Michael Howard adds secondary motion to a character rig by using MASH in Maya.

Plenty of rigging artist and technical directors have put effort into creating and automating secondary motion in character rigs. We’ve seen Richard Lico share some of his setups in Maya and some tools like LMSpring, and Motion Motivator that all strive to create what is essentially the same thing. A new take on the problem comes to us from Michael Howard, who recently experimented with using MASH for automating some secondary motion.

Howard details his process in a blog post that covers both his thinking and his results. “A few months ago, I was doing some research into solutions for automating some secondary motion on our characters,” Howard says. “watching some MASH videos on YouTube. Ian Waters’ channel is full of great stuff. It got me wondering if a MASH network could be used in a character rig to drive some dynamic motion where needed. Well, turns out it can!”

Michael Howard is a Game developer, technical artist, coder, and once upon a time animator. Check out the post for Implementing MASH in a Character Rig here.