Autodesk®HumanIK® (HIK) animation middleware is a full-body inverse kinematics (IK) solver and retargeter. HumanIK is included in Maya as a retargeting engine that lets you retarget animation between characters of differing size, proportions and skeletal hierarchy.
To retarget animation in Maya, each character must be set up as a HumanIK character.
Each character that you want to use in your retargeting pipeline must be set up as an HIK character. To function as an HIK character, the character must have a characterized skeleton. To act as a target character and receive retargeted animation, the character must also have a Control Rig.
Whether you are building an HIK character from scratch or planning to use an existing skeleton or mesh, you can use tools in the HumanIK window to characterize skeletons and create Control Rigs. See Set up a HumanIK character and Example workflow: Non-destructive retargeting.
