Auto Rigger custom UI panel — Autodesk Maya, Purdue Capstone 2024
The Problem
Rigging is slow. It shouldn't be.
Rigging characters for Agronova was a manual, repetitive process — joint placement, naming conventions, control curve creation, skinning. Done correctly it takes hours per character. With multiple characters in the pipeline, the bottleneck was the rigger, not the art. I built a tool to automate the repeatable parts.
What I Built
Technical breakdown
- Custom UI panel — Maya-native interface built with Python and Qt, with fields for joint naming prefix, rig type (biped / quadruped), and control curve style
- Node-based architecture — rig components built as independent nodes connecting via defined interfaces, making it easy to swap or extend individual parts
- Auto joint placement — artist drops guides in scene; tool reads guide transforms and generates the joint chain with correct orientation automatically
- Control curve generation — NURBS control curves auto-generated and colour-coded by side (left / right / centre) convention
- Skinning helper — smooth bind executed with preset options; weights initialised with geodesic voxel algorithm
Reflection
What this taught me
This project taught me that the best tool is the one your teammates actually use. I iterated the UI three times based on feedback from artists who weren't riggers — the final version required no rigging knowledge to operate.
Research Question
How can procedural rigging systems be designed to be flexible enough for custom characters while remaining accessible to non-technical animators — and what are the limits of automation in character setup pipelines?