Tools / Shot Sculpt

Shot Sculpt

Per-shot corrective work on an animated mesh, in layers. Every layer's weight over time sits on a track you can drag.

Animation Add-on Needs the base package

$2 Buy Shot Sculpt With base package — $4

What it does

The track

Every layer gets a bar on one shared timeline, drawing how strongly it applies at each frame. A range is a stretch of frames where the fix is on: drag it to move it, drag its edges to change how it fades in and out, and pick an ease for each fade. Double-click an empty stretch to add another. Or key the weight yourself and the bar draws your curve.

Sculpt on the animated mesh

Add a sculpt layer, press Edit, and move vertices or use Maya's Sculpt tools right on the posed mesh at the current frame. The fix rides the rig's movement. Mask it by painting, duplicate it, mute it.

Deformers as layers

Delta mush, tension, wire, shrink wrap and lattice, each with a painted map and its own ranges on the track. A lattice can be fitted to the mesh's own orientation, or built on only the selected vertices. Deformers and blend shapes already on the mesh can be adopted as layers, keys and weights kept.

Sticky clusters and soft mods

Select some vertices and add a control that rides the surface, following the animation under it. Move it and the mesh deforms from where it sits. A soft mod gets a falloff sphere you can place and key on its own.

Jiggle

Add a jiggle to a joint, a control or a sticky layer, and a locator follows it on a spring: lagging, overshooting and settling. Set stiffness, damping and a distance limit. Bake it to keys when the shot is approved.

Better with Timeline++

If you also have Timeline++, the track can follow one of its timelines instead of Maya's time slider. The bars then cover the frames that timeline shows, and a stretch of frames selected there becomes a layer's range in one press. This is optional. Everything else on this page works without it.

Honest about what it is not

It is for fixing a shot, not for building a rig. The jiggle is a simple spring on position: it lags and overshoots but does not swing, and it needs frames played in order, so bake it before rendering or using Cached Playback. A scene with a live jiggle needs Shot Sculpt installed to play it, and a baked one does not. A weight your rig already drives is left to the rig.

Details

Category	Animation
Price	$2, one payment
Requires	The base package
Works with	Timeline++, optional
Undo	Every action is one undo step
Maya	2024 to 2027, Windows
Install	Unzip into your Maya modules folder, restart Maya — how to install
Scene files	Builds ordinary Maya nodes and tags them so it can find them again. No script nodes

Two dollars.

Bought once, yours to keep, updates included.

Buy Shot Sculpt — $2 With base package — $4