Dustin Nelson has released RapidRig 2 for Maya, his Auto-Rigging script system for Maya which allows you to create flexible, quality character rigs really quickly within Maya. Also of note is that Poser 2 has also been updated as part of the larger suite of tools in the RapidRig scripts. Check out RapidRig 2 for Maya here.
The rapid rig is a tool designed to bridge the gap between character modeling and character animation. Using the user interface, the script enables the user to set up a bi-pedal character skeleton and rig in minutes, a process which can take up to several days
RapidRig comes in two flavors, RapidRig, and RapidRig Advanced which is the paid version of RapidRig that extends the features that are available from the free version. RapidRig has always seen incremental updates and additions, and this represents the first major release since its inception that adds a wide range of features and fixes from previous versions. RapidRig Advanced allows for:
- FREE updates and support as quickly as I can
- customizable number of finger, toe, neck and spine joints
- stretchy and “toony” arms, legs, neck and spine
- elbow and knee locking and following in inverse kinematics
- arm and leg scale to compensate for IK pop when a limb completely straightens
- orientation control for hips, shoulders, head and eyes
- optional geometry created based on the user’s rig set-up, as well as other animator-friendly controls
- “Rapid Anim” animation interface for speeding up animation pipeline, including IK/FK matching
Dustin has also created some new tutorial videos to help you get started with the RapidRig System for Maya.
Rapid Rig 2 for Maya Features
- Customizable number of neck joints ranging from 1 to 9
- WristIK is no longer mirroring rotations, local translation and rotation of the left and right side are the same now
- FootIK no longer mirrors rotations
- Dummies are now called proxies
- Proxies have their own layer now
- Proxies are no longer automatically deleted when the rig is generated
- The proxy layer is turned off after the rig is generated to reduce visual confusion
- Added “RRA” to main control
- Head and wrist proxies are bigger to better visualize the proxies
- Changed control colour-scheme to be Red for Right side, Blue for left side and Green for centre controls
- Also colourized curve controls with a different shade for easier identification
- All parts of the Rapid Rig UI have annotations added to give helpful tips on using the rig
- Added connection lines from the ElbowIKC to ElbowJ and KneeIKC to ElbowJ to easily determine which IKC is affecting which joints
- Added attribute to control the orientation of the spine top to be local or global
- added Curve and Auto Volume attributes for head
- moved spine volume and curve to spineTopIKC
- added translate to hips and shoulder fk controls (Shoulder and Hip FK controls always stay visible as a result)
Rig Extras Tab:
- Can now delete rig. This gets rid of all nodes that may be missed if manually deleted by the user. If a single hierarchy joint chain exists, you have the option to keep it. This is mainly for video game pipelines where they would bake the animation to the joints and then delete the rig.
- Added version number to main control and UI
- Main Control is generated with uniform scale even if the proxies are scaled non-uniformly
