Animation Loader Limited

Animation Loader Limited is, first of all, a script for working with a library of FBX animations. It loads clips into a Maya scene and writes them back out to files, keeps several libraries at once, helps you add new animations to them, and watches over file versions — almost like Perforce, only there is nothing to set up.

It is meant for anyone who has collected a pile of animations on disk and would rather work with them as a library than open one file at a time. The clips go into a single scene one after another along the timeline, and the tool remembers where each of them sits and where it came from.

Clips load in a row, not on top of each other

The usual way to look at an FBX animation is to import it. Import a second one and it lands on top of the first. Import ten and you have a heap.

This tool loads them as a strip: the first on frames 0–65, the second from 66, the third next. Pick several files in the tree and they load in the order you picked them — the order is shown right there as numbers. Pick a folder and everything inside it loads, subfolders included.

From there it behaves like a strip of film: watch, compare, cut, combine, send back out to files. A double click on a row in the table moves the green playback range onto that clip, which is the fastest way to flip through a whole library.

Several libraries at once

One library is rarely enough: the animations for a character, a separate folder of finds, something downloaded to try out. Each of those becomes a project, and switching is a single choice from a list. The tree, the search and the loading all work inside the chosen project, and its settings travel with it.

Adding one is Settings → Add Project, and from then on it is simply there.

The scene remembers what is in it

The list of loaded clips does not live in the program's settings. It lives in the Maya scene, in a node of its own, with a name, a first frame, a last frame and a source path recorded for every clip.

Save the scene and the list is saved with it. Open it a week later on another machine and the tool tells you immediately what is in there and where it came from. The FBX files stay clean: the list describes a whole scene, while a file holds a single clip, so carrying it along would be wrong from the first second.

Presets: sets of clips and a bar of characters

The two things that save the most time, because they happen ten times a day.

Animation presets. The list you assemble from scratch every time — the same twenty clips for the same job — is remembered under a name and loads in one go, from one button.

The character bar. Above the tree sit up to thirty remembered character scenes. A click opens one; a right click loads whatever is selected in the tree onto that character. The buttons are ordered by last use, so whoever you are working with today gathers on the left while the rare ones drift to the end.

Adding animations to the library

The road runs both ways. Select rows in the table and press Save: every clip goes back into its own file over exactly the frame range recorded in the scene. Animated a stretch by hand? Name it, give it a frame range, and it becomes an ordinary clip that Save writes out into a new file.

The confirmation window asks what belongs in the file: the skeleton and its keys alone, or the meshes with their skins and blend shapes as well. The first is for a library, where a file should hold one animation and nothing else; the second is for handing over a whole character, so the file opens somewhere else and moves.

The scene you are looking at does not change. Whatever the export has to adjust on the way is rolled back the moment the file is written.

The library is hard to ruin

Overwriting a file is where work gets lost for good. A personal library rarely sits under version control: overwrite an animation and the old one is gone, and you may not notice for a week.

So there are two lines of defence.

A copy before every overwrite. It goes into a backup folder inside the project, mirroring the library tree. The number grows with each write, older copies are never touched, and the tool removes nothing from there on its own. A right click on a file opens the version history with dates and sizes: any version can be loaded into the scene without touching the file on disk, or restored over it — and the file it replaces is not lost either, it is parked next to it under a marked name. You can pick the wrong version, and you can undo that too.

The read-only flag. A flagged file is never overwritten silently: the tool asks first, and says how many files the answer covers. The flag is set straight from the tree, on a file or on a whole folder, and it is the same flag your file manager sets. Permission lasts for one write: the tool lifts the flag while the file is written and puts it straight back, so the library stays protected. Do not use any of it and nothing changes for you.

Build .mb — a library as separate scenes

An FBX is a source; nobody opens it to look at it. Looking and fixing happen in a Maya scene, where the animation already sits on a character. Building those scenes by hand — open, import, save, for every clip — is an evening's work.

Build .mb turns it into a queue. Select as much as the whole library, point at a scene holding the character in its T-pose, and every clip gets its own .mb with one character and one animation on it. They are all built on the same base, which is what makes them comparable to each other.

The T-pose scene is never written to, not even if you point the output at it. The results can go next to the animations or into a folder of your choosing, repeating the layout of the sources.

The small things a day is made of

• Bulk renaming. A batch of clips is renamed through a find-and-replace mask, with a preview: you see what comes out before you commit.
• Timings edited right in the table, one row at a time or several at once.
• Colour in the tree separates a plain animation from one already loaded into the current scene, and both from a Maya scene sitting beside them.
• Search points at a file instead of hiding the rest: the branch opens, the match lights up, and the neighbours stay in view.
• File work without leaving the tool: copy, move, rename, duplicate, repeat a folder structure.
• A work log, off by default. Turn it on when something went wrong and it records what went out, where, over which range, and why a write did not happen.

Three places where a plain import trips up

Files come from all sorts of places and are built in all sorts of ways. Three things break a plain import more often than anything else, and the tool handles all three without asking.

Several takes in one file. The one you want is not necessarily the first: an empty housekeeping take without a single key often sits next to it. Taking the longest take does not work either, because for a short animation the empty one comes out longer than the real one. The tool tells them apart by name.

A namespace on the bones. Bones are matched by their short name, so the prefix is not in the way: your character may carry one or not.

A skeleton with no root joint. Some of them start at the hips. The tool looks for a root among the usual names, and if there is none it takes the topmost joint of the skeleton.

What it does not do

• It does not edit animation. It loads, arranges and writes it back; the editing is done with Maya's own tools.
• It does not retarget. The animation's skeleton and the character's must agree on bone names, namespace aside.
• FBX only. No other animation format is supported.
• It never goes online. There is no network code in it at all: no updates, no statistics, no account.
• It is not a backup. The copies it keeps sit on the same disk next to the originals: that guards against your own mistake, not against a dying drive.

At a glance

• Runs on: Autodesk Maya 2019–2026. Checked in seven of them: 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026
• Dependencies: none. Python, PySide and the FBX plugin are already inside Maya
• Installing: copy one folder into scripts and start it with two lines from the Script Editor or a shelf button
• Format: FBX
• Interface: English
• Manual: English and Russian in one file, 17 sections, about thirty screenshots
• Licence: MIT — free, work included; change it and pass it on
• Shipped as: source code