The Andy Rig 1.4.6 for Maya

The Andy (short for "androgynous") Rig was made for students at the Savannah College of Art and Design and is updated based on student feedback.  It's meant to play both male and female roles and be generic enough to act in many different scenarios.  Multiple hair styles and textures are already available, but more can be added to change the look of the character.  Feedback is appreciated and often implemented. 

Release v1.4.6 includes:

-Maya 2008 compatibility (Rt. Click menus now enabled in 7.0, 8.5, 2008)

-Animatable pivots on feet, root and head embedded into Right Mouse Menus

-Stick elbows and knees in place ("lock mid" control)

-Stop-Staring type facial setup (eyebrows are displayed in the textures - see tips below)

-IK/Fk matching on arms and legs embedded into Right Mouse Menus

-Dynamic parenting (space switching) embedded into Right Mouse Menus

-IK/FK spine

-Advanced twist enabled on arms, legs and spine

-Squash and Stretch and bendy arms

-Twist and Gimble helpers

-Multiple hair styles

-Multiple textures

-More coming soon...visit www.johndoublestein.com for updates 

Fixed in  v1.4.5:

bad foot pivot orientations are now fixed - sorry about that one

For best results, use your animation preferences (window->settings/preferences->preferences->display) to set the viewport texture resolution to "fast" or "high quality", please use the inlcuded character sets (or make your own), use right-mouse-button menus to change parenting (and IK/FK snapping), use the customizable options on the world-node to show the proxy or smooth the character, only animate in the Y axis for FK elbows (this bug will be fixed in the 2.0 release), and use "smooth+1" before rendering to allow the textures to display correctly.

Do you like the andy rig but need a different type of model for your scene? The rigging scripts used to generate the andy rig are available at www.johndoublestein.com.  The JTD rigging tools are still in beta but continue to mature as they are tested in actual production.  In less than half an hour you can rig your own character to have many of the same features as the andy rig.  However, rigging the face is still up to you :-)

Credits: Models and Rig by John Doublestein, Design by Craig Scheuermann, Textures by Ying-Chih Chen.  Some rigging techniques inspired by Jason Schliefer, Aaron Holly, Javier Solsona, Michael Comet and Hamish McKenzie - thanks guys!