DousenClips: free Maya animation clip exporter

By Luca Vitiello · Updated 6 October 2026

DousenClips is a free Maya tool from Dousen for defining, managing and batch-exporting animation clips and poses as engine-ready FBX. Clips live in your scene as lightweight nodes, and each export bakes onto a temporary clean skeleton, so your rig is never touched. It needs no license.

Free, with no license required.
Runs in Autodesk Maya 2025 or later (PySide6).
Exports FBX with Unreal and Unity profiles.
Clips are lightweight network nodes, so no plug-in requires line is written into your scenes.
Runs headless with mayapy -m dousenclips.
Works on its own, with optional Dousen integration.

New to the tool? Start with the DousenClips user guide, a full walkthrough with screenshots. Jump to the download details.

DousenClips running in Maya 2027 with a simple robot and three successfully exported animation clips — DousenClips in Maya with three clips exported to FBX.

What does DousenClips do?

You work in clip sets, one per rig. A clip set holds clips (named frame ranges) and poses (single frames), and every clip also appears as a colored, named timeline bookmark. When you export, DousenClips duplicates the bind skeleton, strips it to joints, constrains it to the rig, bakes the animation, writes the FBX and deletes the duplicate. The rig, your keys and the timeline stay as they were.

The Export prefix field defaults to the scene name, so clip Walk in Hero.ma exports as Hero_Walk.fbx.

What makes it different?

Clean export skeletons: no rig leakage, no namespaces in the FBX, and no empty files from a forgotten Bake Animation option.
Per-clip animation-layer states: one timeline can emit Walk, Walk_Injured and Walk_Aim, and your layer stack is restored afterwards.
Per-clip root motion: authored, in_place or hip_extract, with origin-at-start grounding and root-joint injection.
Mirror-bake: author Strafe_L and ship Strafe_R, flipped on the throwaway skeleton.
Loop seam check after baking, with an optional snap that closes the seam on the export skeleton only.
Engine profiles (unreal and unity) and output paths with {clip}, {set}, {character}, {scene} and {profile} tokens.
Gameplay curves and anim notifies. Notifies are mirrored as timeline bookmarks, and every export writes a <clip>.notifies.json sidecar.
Independent takes, an opt-in mode where each clip owns its captured animation instead of sharing the timeline.

What do I need?

Autodesk Maya 2025 or later with PySide6. The screenshots in the guide were captured in Maya 2027 on Windows.
A rig with an exportable joint hierarchy. An export_skel selection set is honoured when present.
For independent takes, an anim_controls selection set naming the rig's animation controls.
No license, no account and no server. Dousen itself is optional.

Where is the documentation?

The DousenClips user guide covers everything, with screenshots from a live Maya session:

Install once, open from the shelf, including the manual .mod file and how to update or remove it.
The first successful export: add a rig, create clips, export, read the results.
Animation ownership: timeline clips against independent takes, layers and derived clips.
Start, Loop and End subclips and poses.
Export settings: root motion, loop snap, layer states and notifies.
Importing scenes, sidecars and preview GIFs, and the scene library team workflow.
Troubleshooting, publishing through Dousen, and the headless mayapy -m dousenclips command line.

How does it work with Dousen?

DousenClips works without Dousen. If the Dousen Maya addon is installed, checked DousenClips takes and subclips also appear in Dousen's Publish tab, and both panels share the checkboxes. DousenClips Export then runs Dousen's validation, checkout and publish workflow. Validation errors stop the export and warnings ask for review. See Dousen in Maya for the addon.

Where do I download DousenClips?

DousenClips is in beta. Builds are published at dl.dousen.io/dousenclips/; if the link below has nothing behind it yet, email [email protected] for the current build.

Download DousenClips (latest beta) Install steps

One zip for Maya 2025 and later, any platform. Unzip, then drag install.py into the Maya viewport.

The zip contains the Python sources, the user guide and a LICENSE.txt: free to use in personal and commercial projects, no redistribution or modification.

Dousen is free during the studio beta, with access by request, and free forever for teams of up to 5 users. Request early access.