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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. The advanced version of the rig comes with enhanced features including: * customizable number of fingers and toes * stretchy and "toony" arms, legs, neck and spine * elbow and knee locking and following in inverse kinematics * 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. * animation interface for speeding up animation pipeline

thanks for the link, Jakub! :)

The animation and animation-related musings of Kevin Koch. Interesting details about eye animation in the "Eye Movements" category (with references from the BBC motion gallery website).

Facial animation test including lip sync. Based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) by Dr Paul Ekman. Created with Softimage XSI by Paul Charisse (modeling, animation) and Andrea Interguglielmi (scripting).

Facial animation rigs created for the "Delgo" movie. Tutorial by Warren Grubb.

deformation / articulation reference animations on a (3D) biped character.

oh hippydrome, nice website, shame it doesn`t get more updates...

some rigging reference... ;-)

Hey I was just about to post that and beaten by you!

I don't generally share too much of what I teach as it's either for the Studio's or for the classes I teach at the Animation Union/American Animation Institute) and I would like to give the students some one-of-a-kind instruction and first dibs on the ideas I teach.

"Welcome to our website. We, a couple of Tech-Artists (and geeks) decided to come up with our vision about having a platform where we can put out our ideas and discuss with everyone as well. We are fans of open-source, learning so much from the community and we would like to give something back. The reason creaturerigs.com was created. We are CharacterTDs mainly working with Autodesk Maya among other softwares. Check out our Tools and Rigs available in the Download section of our website. Go Ahead, check it out, have interesting fun with it and we would love to have your feedback on anything and everything. In the Coming weeks, we will continue to share more ideas, break down Animation Rigs with traditional setups, showcase our own setups and develop/maintain Auto-Rigging tools as well."

Animation Tools - a set of free Maya-tools targeted at reducing the amount of tedious work associated with the setup process of high quality, animatable characters. The Adaptable Facial Setup is capable of driving any humanoid geometry, drawing from an extensive, FACS-based library of facial movement components. The process of fitting the head skeleton to the individual geometry is simplified by offering a standard set of skin weights that accommodates the typical deformation regions of the face. Any skin weights may be cloned topology-independent from one head to another utilizing the Geometry Matching Tool. The Corrective Blendshape Manager offers a useful way to add subtle deformations to a skinned mesh. Blendshape targets can be created and edited, and are computed with respect to the bind pose of the skinned mesh.

This is a simple maya collision deformer to use with any arbitrary meshes.

thanks Brad! :)

An interesting read from Phil Taylor, one of the key guys behind CAT, ICE and now Fabric. He's gone from building an entire rigging system within a program, then building an entire node network system within a program to building an entire program to support a whole new rigging system. He doesn't lack for ambition.

large collection of free maya rigs

video footage / reference

This comes out of work I presented as a SIGGRAPH 97 Technical Sketch. The demo is mostly an experiment to isolate the minimal number of facial expression elements that will produce a "convincing" impression of character and personality. Of course this is just a subset of the full range of expression the human face is capable of. Paul Ekman's pioneering work on the Facial Action Coding System gives a functional description of the full range of expression of which the human face is capable.

I did send it a year a go, and have been looking at it off and on since it was created. As a simple base set of points it's wonderfully expressive and shows how much reads with so little adjusted. Head angle and noise plays a big part in this too.

I was playing with that. Very cool! It just shows the system, simplied as possible. What is "heas" angle?

A friend of mine just finished compiling these guidelines. Hope it helps.