posing Characters with the Quick rig tool
Anyone working as a character artist will know how incredibly rewarding it is to see your creations brought to life through movement, even if it’s just a static pose that conveys some sense of character and personality. Posing a character has typically been a cumbersome process, but thanks to a growing number of tools, it is now easier than ever to bring your characters out of their default sculpted stance.
Posing problems
When sculpting characters for production, you’ll normally create a ‘blank-canvas’ version. Your character will be in an ‘M’ or ‘T’ pose, with arms out to the side and a neutral facial expression. The practical reason for this is to make the character as easy to rig as possible. When it comes to presenting your work, however, a portfolio full of expressionless characters preparing for a TSA patdown can be on the boring side.
There are methods of posing in Zbrush and Mudbox, but the builtin posing tools aren’t always the easiest to work with. They involve a lot of special masking and one-off rotations, although there are ways to create more complex rigs. These methods can work well in many cases, but they can take a lot of time. If you have a character that is just begging to get out of that restrictive T pose, try using Maya’s Quick Rig Tool (added in Maya 2016 Ext 2) to rig and pose your model quickly and easily.
Click to pose
First, transfer your mesh from your selected sculpting program using GOZ or Send To. In Maya, select the Quick Rig Tool from Rigging>skeleton, the Rigging Shelf, or the Character Tools interface. There are two options here. Step-by-step will give you fine control over the process, while One-click does everything automatically. If you selected One-click, use that precious click on the Auto-rig button. You’ll see that your character suddenly has bones and controls, and the mesh has been bound. If your joints don’t come in at the right spots, you can use the Step-by-step method and move your guides into place before creating the bones. Keep in mind that, as of right now, this process is meant for bipedal characters, so for a more complex creature you’ll need a different solution.
Once it’s rigged, simply pose your model and send the new mesh back to your sculpting app to update it with the high-resolution detail. You can use the Quick Rig Tool early in the process, posing your base mesh for further refinement in Zbrush. If you’ve already sculpted your model and it’s insanely detailed with lots of subtools, you can use the same workflow with just one extra step. In Zbrush, go to the Transpose Master plug-in from the Zplugin menu. Push the Tposemesh button in Transpose Master to create a single low-resolution mesh with a connection to your multisubtool object. Instead of using the masking and posing tools in Zbrush, send this low-resolution Transpose Master mesh over to Maya via GOZ. Now you can use the Quick Rig Tool to rig and pose the model. Then, send the mesh back to Zbrush, transfer the new pose to the subtools via Tposemesh>subt in Transpose Master and your character is ready to jump off the screen!
if you Have a character that is just begging to get out of a t Pose, try using maya’s quick rig tool Justin Marshall, lead modelling author, Pluralsight