehsan Bayat

Animo Maya Animation Toolset: Free and Open Source by Ehsan Bayat

If you’ve spent any time animating in Maya, you’ll know how many small repetitive tasks quietly eat up your day. Animo by Ehsan Bayat is built to fix exactly that. It’s a free, open-source collection of animation tools that Ehsan has been refining in his own workflow for years, and he’s now released the full toolset to the community.

What I love about Animo is how broad it is. This isn’t a single utility, it’s a proper kit. Selection sets, animation sliders, fast arc tracking, temporary pivots, space switching, global offset, Spider-Verse style animation tools, repathing, fast baking, animation layer helpers, a multi-camera playblaster, and a stack of smaller workflow improvements. It’s the kind of toolset you didn’t realise you needed until someone hands it to you and you wonder how you ever animated without it.

What Animo offers

• Selection Sets: save and recall control selections across rigs and scenes
• Animation Sliders: push and pull poses across keys with smart controls
• Fast Arc Tracker: visualise motion arcs without leaving your workflow
• Temporary Pivot Tools: place pivots on the fly for cleaner rotations and offsets
• Space Switching and Attribute Space Switching: seamless space changes mid-shot
• Spacify: a full temporary space-switching toolkit: world, camera space, new pivots, temp parents, aim, temp IK, and FK chains
• Global Offset: offset entire performances in one move
• Spider-Verse Style Animation Tools: stepped poses, frame holds, and stylised timing helpers
• Animation Repathing: shift the path of an action without re-keying every control
• Fast Baking: bake to ones, twos, threes, fours, fives, sixes, or sevens in one click
• Animation Layer Tools: merge, smart-merge, and clean layered animation
• Multi-Camera Playblaster: playblast through multiple cameras in one pass
• Keys and Tangent tools: auto, linear, step, mark and clean keys quickly
• Xform Tools: world space tools for quick space switching and posing
• Mirror Pose and Animation: flip a pose or a whole performance to the opposite side
• Camera Space Arc Tracker: read arcs the way the camera sees them
• Graph Editor Toolbar: the graph editor tools you reach for, gathered on one bar
• Nudge Keys Left and Right: shift keys along the timeline without dragging them
• Reset Translate, Rotate, Scale, or All: send a control back to default in one click
• Copy animation and poses from one scene to another
• Quick Export and Import of objects

What Animo is great for

• Speeding up day-to-day Maya animation workflow
• Cutting time on selection, polish, and clean-up passes
• Production animators on tight deadlines
• Animation students who want a proper toolset alongside Maya’s default tooling
• Stylised animation work using stepped or Spider-Verse style frame holds
• Reel work where iteration speed matters

License and contribution

Animo is 100% free, with commercial use, non-commercial use, and open source contribution all permitted. Ehsan has built and refined the toolset over years as part of his own daily workflow, and he’s released it back to the community. If Animo helps you, a credit or mention is appreciated whenever possible. Since the project is open source, you’re welcome to contribute improvements, fix bugs, or expand the toolset. Keep things accessible, give proper attribution to contributors, and please avoid repackaging or reselling the tools as your own work.

Note on the beta: Animo is currently in beta. It’s been refined over years in real production use and should work as intended, but Ehsan flags that it may contain some bugs he hasn’t had time to revisit. If you hit something, raise it and the community can help patch it.

Happy animating.

Animo by Ehsan Bayat.