Bones + Skin:
[Link to www.youtube.com]

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Max also comes with some pretty good tutorials.

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Chris

you can rig a character with any kind of object. its basically just to do with creating heirachies. you could use a series of box primitives as bones, link them together and add them to the skin modifier. The tricky bit is getting the pivot points in the right spot, setting up IK solvers and control objects and then the skinning which can be a major headache depending on the design of your character. Start with a character that is very skinny with a fairly low res mesh. weighting vertices can get very confusing on a high res mesh.

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i tried rigging a while back, and had a question which i now recall....
say you've made some stick figure, and set up the link hierarchies...so you can move whatever limb you want etc...
now say you want your stick fig. to pick up a teapot and throw it. (i tried this)
the stick fig. hand goes toward the handle. after that point, how do you get the teapot to move with the hand....i used link there again, but the problem is when the teapot should leave the hand....how do you de-link it? and is there a better way to all this

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Cogito, Ergo Sum

you can use a parent constraint on the teapot and then key the constraint on and off as you need it. I hope this is relevant in max tis what i do in maya.

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and it's a story that might bore you, but you don't have to listen, because I always knew it was going to be like that.

In max its called link constraint.

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ah ok thanks!

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Cogito, Ergo Sum