I modeled this guy in Zbrush but now I'm rigging it in Maya. The plan is to build a control rig with a low rez copy of the model for animation then, using a script, the bound hi-res model rig gets constrained to the control rig which has all the animation data on it. This approached helps keep the scene lighter and also allows one person to work on the animation while another person is weighting the bound skin and making blendshapes. Plus, you can delete the control rig anytime you want and replace it with a different one so, for example, if you need a special rig that allows your puppet to climb up walls and another rig that allows it to spin around on its back, you can have seperate rigs instead of trying to figure out how to make a single rig that does EVERYTHING.
By the way, this model is a little over 18000 polys and uses a normal map instead of a bump map.
