This is the autorig I am currently working on in Maya. It is the basis for the rig in my FIEA capstone project, Everent.
I began work on this in order to develop an intuition for how to design a large, scalable, and efficient Maya library that is suitable for use with my Mantis software.
Generate the rig!
Here is the UI of the autorig.
Its first button generates the meta-rig, which is the basis for the generated rig and deform skeleton.
The next button generates the widgets.
The third button generates the control rig, and optionally, the deform skeleton.
The Mocap Hierarchy
This rig uses the same hierarchy as motion capture workflows in order to deliver maximum compatibility in UE5 and other game engines. The rig can be used to create hand-keyed animation, and the deform skeleton can be retargeted to Motion Capture data in engine, or play Mixamo animations directly.
The First Step to generate the rig is create the meta-rig and adapt it to the mesh.
Next, you will need to make the deform skeleton by duplicating the meta-rig, if you don’t choose to generate it automatically.
Here is the Symmetrize tool I made to copy joints’ transforms to the corresponding joint on the other side of the skeleton. I have made a lot of little tools like this in order to make the process a bit easier.
Finally, generate the default widgets and then generate the rig.
Undo, customize the widgets to your liking, and regenerate.
The rig is finished generating and is ready to use!
Loads of features!
The Torso features a unique version of the classic ribbon spline, which uses two NURBS curves and some math nodes.
I always prefer to make my rigs as low-level as I can – since if I can control the details of the calculations, I understand exactly what it is doing and why, and I can ensure it won’t break or flip or explode or collapse into nothing.
This rig features an advanced IK with length-preservation, stretchy mode, and space-switching for the IK handle controllers and pole vector controllers.
The head and neck in this rig have the ability to inherit or skip inheritance of the chest’s transform.
In this video, I pose the rig in the craziest way I can, trying to break it… but I am defeated. Notice in particular how well the rig handles scale.
In the end, I reset the entire rig to its starting point by selecting the controls and resetting their transforms.