Animating with FK only is of course painful... IK/mixed is usually best choice. You can use for example "bake IK/Motion" to bake all the IK keyframes in the animation after you have finished making all the animations.
Good rig is of course essential for natural & succesful character animation if it's anything more complicated than nodding of the head... without good base rig (with constraints etc), don't even bother. Here's one solution that makes things bit easier (and of course it's not free):
http://www.thomas4d.com/html/t4d_rigging_tools.html
Good rig is of course essential for natural & succesful character animation if it's anything more complicated than nodding of the head... without good base rig (with constraints etc), don't even bother. Here's one solution that makes things bit easier (and of course it's not free):
http://www.thomas4d.com/html/t4d_rigging_tools.html