Rigging - Larry Splinegod hints

Character animation is broken up into stages. The blocking out stage can be done with versions of the characterst that are like chess pieces. Theyre moved around to get a feel for the overall timing.

When the actual character animation starts the character animators typically arent concerned about deformations. Animation is about timing, weight, acting etc etc rather then focusing on technical issues like deformations. This requires that the rig be animatable, that it gives fast feedback and can be posed quickly and easily. You dont care about deformations at this stage and in fact the animating and deforming aspects should be separated. The rig shouldnt require a lot of reposing once parts are posed. The rig should also be stable in between poses. Once the character animator is done animating the character technical animators take over and apply the motions to a more complex rig that has higher poly counts, cloth, skin, muscle and other dynamics. They insure that the character deforms properly and they do whatever it takes to make sure it does this. Sometimes that means creating morphs or even tweaking points by hand. They will add other types of deformers to help out as well. At this point you definately wont see realtime feedback on the rig. If animation changes need to be done the character animators will do it on the chopped up rig. The motions will again be applied to the more complex rigs. Sometimes there may be multiple rigs, with the data from the previous rigs being applied to even more complex ones. If it sounds tedius its because it is. This is also why that large Maya based studios have lots of speclists. Lightwave people tend to be their own TDs.

Rather then have multiple rigs in LW I tend to have a hybrid rig. My chopped up rig and my high rez rig share the same bones. I have some scripts that allow me to change my rig between an Animate Mode and a Deform Mode.
When I run my script for Animate mode, the high rez mesh is hidden, subpatch levels are dropped to 0, subdivision order is set to first, bounding box threshold is set to a lower value and I may also opt to disable all deformations. At the same time all the chopped up pieces which are invisible and parented to the proper bones are made visible. When I do this my rig animates very quickly in Layout.

When I wish to test deformations my Deform Mode script makes the chopped up pieces invisible, makes the high rez subpatched character visible, sets the subpatch level to 2 or 3, sets the subdivision order to last and enables deformations. I may choose to leave the bounding box threshold at a low value. In this mode I can see how my character is deforming. The feedback in this mode is not realtime but I can quickly switch between both modes to do what I need to do.

With that said, one thing nice about living in LA is getting to meet lots of cool people in this business. One of them is Colin Cohen. Colin does character work and is an awesome programmer. After some discussion a couple of weeks ago Colin wrote a new plugin that can copy motions from one rig to another. I would definately recommend his plugins, many of which really streamline the character rigging/animation process.
Heres a link to his site. http://cohen-plugs.tripod.com/