Got some more work done on what I’m now calling the Goon Rig (play on my last name). The body is 90% rigged. All the advanced hand and foot controls are in, IK/FK blending is all set up as well as some of the FK assistance features (being able to blend between the arms and neck rotating relative to the chest or the character root) I used in the rigs I made for work. There’s also squash and stretch controls (volumetric optional) on the arms and legs, and I’ll be adding them for the head and torso most likely tomorrow. Also, arm and leg pole vector controls are optional, you can chose between classic twist controls and the pv nodes you see in the image above (click it for a much bigger version).

So my plan is to finish off the key rig features first so that I can get people testing it. Key features are all you’ll need to animate a character that looks like this one. That will include a full face setup and all the body controls. The next thing I’ll probably do is work on the picker interface for the rig along with phoneme and hand pose libraries. Next up will be body scaling so that you can easily re-proportion the rig using simple channel box sliders, then face scaling (think the character creator from oblivion) and finally a namespace manager to allow multiple instances of the rig within a scene (should already work fine, but this will allow the picker to detect the rigs in the scene and switch control back and forth between them). So yeah, progress is being made, and I’m really psyched about how it’s coming. Hopefully I can keep up the momentum.