Preferred autorigger in maya? (for humanoid with wings)

Hi all,

I need to create rigs in maya for winged humanoids that will be using a combination of pre-bought animation plus my own maya exported animation.

I've been looking at using AdvancedSkeleton or TSM or possibly HumanIK. It would be great to hear others experiences with these (and others) especially in regards to adding bones.

Thanks!

 

I prefer HIK, since it works with almost every humanoid skeleton I've tried it with, setup is very quick, it gives good control, and allows retargetting animation directly. I've tried countless other (free) rigging systems for Maya and I don't like any of them, but YMMV, etc. and I do recommend trying them out for yourself if you haven't. A disadvantage of HIK is that it's relatively slow, so it might not be good if you need to work with a lot of characters at once (of course this only matters in Maya and not after export).

I'd rig wings separately from the character rig, regardless of which humanoid rig you use, since that's not something any biped rig will handle (not its job), and the type of rig you'd use for that depends a lot on the style and what you need it to do.

 

Thanks NFD, good to know re HIK. I was planning on just adding bones to the existing rig, the wings won't need to fold or anything complex... what are the advantages of keeping them separate? Will it be easier to manage keeping things separate once in unity? Cheers

 

Talking about the rig, not the skeleton, eg. whatever controls you set up for animation. The skeleton would usually just be a part of the body skeleton.

 

Sorry getting confused, yup meant skeleton rather than rig... cool, thanks