Hi, I’m completely new and totally interested in mGear. Just curious if animators need mGear installed for mGear rigs to work on their machines?
Yes: mGear uses custom C++ nodes for high performance, so the plugin has to be installed for mGear rigs to work properly. Also animators would likely want to use the anim picker and viewport right click menu to get the optimal experience with mGear rigs.
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There is a light version for animators.
And its only one lign of code to install.
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Is there one for 3.6.0 ?
The solvers are the same. The 3.4 installer will work 
Hello ! just flagging that the link for the light version for animator is dead.
Maybe this is already linked as a ressource somewhere else on the forum ? I would need the version for 3.6.0
Thank you,
Hi @fredG I am not 100% sure, but I am 96% sure that if you install 3.7.8, the plugins did not change, so it should still work (I believe).
3.7.8 came with the first version of a drag and drop installer to make it easy to install. I think maybe that’s why that “light version” doesn’t exist anymore. But if you’re doing it manually, you just have to copy the plug-ins folder to the Maya prefs.
For building new rigs, this won’t be backwards compatible with 3.6, but it should just work for animators to open the rigs.
BUT… in production, I don’t recommend installing via drag and drop. I would recommend that you store the full mGear release somewhere on a production server. And then “install” it by adding this line to your animator’s Maya.env
MAYA_MODULE_PATH = /path/to/mgear/on/your/server/release
That makes it very easy to switch versions or upgrade in the future.
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Indeed, I took the “light versions” down as they made no sense having a simple drag and drop to install mGear with all functionalities fully. Be aware of those animators missing most of the fantastic rigging features offered by having the full installed version… definitely worth a full install.
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