The many Rig properties

Hello John. Wayne is the rig master, he probably missed the post where you asked about documentation. He will see this post and clear all that up for sure. He lives in the future in Australia, it's 4:12am over there right now.

Hi John,

"I asked if there was any documentation but got no response..."

Hello again jjjhartz,
(I'm taking you to make sure you receive a notification of my response).

I'm sorry for your frustration but let's see what we can do to solve your confusion.

First off - if you haven't already watched the video demo on the rigs, please watch that.  It will answer most of the questions you have.
Here it is again.
https://cgcookie.com/lessons/vonnbot-rigs-3-4-demo

As for your question about how you should approach the properties...
You should be able to start animating with the character in its default state.  Those settings are saved in the most commonly used state (well hopefully I have done that).

But let me explain a few things for you.
0-1 : if you see a slider like this, left is zero/off and right is 1/fully on
For example, Head Follow.  0 will ignore the rotation of what it is attached to (the neck), and 1 will follow that rotation.
This is true for any of the properties called "Follow".
Why are you seeing 'head_follow' and "Head Follow"?  One is actually the real location on the control bone, and the other is its place in the UI.  They are the same, however in the UI you can display many important properties at the same time without having the bone selected.

Any of the "Parent" options will let you swap the parent.  Much like the "Follow" except it will inherit the location, rotation and scale as well.

And the FK--> IK functions will let you snap the FK chain of bones to the IK ones, I'm pretty sure this is explained in the video (however you won't need it in the course).

And any of the volume slider will let you enable or disable the volume preservation when you stretch that body part.  
Maybe you don't want the arms to get skinny when they stretch, or maybe you do.  That is what the volume property controls.

If you have any more questions please let me know.  
I really hope you see this response.

Hi John,

Yep, animation is hard. But you can get there.

I understand the need to want to know absolutely everything at once as I come from a family of engineers.

While it's a great thing, don't let this distract you from your learning goal.

In education there is a concept called 'tolerance for ambiguity'. Generally it means you will be exposed to stuff and not know what it means (yet). It's like at the start of movies where they show some mysterious dark figure doing something evil. They don't show the audience everything, but the audience goes "oh that's something that I will learn more about later".

You can treat your learning exactly the same way. You can take a mental note of the things that aren't making sense yet and let Future John worry about them. Chances are it might start making sense organically with out any extra effort on your part, but if you get a little further down the road and you find yourself asking "Hey what happened to that creepy monster at the start of movie?", then it's time to dig deeper.

I hope that can help you decide on which rabbit holes to go down in the present moment.

Also, I should ask, you have taken the CORE | Fundamentals of Animation, yeah?

If you haven't, you really should.

Ok let's see if I can answer your questions.

1a) If controls are greyed out, it generally means it is unavailable. Most likely this is intentional behaviour. For example, sometimes you might find the location channel boxes greyed out. This happens when that control (aka bone) is a connected child. It cannot be translated away from the parent so the location controls are greyed out.

1b) IK (inverse kinematics) is when the control is at the end of the chain. Grab the torso on Rivet, move it around, and you will see the feet are stuck to the ground. That is IK.
FK (Forward Kinematics) is when the hierachy flows down the chain. Grab the antenna on Torque, each control influences all the others down the down (but not the inverse direction). IK is good for things like feet sticking to the ground. And FK is good for creating nice arcing animation.

Both are hard.....because animation is hard.

1c) Yes, if you learn about the rigify settings that will help you understand all the other functions we don't touch in the course. These rigs were built to be compatible so when you go off and animate something on your own, you already have experience with a Rigify rig.

2) It sounds like you want to copy all the keyframes, which is more easily done in the action editor (or one of the timeline editors).
You learn about that in the fundamentals course.

3) The stretch and volume only work when that part is in IK mode. You will need to manually scale parts on an FK chain to create the volume preservation.

4) There is nothing stopping any driver implementation, however, you probably don't want to drive the foot translation with the rotation of the hips. That will limit your ability to animate it in the way you need. It is possible to switch the parent of the IK foot to the hips but this would just have a very small use case (like falling from the sky or something like that)

5) You can generally leave the IK feet parented to the Root, and leave the pole target parented to the Foot. This is the best setting for the legs (it's their default). As for the IK hands, you might want the hands to be placed on a table, or put them on his hips etc. Changing the parent is a way to limit the amount of work you will need to do in a specific situation.

6) The blue gears are where all the properties live for that specific limb. If you need to work with those settings in the graph editor (GE) you can select that and see all the properties and edit the animation of them.  

Hope that helps.