What's your go-to autorigger for Maya?

I've been using advanced skeleton for years now and it's been my main go-to. The facial rigging system is incredibly robust, which is a huge plus if your character needs detailed facial animations.

Pros of Advanced Skeleton:

- Very straightforward interface with a step-by-step process
- Excellent facial rigging capabilities
- No custom nodes (which means no plugins required for others to use your rig)
- Tons of tutorials available online

The main downside is that it can get a bit heavy performance-wise if you're working with multiple characters. Also, while it's free for educational purposes, you'll need a license for commercial work.

If your character needs to go into a game engine, I've had no issues exporting Advanced Skeleton rigs to Unity and Unreal. Just make sure you clean up any unnecessary controls before export.

HIVE autorigger from ZooTools. Worth every penny of the $40. Super clean rigs and crazy fast to set up.

I switched from Advanced Skeleton to mGear about 2 years ago and never looked back. mGear is completely open source and free, and the performance improvement is DRAMATIC. I can have multiple characters in a scene and Maya still runs smoothly.

The learning curve is steeper than AS, especially if you want to customize components, but for basic biped rigs you can use the templates out of the box. The system is data-driven, which saves a ton of time when you're dealing with multiple characters.

One thing to watch out for - if you're going to a game engine, make sure you use the Unreal template in mGear. I had some initial issues with compatibility until I figured that out.

Has anyone tried Rapid Rig? I hear it's super straightforward but lacks features compared to the others.

@martindef, Rapid Rig is great for quick and dirty rigs. If you need something fast for blocking animations, it works well. But for production quality, I'd recommend something more robust.

@underaleo, Since you mentioned deformation issues around shoulders and hips, you'll definitely want to look into corrective blend shapes regardless of which auto-rigger you choose. No auto-rig will give you perfect deformation out of the box for those tricky areas.

I've used both AS and Hive, and personally prefer Hive. The rigs are much lighter and faster, and they use all the latest Maya nodes for better performance. The $40 gets you not just the auto-rigger but the entire ZooTools suite which has a ton of useful stuff.

For game engines, I've had zero issues getting Hive rigs into Unreal. Just be sure to double-check joint naming conventions for your specific engine.

Oh, and their documentation and tutorials are really thorough! https://create3dcharacters.com/maya-hive-autorigger/

Don't overlook Maya's built-in HumanIK system if you're working with strictly bipedal characters. It's already there in Maya and requires no third-party tools. The downside is it's very rigid in what you can customize, but for standard human rigs it works fine.

For non-human characters though, you'll definitely want one of the options others have mentioned. I recommend trying out the free/trial versions of each to see which workflow you prefer.

Another thing to consider is stability and longevity. If you're working on a long-term project, you might want to avoid any solution that requires custom nodes (like mGear). While they offer better performance, there's always the risk that future Maya updates might break compatibility.

Advanced Skeleton only uses native Maya nodes, which makes it more future-proof. Just my two cents from someone who's been burned by plugin dependencies before.

I think I'm leaning toward Hive since several of you mentioned it has good performance and game engine compatibility. The fact that it comes with other tools in the ZooTools package is a nice bonus.

@HowardZes - I'll definitely look into corrective blend shapes. Any tutorials you recommend for that specifically?