Advanced Rigging in Maya & Pickle Rig Demo

My work during the advanced rigging class in animation school, at first, the plan was to create a regular humanoid rig, but in the process, I’ve scripted most of the work, so I’d like to present you the “Pickle Rig“ demo, first edition :D There are a lot of rigging systems on the market at this moment, but most of them are good in one thing, but have limitations in other, for example, the rig could be very fast, but it will use custom C nodes, which makes it harder to work with outsource and requires technical maintenance. Or rig could be easy to use at a small scale, but when the setup becomes complicated, it starts producing errors, and because of a lot of legacy hard code inside it is almost impossible to fix. And sometimes if you want to adjust just one little control in a heavy rig - you’ll have to rebuild the whole thing, which could take up to 5-10 min. If you do rigging in Maya, probably, you’ve already figured out what rigging systems I’m describing :D So, my idea was to create a modular, easy-to-use, easy-to-edit, relatively fast, reliable, with no custom nodes-used autorig which would work with game engines out of the box. What you see on the video is basically a prototype and the UI is very far from the final. Features: 1) IK / FK limb, with a stable quaternion-based twist, working in (-180, 180) range with no flips. Twist connected to ribbons, which also allows adjustment of the shape of the limb, offset the elbow control, stretch the whole thing, and control the volume compensation. 2) Basiс IK or FK chains, with various settings 3) Simple reverse foot autorig 4) Corrective joints driver script. It creates an easily customizable system, with an angle extractor working in (-180, 180) degrees range, with two axes simultaneously, with no flips or back movement after passing the 90 degrees. As a result, it is possible to set reliable correctives without using RBF or any other custom nodes 5) Custom ribbonizer. Unlike most of the ribbonizer scripts on the market which create a generic symmetrical setup - here you can pick up any driven objects, and any custom controls and create a custom setup in a few clicks 6) Tools for working with joints and curves. For example, here at 02:36, I reduce the number of joints in the chain, while keeping it following the initial shape, very handy, You can check my other video with a more detailed description of this script 7) And the final point - the whole thing is designed to work with the game engines Also, I decided not to use any proxy objects for joint positioning, as I believe joints themselves are the best proxies, and this is the only way to be sure the orientations in the final skeleton will be the same as you’ve planned. Newcomer riggers usually have problems with proper joint orienting, but with my new script “aligning joints in a plane“ joint orienting becomes super fast and easy, I’ll try to make a presentation soon. Would appreciate any feedback in the comments section! Thank you!