Facial Rigs:

GUI driving Blendshapes:

In this facial rig I created a GUI which represents the head shape, and each control is in the area of what part of the face is moved by the blendshape, respectfully. The connections were made via connectAttr and MEL expressions.

GUI driving joints:

This is my first private bone driven facial rig, this was done in Maya with MEL expressions and set driven keys and other connections. The controls for it are two tiered; a phoneme control which quickly forms the most common phonemes/visemes (e, o, u, f, m, th, l) for this cartoony character, and then the individual controls which are grab and move for easily adding individuality to the character's already set phonemes and expression. The face had 16 bones not including the jaw and tongue, and could hold up to many zany facial expressions that Jim Carrey has done, as well as Sylvester Stallone, and Jack Nicholson.

Free controls driving joints:

This rig allows for total freedom of movement for facial animation, it grants realistic and rather animated/fantastic facial movements. All the joints for Digi-mask were included in this rig as the plan was to allow the player to switchout the default head for their own.

Bipeds:

First rig:

This is my jewel in biped rigs as it includes:

Upper arm and forearm twisting without gimbal flipping/locking.

IK-FK switching and blending.

Stretchy IK.

Motion Capture.

Switching MoCap on and off per limb (and maintaining position/rotation)

Blending Mocap on and off per limb

Baking animation, and an offset rig for animation tweaks after baking.

Facial rig for Digimask.

This rig was also the default rig, so the model was a very simplistic average of all the other models' sizes and proportions without any detail, you also see this rig in my facial demo reel on a soldier's face.

Complete Foot:

This rig I found to be the favored for most game biped rigs. Every possible movement is available on this rig, rolling up on the ball of the foot, rolling up on the toe and heel, free toe wiggling, or just rotating the ankle.

Reverse Foot:

This is a standard reverse foot, it offers one control, but everything is on slider attributes for rolling on the toe, ball or heel.

Detatched Foot:

SImilar to the reverse foot, save I put rolling on the heel and ball all on one attribute, which also allows for a toe wiggle attribute. The big advantage to this style of rigging is that the animation pose can be cheated and stretched.

Multi-ped and Creative Solutions:

Plankton Boss:

This Rig is seen in Spongebob Squarepants: Truth or Square. The biggest challenge of this was the tank treads as in a cinematic scene, it needed to have the tank treds spin as it moves and turns, as well as have the animators have control of the spin (incase we wanted it to peel out). The solution came about via MEL expression driving joints around a NURBS surface based upon the direction it was facing and direction being moved. THe treads were also able to scale down to fold in and hide within the "chum bucket" part of the robot.

Particle Skeleton:

Two characters in one. The first character was a simple polygonal model rigged for basic funtionality, the second was constructed of Nurbs curves and obects bound to the skeletal structure in a very different manor, the nurbs objects were then set as particle emitters for a custom made black flame. Each arm, hand, and the body of the nurbs character had it's own scalability and sretching. Both characters were driven by MEL expressions and various connections.

Patrick Boss:

This rig is seen in Spongebob Squarepants: Truth or Square. We needed this character to have his pants fall down, but also move with the legs and belly of the character (or not for when its pants were down). Also this character had two basic attacks, one being spinning attack where the body needed to spin independently of where the lower half is facing.

Skirt:

This skirt was for a female character in Turning Point: Fall of Liberty, a game produced by Spark Unlimited LLC (all rights reserved). It was a test of Maya's physical objects which would drive the bones, after testing this solution for the skirt was dropped as the bone count was very heavy. I rigged the skirt and set up the physical objects and their connection to eachother as well as the skirt joints, the physical objects would colide with the Nurbs spheres and the joints reflect that colision and reaction, the physical objects were Nurbs spheres flattened out and resembled beaded curtains. This was one of the more successful dynamic solutions attempted.