Excellent work, nice rig. Awesome.

-H

"Universal Man" !!

Yo,
Great rig man. The squash and stretch is fast and simple. The rig is super customizable. The hands feel a little complicated, and the translates on the FK are locked, but a slider has been added to give it that capability. All in all this is a great/friendly rig worth a look by any animator..... And one of the best parts of this rig is the name. Great work man, much props.

andy

*update* Hey Ken, all the facial controls can be shown by flipping the visibility switch on the "andy_world" node. Just select it, and turn on "face sliders" and "on face controls."

*update* Thanks for the comments modi, I'll take your suggestions into consideration for the next release. Don't worry though, the IK/FK snapping is still there, you just have to Rt. Click over the switcher (The arrow shape) instead of the Ik control. It's separated out so you can still blend if you want to using the IKFK attribute. When I can afford Maya 8.x I'll do the update for the dagMenuProc, but right now it's maya 7.x only.

Hey thanks for the kind words everyone. I encourage you to give the finger's another chance though. For example, to curl the whole finger, just drag down the left side of the channel box to select all three attributes of the index, then middle-mouse drag in your viewport to change them all at once. If you just want to bend only one section, only select one attribute, if you want to close the hand, select them all. I've found it to be a pretty fast way of doing the fingers, but I'll keep refining it for future releases, maybe there's a better way.

One of the best free animator friendly rig i've seen. A few comments :
. There should be a attribute to control the squash and stretch. Maybe add one next to the stretch meter - a slider to control how much it squashes and stretches.
. The facial setup imo is a little weak, i wish you had more controls for the brows and the cheeks. Everything is subtle and is hard to push the character into good facial poses.
. Squash and stretch for the head and face would be nice.
. The Pinning elbows and Knees is friggin awesome!!
. The character looses a lot of volume , you may want to add some pose deformers as fix it shapes, might be over kill though.
. I like the finger controls, don't limit the animators though, just connect the twist to the rotation of the joints.
All in all, great rig, thanks for sharing.
And you rock for adding dynamic parenting.
I just wish you would have kept the right click ability to switch from Ik to FK
I just checked the right click works on maya 7.0 but not 8.5. i have the latest dagMenuProc.mel for 8.5 but right clicking does not give me any options. Even on 7.0 i get the parent to option when i right click but not for switching IK/FK
cheers
Modi

Opps,

Sorry, answered my own question - I poked around enough and found the switch to turn on the facial contols.

FOR those who may have the same question, locate the "Andy_World" shape below the character and locate in channels "Face Sliders" and change from "OFF" to "1"

Thanks again for use of rig.

-------------------

I hope this is the correct forum for my question.

I am a student of animation and I was considering using this rig for my character animation class, but I could not locate where I can manipulate the facial settings so that I can perform lip-syncing.

Please advise, thank you in advance.

Thanks for the opportunity to use such a well though out rig.

Ken

this is by far the best free rig available on the internet, very generous, I know some places on the web would charge allot of money to grant access to this kind of material!

Thank you so much for sharing this character rig! It's very well put together, fun to animate with, and a great example to inspire future rig ideas of my own.

Hi.

I have been having shadow problems when using the Andy rig. My problem is, well, the shadows don't render.

Or they do render but only when maya wants them too.

After spending ages trying to figure it out I found out that it was something do do with the great, but complex (to me anyway) texture setup.

I put a lambert on the model and the shadows rendered fine. I then went through the textures and started deleting some. I the hypershade the andy model seems to have about 5 different textures, told you it was complex, each with about 10 different nodes.

I right clicked each of the textures and the textures that didnt select the andy mesh when clicking "Select the object using texture" I deleted. This resulted in the shadow being rendered and the models texture was rendered too.

But, doing this made the character seem ill (slightly pale).

I will spend more time on it.

If anyone has this problem and knows a better way to sort it, please email me at sean.conibear@talk21.com .

Sean

Hey, i really like everything about this model! my only question i wanna ask is whether there is a fast way of adjusting the shaders for final gather? the problem is, when i put the model in shadow its skin shaders glow and there is never a true dark on the model.. if anything could you give me directions to adjusting that feature? (im at about an intermediate level of skill at texturing in the hypershade, but there are a LOT of nodes to deal with, my previous attempts left me feeling like i had just tried to diffuse a bomb..) anyways thanks..

you can answer me directly at writetojordan@hotmail.com if you like..

regards,
Jordan

Ok first of all grat rig, I've test it and it's stable and quite easy to use.The dynamic parenting works which is always nice :).
I have a concern though, it seems that I can't find the control for the shoulder.Is there a way to animate the shoulder? that is to my sense one of the most important control to give life to character else the animation always have that stiff look.
anyway I still rate that baby with 5 stars.
great work and thanks for sharing

Really nice rig and nice gender switch functionality.

While searching the interwebs for a decently made low poly low cost model I came across The Andy Rig, and it really was exacally what I was looking for... and it even included extra skins!! How can you beat that?

