The point of it is to demonstrate the benefits of IK and some copy/limit rotation modifiers.
Hopefully making it obvious it's easier to animate.
some setup info:
- The main animation bones are visible, hiding the others on a different layer.
- Except for the main heel-to-toe-bone all have their own shape.
- Hands and feet have their own target, including pole targets for the elbow and knee joints.
- A fancy heel to toe bone (see blenderguru tutorial)
- Copy and limit rotation modifiers for the fingers/thumbs on the X axis. The main finger bone would be the rectangular one.
- Hips are fun to play with, and rotate around a sensible origin. ( the reversed hip deformation bone is hiding on another layer )
- The weight painting is functional but definitely not polished.
- Sadly no titty bones but thats not the point right now. Implement some softbody physics or something :P jk.
- It took way longer to setup than i previously though, including making all the stupid custom shapes.
- Its probably useless with all its fancy modifiers for LOS but a good demo me thinks
edit: Copy- Rotation, Location, Scale ( no seperate x,y,z scale ) and IK modifiers now supported \o/
The whole thing is based upon this 3 part tutorial and thus the rigify addon armature ( included in the newer blender 2.6 versions )
The finished tutorial .blend file has a better weighted character with better topology. I recommend looking at that one too.