In animation you >>WANT!!!!<< control thats the point,giving less control is the opposite of a good rig
Any animator will jump at your neck for what you are doing
I won't even bother following this anymore if that is your reasoning
Animators want only one thing and that is animating as easily as possible but as precisely as possible,in other words recreating accurate believable movement fast,without precision believable movement is not possible
Also any helpers can go in the rig as long as they don't modify geometry, if only the bones control geometry I don't care what is in the rig
Other then the fact that if your spine moved like that you would not be human?
Seriously cut it out with the IK ,its not good to control everything with it
Also learning from movie rigs is a good thing,there made to help the animators, at least the human ones where there isn't cartoon deformation or strange limbs should be good examples,the only things you shouldn't care about them is morphs, shape keys,deformation systems, head rigs or spline bones otherwise you should learn as much as you can from whatever you can,including like you said other programs
Actually make a list of points and tricks you have discovered in those rigs and see if they are feasible to implement
Also I would suggest to look at footage showing on how a real human moves as I think this is the biggest problem you have,as you have no clear sense of how things should move
edit:
Almost forgot for spine why not go with mancandy implementation?
Bah I just wished they made a limited SA that keeps the derivate as there own medium
The rig seems made to be deformed
Not exactly what we need for a game rig
No you don't get,spline IS the many bones,its a method to control many bones using IK because the simple IK breaks down
What I wanted you to copy is the controlling mechanism and limiters
IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SPLINES nor does the rig which probably has normal IK
Bah thats completely useless,do you think we can afford that many bones?
Its not even SPINE but SPLINE which is completely different
Spline think of it more like a bezier curve or photoshop path
There 2 types of animation
Good animation and Bad animation
There is no such thing as game animation and movie animation
This is a unified game rig,where all possible conditions have to be taken into account including the use of the rigs in cutscenes
If you think IK is still good for spine I challange you to recreate all this movements
http://www.cactus3d.com/FakeIKFKSpine.mov
The rig is IK with helper bones
In animation you >>WANT!!!!<< control thats the point,giving less control is the opposite of a good rig
Any animator will jump at your neck for what you are doing
I won't even bother following this anymore if that is your reasoning
Animators want only one thing and that is animating as easily as possible but as precisely as possible,in other words recreating accurate believable movement fast,without precision believable movement is not possible
Also any helpers can go in the rig as long as they don't modify geometry, if only the bones control geometry I don't care what is in the rig
End of rant
Other then the fact that if your spine moved like that you would not be human?
Seriously cut it out with the IK ,its not good to control everything with it
Also learning from movie rigs is a good thing,there made to help the animators, at least the human ones where there isn't cartoon deformation or strange limbs should be good examples,the only things you shouldn't care about them is morphs, shape keys,deformation systems, head rigs or spline bones otherwise you should learn as much as you can from whatever you can,including like you said other programs
Actually make a list of points and tricks you have discovered in those rigs and see if they are feasible to implement
Also I would suggest to look at footage showing on how a real human moves as I think this is the biggest problem you have,as you have no clear sense of how things should move
edit:
Almost forgot for spine why not go with mancandy implementation?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T__WfyEFxkg
Its basically a FK setup with a a few tricks,and looks like it works really well
Just ignore the deform stuff
edit2:
Nevermind looks like the mancandy one is a little bit to complicated
The spine IK doesn't work at all,it worked better in the previous version
My recommendation is to look at how other rigs handle it,if they only have fk for spine will just use fk
The texture has some really bad artifacts
They like compression artifacts,do you still have the originals?
How did you made this?
Its such a shame because the texture is pretty interesting
I mean the hand not the finger forgot to add a "don't think"
Don't parent it to the hand control,parent it to the hand
Looks like the fully connected rig isn't going to happen after all
The metarig shape library doesn't look very promising with that mesh twisted horribly like that
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