Mega kudos for making Andy

reeeaaally cool rig, thanks so much for sharing.
only thing i dont like, is that the hips dont fit on the boy.
would be cool if there where a trigger for that too.

really great , different thinking, nice work keep it up

It's a little more than ok for me. It moves well enough but, assuming this rig is suppose to have more 'human' proportions, the arms are out of proportion; the shoulder-to-elbow length is too short. The elbow rotation isn't locked to one way like in real life and if you try to animate only in one axis then it doesn't deform properly (I like the elbow controls on bloke). I found the facial animations lacking. Also, like some people above me, I couldn't find the shoulder controls. The hips are 'broken', every time you move them, the legs also have to be moved to compensate unlike in generi.
I actually found the fingers to be one of the better parts of this rig. They deform well when curling but the knuckles don't deform nice when moving backwards, making the fingers less flexible.

edit: ok after looking at all the other free rigs on this site with human proportions, I realized why this one is so high rated... maybe it's because I've been spoiled with good rigs in class. This rig has a proper foot roll and the way the legs move in general are REALLY nice... so I suppose the legs are my very favourite part of this model.

Hi , i've wanted to try this rig for a while but it crashes Maya (either immediately or after one or two clicks). I've tried importing and opening in both Maya 2008 x64(plus SP1) and Maya 8.5 x86 but always get crashes.

When i opened the ma. file in Wordpad it says-

//Maya ASCII 6.0 scene
//Name: andyRigv1.4.6.ma
//Last modified: Mon, Apr 14, 2008 12:13:40 AM
//Codeset: 1252
requires maya "6.0";
requires "Mayatomr" "8.5.1.7m - 3.5.6.7 ";
currentUnit -l centimeter -a degree -t ntsc;
fileInfo "application" "maya";
fileInfo "product" "Maya Unlimited 8.5";
fileInfo "version" "6.0 Service Pack 1";
fileInfo "cutIdentifier" "200705272232-699835";
fileInfo "osv" "Microsoft Windows 2000 (Build 2195)\n";

I've tried changing this to Maya 2008/ Win x64 SP2 etc but it still crashes.

Does anyone have any idea how i can get this file to open/ import/ convert or can someone save a working version from Maya 2008 and post it/ email it. My email is dom@offplan3d.com

Cheers

Its good, but i think its missing some elements in the facial controls such as:
-Having single eyelid controls/eye movement controls
-nose control
-seperated eyebrow polys with single controls

Its a great model just needs more detail.

Hi......The Rig is Simply,,aaaa Great Really
Please Can U tell Me, How U locked Knee and Elbow ..?

I downloaded this rig for a quick animation I was doing for school but when I dropped it in my scene the textures and skin are Really, REALLY shiny! like they are wrapped in plastic shiny. I'm using final gather and an area light for lighting. is there a way to tone it down a bit?

Thanks a lot for such a great rig! It's really very very helpful for me in my studying!

good rig

a quite excellent package to work with...

For shiny problem u have to set to 0 reflectivity in shaders.
Uncheck R in andy mesh (reference in layer editor) - select mesh - navigate Attr.edit. to find skin shader (last node) - enter in various materials of the layered shader and set reflectivity to 0.
Is a great rigging, very handy, thanks a lot! :)

i just have a problem using all of the torso controls. is there a way to make the torso ik that i'm not seeing? i'm presently working with all 6 torso controls and its a pain in the butt!!

I´m risking a stupid question now:
1st of all I´ve used this rig before! When i try to open it now however it doesn´t show the textures since the path is not right! why did they load properly before and is there a way get the textures without digging into the mat-nodes?

thx

a great rig with ease and movement....very good one for the guys who started animation has their career ........superb job men........

What is with the rig starting with so many things already keyed? it's a bummer. Takes some time just to key everything back to zero to begin. My favorite rig ever, none the less.

Superb job man! i really dig the mouth control.

CAN SOMEONE HELP ME ON HOW TO RIG THE FACE TO LIKE MAKE EM SMILE OR SUMTIN!?

really awesome rig. well done.
Any chance to get it shown as a tutorial how the rig came to life ?
Thanx so far.

Thank you
very good~

Years gone but your rig still famous to everyone!!!
Congratulation and finally i can't stop myself to leave a comment here ~
Your are awesome awesome awesome !!!
By the way, i really really hope to see a tutorial that review this rigging progress ^^
Thank you very very much for everything your done!!
Thank you~ =)

For AndyRig's fans , here is a good place to go =)

http://www.johndoublestein.com/

Thank for JohnDoublestein !!

It's a nice rig for beginners..however for complex body mechanics shots it's not an advisable one as the biggest problem lies in spine controllers...whenever you are trying to get a perfectly smooth " C" or inverted "C" curve by the FK spine controllers the mesh torso deforms badly and can only be sorted out by adjusting the IK spine...the facial controllers/fingers are also not upto the mark...I'd rather advise GOON or NORMAN.

hi..... this is d best practice rigged ever made for me...... i have a question tat in d main pic it has shown boy n girl n wid different hair style bt i m nt getting where is d boy wid his hair style...... only andy female is there can u help me out wid male andy rigged plz......

Does this rig supposed to show up completely blacked out except the hair?

hi :) i had downloaded your rig just now, uhm the texture for the girl seems out of control, is it my version problem or is it can be fix?

yeah antoine i have the same problem, i only see an all gray rig and no clothes

Its a great Rig but the only control it requires is the Head Squash and Stretch!
Please Update that soon....Thank you.

how to make ik stuck it's not working help!!!!!!!

Great model, I wish there was an option to have eyebrows to move independently.