STEP BY STEP

QUICK RIG CREATION IN MAYA

01 MIRROR THE JOINTS

Select the clavicle and go to Skeleton>mirror Joints. Mirror across should be set to YZ, if you are mirroring across the X axis.

The Mirror function depends on how you want the joints to perform, so for an arm, setting this to Behaviour will mean both sides will move in the same way.

Finally use the search function to quickly rename your joints for you, replacing ‘l_’ with ‘r_’.

02 DUPLICATE AND GROUP THE CONTROLS

Select all the controls on the left arm, including any offset groups, and duplicate them. Make sure you go through and unlock any locked attributes on the controls and groups.

Group the new controls and offset groups. The new group will be created with its pivot at the world root, which is perfect for what we need here. Now we need to set Scale X on the new group to a value of -1.

03 FIX THE ORIENTATIONS AND SCALE

You now have the controls in the correct place, but the orientations are flipped, and they have a scale value, which needs to be removed.

Freeze the transforms on each group and control, but just on the scale attributes, to reset those to 1.

Now use the Modify>match Transforms tool to make sure that each control and offset group matches the orientation of the joints.

04 REBUILD THE SYSTEMS

So now that you have the controls in place, it’s just a case of making them drive the joints again. How you do this will depend on how you set up the original arm, so if you have IK and FK blending you will need to rebuild these systems. You can duplicate and mirror the base IK and FK skeletons to save time, and you just then need to add the constraints to make them drive the base skeleton.