Maya Character Autorigging Script

After having done so a few times, I found myself in a conundrum: I hated manual rigging characters with a fiery, possibly irrational passion, but I wanted characters to move in vaguely human being-esque ways!

So when I realized I could take my character skeletons and write a Python script to do all of the rigging for me at the click of a button, it was one of the best, most time-saving decisions I’ve made in my recent years. Not only can I have what previously took a couple of days of work in an instant, but if an improvement to the character rig comes to mind, I can modify the script, delete the rig, and and instantly have it back, new and improved on all characters!

The script is currently more Me-friendly than User-friendly, but this is the project that showed me that the amount of time saved by scripting in Maya can make it virtually essential.

I continued to use and build upon this on personal projects until I discovered Cascadeur, and now gladly use that to animate my characters instead!