Jumping back into Maya recently, I've been trying to replicate the poses we were shown earlier, using a rig I haven't used before. This reminded me of a task we did back when I was an undergraduate. One aspect I struggled with when trying to make these poses was trying to translate the 2-D sketches I used as a reference into 3-D poses for the character rig. Some of the joints of the rig don't move in a manner similar to the Buckid rig I was previously accustomed to working with, so it was an interesting trying to come to grips with using this new rig, Ultimate Boney. The facial features of this rig are less expressive than those Buckid had, which was interesting for me using this rig, given that I had to really more heavily on correctly posing the rig's body to convey emotion, as opposed to using facial expressions as a cheat to make things easier. I used the sketches shown previously as a reference, so instead of creating my own references were I already know what emotions I'm trying to convey, I had to interpret the sketches and then try to convey those emotions through the rig I was posing. I feel like I did a passable job, but I think if I were to push the poses further next time the emotions displayed will become much more clear.
I also wanted to pose a quadruped, but the website I used to look for a rig had none that worked for me, so I ended up using a rig of Eevee from the Pokemon games.