rigging

Pretty old now but some nice cartoony rigging demos.

great human anatomy reference in videos

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).

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.

free rigs, scripts and character setup / rigging tutorials for maya and xsi.