All,
My team has just finished a tool to automatically rig, skin and reshape a 3D human model. We have released this for free download (windows .exe installer) here:
http://smartbody.ict.usc.edu/autoriggerandreshaper
The motivation behind this tool is that the ability to create a 3D human body scan is becoming widely available and inexpensive (via Microsoft Kinet, Intel RealSense, Occipital Structure Sensor, capture cage, etc), and this provides a way to ready the character for a 3D game or simulation. The tool will also work on standard humanoid models (not from scans).
The idea behind the algorithm is to rig and skin an example model, then match that example model against the scan, so the rigging information that is transferred should be roughly similar in quality to the original rig.
You can see a video of the tool in action here:
With some additional explanation here:
and our paper that we just published that contains the details of our implementation is here:
http://www.arishapiro.com/AvatarRiggingAndReshaping_FengCasasShapiro.pdf
Regards,
Ari Shapiro
Research Scientist
USC Institute for Creative Technologies
http://www.arishapiro.com