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When it comes to animate a human character, it needs tons of hours to rig it correctly. If you want to practise and focus on animation, rigging time will be trouble for you. So there are some beautiful professional rigs to pass that problem over.

Let’s see top 5 useful human body rigs in Maya,

Number 1:

Josh Burton’s Morpheus rig;

First of all this rig is like a dream, because it is not only a body rig, it is a character. You can modify everything in your character. Turning your fat man into slim man takes only few seconds, or turning your man into a woman. Josh really works great and develops his rig day by day so quickly.

Here is some features about Morpheus Rig;

Textures
Skin texture variations
Eye textures
Included source .psd files if you’d like to try some variations
Scripts pack and updates
Morphy Shelf and Icons, see docs page for instructions

Rig Features:

Body rigged with John Doublestein’s rigging tool-set (get it here)
FK/IK switching (right click menu)
Space Switching (right click menu)
Stretchable bendable limbs
Body morphing for body customization
Hand morphs for talons and knuckles!
Facial rig
Facial morphing for facial customization
Facial shaping controls, movable, scalable eyes
Noses, ears, and beards, Oh my!
FK/IK Eye Rig (the base of which is Scott Englert’s rig)
Eyelid tracking/blinking
“Mold-able” eyelids
Seperate head rig should you want to put Morphy’s head on another body
Work-flow Stuff/Other
Nurbs UI for easy access to controls
Quick Select sets setup for easy selection
Alternate textures for eyes and skin

Download Link: http://www.joshburton.com/projects/morpheus.asp

Number 2:

The Andy Rig

The Andy (short for “androgynous”) Rig was made for students at the Savannah College of Art and Design and is updated based on student feedback.  It’s meant to play both male and female roles and be generic enough to act in many different scenarios.  Multiple hair styles and textures are already available, but more can be added to change the look of the character.

Release v1.4.6 includes:

-Maya 2008 compatibility (Rt. Click menus now enabled in 7.0, 8.5, 2008)

-Animatable pivots on feet, root and head embedded into Right Mouse Menus

-Stick elbows and knees in place (“lock mid” control)

-Stop-Staring type facial setup (eyebrows are displayed in the textures – see tips below)

-IK/Fk matching on arms and legs embedded into Right Mouse Menus

-Dynamic parenting (space switching) embedded into Right Mouse Menus

-IK/FK spine

-Advanced twist enabled on arms, legs and spine

-Squash and Stretch and bendy arms

-Twist and Gimble helpers

-Multiple hair styles

-Multiple textures

For best results, use your animation preferences (window->settings/preferences->preferences->display) to set the viewport texture resolution to “fast” or “high quality”, please use the included character sets (or make your own), use right-mouse-button menus to change parenting (and IK/FK snapping), use the customizable options on the world-node to show the proxy or smooth the character, only animate in the Y axis for FK elbows (this bug will be fixed in the 2.0 release), and use “smooth+1” before rendering to allow the textures to display correctly.

Do you like the andy rig but need a different type of model for your scene? The rigging scripts used to generate the andy rig are available at www.johndoublestein.com.  The JTD rigging tools are still in beta but continue to mature as they are tested in actual production.  In less than half an hour you can rig your own character to have many of the same features as the andy rig.  However, rigging the face is still up to you 🙂

Credits: Models and Rig by John Doublestein, Design by Craig Scheuermann, Textures by Ying-Chih Chen.  Some rigging techniques inspired by Jason Schliefer, Aaron Holly, Javier Solsona, Michael Comet and Hamish McKenzie – thanks guys!

Download Link: https://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/the-andy-rig

Number 3:

New Dee Rig for Maya

This is a simple but really pretty full character rig for maya.

It includes all IK/FK, Stretch and squash, High and Low character with full facial controls.

Download Link: http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/new-dee-rig-for-maya

Number 4:

Alfred

Alfred is a really ready to use character rig to practise animation.

Look At control.
Arm World Orient

Download Link: https://www.creativecrash.com/maya/marketplace/character-rigs/c/alfred

Number 5:

The Teddy Rig

The Teddy Rig is a basic character setup created for a group project at ILIA – Chicago. Comments and suggestions are appreciated.

Features:
-IK/FK blending & snapping
-Squash-and-stretch limbs, spine, and head
-Bone-based facial setup
-Low-poly
-Flip & match pose

Download Link: http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/the-teddy-rig