Today I restarted my character rig because the original rigging tutorials I was following where not the best and I found some much better tutorials. I instead followed a 6 part tutorial made by Russel Stasiuk on Youtube starting with : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwNDoyZbsCQ

These tutorials are better because you are given more warning about the future effects of modeling decisions, I didn't notice any mistakes, its clear to follow and a less annoying voice. Here are some screenshots of my rigging production.

Firstly I found out that having a bend in my models knees was a big mistake as this can lead to unusal results when creating IK handles, so I went back to my legs and begin to straighten them out by selecting rings of vertices and using the soft select tool to keep it smooth.

I then moved on creating more bones for my whole character since my arms where down I just made the rig above it and will move them together in position once the control's are complete.

Here is my complete bone structure.

Once my structure was complete I check the orientation of all my joints and begin to adjust them, so they all matched up correctly.

I then created some foot controls, I also added an attribute to these controls allowing me to move the foot, I can use this for future walking or running animations if I ever need them.

Then I created some knee control's using Pole Vectors, I then edited these controls so they will not show up in renders, and only display the necessary attributes.

I then made the hip controls and connected it to the relevant bones so they all move and rotate together correctly.

Next I made a back control using multiple tools such as spline clusters, additional attributes, connection editor, key drivers and much more.

Then I created a head controller using all the same technical shizzle wizzle, and began to make some arm controllers.

Here is an image my final rig all finished I also added a rig to the eyes and added my head mesh as a child of the bones so it is animated correctly, the arms and hands are also rigged up and the hands have newly made attributes that allow me to make a fist shape using a single attribute, this will be helpful for gripping the sword if I decide to do any animations like that, I had to use multiple scrips that I learned from the tutorial videos in order to produce these attributes and do other handy functions in Maya.

I also decided to use a different tutorial for the eyes, I used it because it seemed easier for my unique type of eyes, below is a link to the eye controller tutorial I used.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdZl6tLjfdE

The next thing I need to do is either move the arms rig to line up with the mesh arms or the other way around and then bind my skin to my bones and hope it doesn't go crazy.