So yeah, I failed to find any good tutorial on the matter, so I decided to make one (after strugling with blender to understand how to properly do it.
And here you are:
You can download the finished .blend from my webpage [Link]
Hope you guys find it useful! 
Also, and important sidenote
.blend file ready for download
nice tut
I love the elbow and shoulder of your character
but if I want to have bones for fingers then I will have to have extra 28 groups for them ? and have to paint that much ?
Indeed, you will need to paint those weights too. But, as you saw in the video, once you get a grip of the process every group shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes at most.
Also, once you do one finger, you0ve prettu much worked out how to do all of them. 
Great tutorial on an important (and under appreciated) facet of rigging… I hope you will do more tutorials…
Thanks a lot for the comment, I really appreciate it n_n
great tutorial!!!
i’ve been playing with the meta-rig with awfull results due my ignorance about weight painting.
by other way, is there any posibilty to put this in a pdf?
i don’t speak english so is a bit hard to follow…
anyway thx for the vids those are much apreciated!!!
regards from argentina
Making this into a pdf I haven’t really considered, That would take painful amount of time and I really don’t have it right now.
What I have considered is making it in spanish if people ask for it XD that I can do in about 30 minutes.
Thanks for the comment and good luck with the metarig.
Thanks heaps for the tutorial, it helped me through a couple of things I was having trouble with in 2.5.
I just wanted to note that you might not need to go through the work of copying the vertex groups to the right side. If you select X Mirror under the Brush Options menu it should mirror the weight painting for both the right and left sides (provided you have your bones named correctly - forearm.r, forearm.l, etc.). That might help avoid the side effect you noted in your sidenote. =)
you know why this tut is awesome. Because i learned from somebody who learned the hard way and you know most likely what the problem was.
Wirryalias, I think you might be correct, Although I’m pretty sure the X-Mirror wouldn’t detect manually assigning vertex to groups (which is something I really like doing because of the ease) so yeah, definitely another way to do it. I should try it.
larmannjan, Thanks for your comment. I’m glad you enjoyed and learned from this.
Thank you! I have needed this so much! You explain this very well, with detailed, clear and precise instructions/explanations. On a great topic too.
You should apply as a guest tutor on Blenderguru with thus tutorial. You get $100 (I think) and this is a highly sought after tutorial.
Well done!
Sam M Thanks a lot for the comment! I do try to make it clear XD I think i had to shoot this at least 10 times before it came out clear enough for my liking.
I’m under the impressino that Andrew Price is no longer accepting submitions for guest tutorials. He did, however, give this tut a shoutout on his twitter feed, which I really appreciate.
Again, thanks for the comment.
Great tutorial,
It’s something I’m starting to think about and seeing the difference between weight painting and auto assiged makes me think which method I will do.
Thank you.
No problem, Great thing you liked it, I really appreciate the comment. Thanks!
I’m currently using Opera Mini right now but I’m gonna check this out when I get home. Skinning a character is the part I really suck at. A lot of times, the elbow, armpits, and fingers don’t work exactly as I planned it to be. Anyway, feedback later. Thanks in advance.
I hope you’ll enjoy it. n_n
Hi, this is what I have been looking for for a while, I tried to follow each of your action during your presentation, one thing stopping me forward is that when you were on Weight Paint mode, you selected arm.l, then you typed R and used mouse with a circle cursor to rotate the arm with bone, but when I do that on my own blender, it is not working, the arm does not rotate at all, I can only rotate by going to Pose Mode with bones selected, can you tell me what I need to do to rotate in Weight Paint Mode?
By the way, I am using Blender 2.56a-beta for OSX 10.5.
Thanks very much for your help, also do you have more tutorials?
David
Hey there!
I think I didn’t explain it, but I’m using a little trick in the tutorial. once you parent the mesh to the armature, you go into pose mode, select a bone you ant to rotate and then select the mesh (without leaving pose mode). That way you can rotate and paint at the same time.
I have a couple tutorials half baked, but I just recently moved in with my girlfriend and her kids, so I’ve had no time to finish them but I’ll do it soon enough, don’t worry, hehehe.
Thanks a lot for the comment.
Thanks, it works, really appreciated.
David