Meet the Bonnie Rig for Maya by Josh Sobel

Bonnie

Bonnie is a free character rig from Josh Sobel, creator of the excellent Kayla rig which can be downloaded for just $12.  Bonnie by contrast is absolutely free, and is an excellent rig for learning character performance and dialogue.

Josh Sobel describes Bonnie as "a free legacy rig. Bonnie has been downloaded and animated over 20,000 times, and though she's a bit dated, you can still pull a decent performance out of her for the low, low price of free".

Bonnie can be downloaded for free from Josh Sobel's website. We're recommending her to all our students for character performance and dialogue animation.

Rig Walkthrough

You can also see a great walkthrough of the Bonnie rig in the video below:




Mental Ray
Bonnie's shaders are designed to work with Mental Ray, so she will work less well with newer versions of Maya that use Arnold for ray tracing.

Layer Editor

Bonnie comes with a number of layers in the layer editor. Be careful before you delete these - some of them contain nodes which will adversely affect the rig if the layers are deleted. 

Eyes Not Rendering

Render problems

If Bonnie's eyes won't render properly with Arnold, go into the Arnold render settings.  There is a tick box in the Shape Node called 'Opaque'; make sure this is on the correct setting, the eyes will look like.

Create a Face Camera
We recommend creating a Face Camera when you animate characters in Maya. To do this, follow these steps. Creating a camera, name it faceCam, and parent it to the facial controls. Then tear it off (Panels/tear off) so you can return to the faceCam whenever you need it. This will save you a lot of time when animating facial expressions. 

To see this process in more detail, watch the video below:  

Bonnie 2

If you have $20 to spend, consider downloading Bonnie 2, a "from-the-ground-up rebuild of Bonnie", Josh Sobel's first rig, which he describes as "easily the most advanced rig" he has made.  Bonnie 2 isn't free, but at $20 for a solo license, she is competitively priced for a wide audience.  Josh Sobel's rigs are in general dependable and reliable, and we recommend them. And, you can still download Bonnie 1.0 for free.

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