This tutorial also available in French.
Character Rigging
by Jean-Philippe Savariault
If you would like to download and test this LightWave Character Rig now, before going through the notes, it is recommended. If you have already tested them and are looking for a better understanding of how it works and how to set it up... read on.
A little bit of history...
The following notes were originally written the French games animator Jean-Philippe Savariault, and have been kindly translated to English by Samuel Kvaalen.
Jean-Philippe originally shared this beautiful model and rig on the LightWave 3D forum SpinQuad. The rig itself was developed over two years ago. Although my own knowledge and understanding of rigging and animation is limited, I found this to be the most intuitive, simple and well behaved IK rig I have used to date.
After telling Jean-Philippe how much I enjoyed playing with the rig and trying to understand its magic a little better. He offered to write down and share these set-up notes.
In return, I host them here for everyone's benefit. So here they are, over the next few pages, read on and enjoy :-)