Before we go ahead and work on the character rig in Maya, I would like to go over some rules you can use for building any character skeleton that is meant to be used for CRYENGINE.

There are some rules when it comes to creating a deformation skeleton for a CRYENGINE character. That's why we like to keep our animation and deformation skeletons separate.

The deformation skeleton is what we will use for skinning the character and it is the one that we will export to the engine in the CHR format. Because this skeleton needs to follow certain rules, we use another skeleton for building the rig, which is the animation skeleton.

The animation skeleton will drive the deformation skeleton via constraints or direct connections. There are no rules for laying out your animation skeleton; you can have whatever hierarchy you prefer for your rig as long as you understand that the end result needs to be hooked to the deformation skeleton.