Up until 2016 or so the, very creatively named, Biped01 rig has been the workhorse of ICT’s character animation work. It will be retired soon, however it has had a quite a journey:
Pieces of it originally spawned from my initial rigging learning out of the excellent book “The Art of Rigging”.
It was initially built for a small prototype project called Virtual Briefer, which would allow offices to create digital briefings delivered by an animated character.
The Gunslinger project brought it together with ICT Smartbody animation system and it became the de facto character rig for the Institute.
During the SimCoach project, working closely with Angie Jones, I generally expanded it to include more features expected in a commercial production and more specifically focused on enhancing the face.
The Bravemind and STRIVE projects demand new capabilities of it such as item controls and also pushed the development of the overall Zebra 2 rigging framework to support a wide variety of rigs.
The final work done on it was the final conversion of all its scripts to PyMEL. This served as the foundation for the creation of the new Humanoid rig which will fully embrace Unity’s Mecanim animation system.