Have you ever animated a character typing on a keyboard or piano? Getting the right keypresses down is not something that you want to do by hand. The number of keys on a keyboard, with the combination of up to ten fingers, leaves a lot of outcomes to keyframe manually. A keyboard rig or rigging tool would be a great way to easily handle that.
an entire keyboard that could be activated by any combination of up to ten fingers would require too many connections to implement a solution with utility nodes
This is why Kaine Van Gemert has created a Maya plugin that allows you to automatically create a keyboard rig so that the keypresses can be guided by a locator. Simply parent the locators to each of your characters fingers, then animate the fingers. They keyboard will automatically make the right keypresses for each key that is hit.
Although the Keyboard rig tool is still a work in progress by Kaine’s own admission, it is free to download and use. If you want some information on how the tool was created and what it does behind the scenes, you can visit Kaine Van Gemert’s blog here.