An incredible experience animating with Autodesk Maya

Here is how you can have a spectacular working experience while animating using Autodesk Maya without having to be bogged down due to all of these monstrously heavy and sluggish Rigs on the market.

The research

We have been in conversation with animators across the world, expert animators who work within significant animation studios as well as animation students that learn both on the web and in physical animation educational institutions, and the things we’ve found out ended up being quite interesting.

We asked them the following two questions:

• What are the most critical aspects that you look for when you start using a new rig?
• What makes a proper rig?

 

Most of them shared with us more or less identical things:

1. The rig must be appealing
2. Must be easy to use
3. It needs to be light-weight

 

It wasn’t a shock to us whatsoever. We invested time into 3D animation for more than ten years, and we’ve seen it all and tested many Maya rigs ourselves.

There’s a lot of rigs around that you can put your hands on, some are pretty good and fun to animate, however, there are not many that answer these three parameters of being appealing, easy to use, and lightweight.

While many rigs we’ve tried were quite appealing, they turned out to be heavy and complicated, and others that were so-called easy to use were lacking in appeal.

Almost none had all three values in them.

 

Animating with Autodesk Maya – The solution

We’ve decided that we must do something about it, so we sat down and created a plan of action:

We will develop rigs that will aim to answer these three values.

First, we created “Grey matter Gary,” which is a rig that we give away for free. Gary is a cartoon character rig that is really appealing, simple structured, and highly flexible.

To be able to achieve what we planned, we used a rigging system that allowed us to create a super reliable, flexible, and high performing Maya rig.

 

You can download the “Grey Matter Gary” rig here:

https://www.squigglyrigs.com/product/grey-matter-gary/

 

We were stunned to find out the reactions to Gary, since its release, we’ve been getting many positive feedbacks about him, and most of the animators who used him were surprised by how fun he is to work with it.

Here are some of the feedback we got for Gary’s rig

“ Very easy and intuitive to use. The bendings are very nice, and simple. I had great fun animating this rig, I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to practice cartoony style animation.”

“ Incredibly flexible and fun rig! Recommended for all the cartoonists out there”

“ Seriously, this rig rocks! It’s super expressive and easy to use… and has so many features that usually only exist in paid rigs.”

“ I’ve been having an absolute blast with the rig! Downloaded it last week and after a few sittings I can definitely say it’s a good one. Really intuitive, super fun to animate and push, pull, squash, stretch and smear the hell out of.”

 

Our second rig is Lee, a hyperactive teenager with a great sense of rhythm.

What we were trying to accomplish with Lee is to give her a simple and graphic style of design to make her highly flexible and expressive without losing her appeal.

 

Lee will make you smile while she moves and does her thing. Check her out here:

https://www.squigglyrigs.com/product/lee/

 

 

And finally, our most current rig is Goosh, a type of a big friendly giant dude that you’d rather have on your side.

But don’t be misled by his gentleness, when he lets his ridiculously massive arms do the talking he can be very persuasive.

You can check Goosh Maya Rig at:

https://www.squigglyrigs.com/product/goosh-maya-rig/

 

 

So, if you want to have a go with appealing, easy to use, and lightweight Maya rigs while animating your projects, you should check out our rigs.

We are planning on releasing many more rigs soon, and if you want to get updated about our new releases don’t forget to like our page and subscribe to our mailing list