Hi. I am up to make something in fashion of music video with blender and movie extreme. Don’t plan any deadlines yet. I have modelled a lowpoly mouse character (similar technique as Blendo).
Question: does anybody know of some simple effective armature setup suitable for toons (doesn’t have to have all arm fingers animated) and is there a way to do a simple mouth animation with armature.
Question 2: is there some tip or advice on heightfield modelling (not for terrain) - for some sort of dome that should look like sand-made? I tried some for myself, but wasn’t happy with outcomes?
Mouth animation with armature? Well that’s a no-no in today’s CG world. Almost everybody uses morphing (RVKs in Blender). It’s faster, easier and better than bones. Use the Lipsync tutorial to get started with RVKs.
About Question2 - ask in another forum. We can’t model, we’re just dumb animators here 
Well, not really…
I’m mostly imressed by your idea of making a music video! Have you seen Alien Song by Victor Navone (of course, you have ) ? That was the piece that inspired me to start with character animation! Probably you have seen the music video by Playgroup - “Number One”. It’s the best I’ve ever seen. It’s on music TVs all around the world. And here’s another piece of work that is definately worth seeing:
http://www.pocketmovies.net/detail_179.html
Lyubomir Kovachev
character animator
http://www.angelfire.com/comics/cartoons4
thanks, lyubomir for reply; for that armature for mouth - it goes for distance scenes - mouth should only open and squash a bit in tempo, which is exactly 120 bpm, which means 13+12 frame repetitive sequence/loop, which leads to parenting/constraining an empty to a bone, and linking it via constraint or python to something else on a clean layer, which should mimic some yeah etc. expressions. Theoretically yes, but some tests (I rendered only ugly aliased animated screenshots) were bad. I am extraordinaly very weak in character animation, and very lazy, too, so I am looking for an easy and good looking solution.
Sadly, there’s no such thing as “an easy and good looking solution” 
But there’s an easy solution and a good looking solution instead.
Well, if you want to make the mouth just open and squash you don’t need bones and empties - it’ll be twice as easier with just one vertex key and it’ll look better. Trust me - this is the easier solution.
We’d like to see your test renderings and try to help you, so if you have web space, upload them and let us know.
And don’t worry about being lazy. You’re on the right place - we’re all lazy bastards here! 8)
Lyubomir Kovachev
character animator
http://www.angelfire.com/comics/cartoons4