There have been a few people asking about quick and easy ways to rig a character. I have not tested these yet (well I am at the moment) but it gets good reviews and there are some nicely made tutorials by Olivier Ladeuix.
Now bear in mind that using tools like this will teach you nothing but it will allow you to get on with animating your characters. Make sure you test the rigs thougherly to see if they do what you want.
There is a similar simple autorig solution in Softimage XSI but Maya does not have one as standard, there are also a few you can buy.
This one is called abAutoRig and is available here
And the tutorials on using it are here
If anyone gets good results with it please tell us
Whilst we are on rigging for you animators out there who are playing with the various rigs that lovely people have given out for all to enjoy here is a list of rigs available along with comments on plus and minus points as well as examples of the rigs in action Link
