The tiger is IKed and enveloped .... I didn't use the prepackaged rigs, my characters are not human like (the tiger has a tail and has no knees!!) so I decided to move along with my own IK, which is quite an easy rig to create anyway ... the skeleton is not the time consuming thing ... its the enveloping that takes forever!! It took me about 3 tries ... there is never an automatic way of enveloping characters, there are always many points that have to be reweighted one by one ... and it seems more difficult when working with a polygon mesh that has a subdivision surface. Since the polygon mesh is the one that is enveloped, it can be deceiving when weighting the points on it ... when you look at the subdivision surface, the points need to be tweaked more ... I'm tempted to freeze the subdivision surface and just work on that, but then it will be slower to animate (and at this point I'd have to reweight the points again !)

My next step is to add eyes, nose, and stripes to the tiger.