I did few character animations in my life (all fall into category of crap) and I know what IK is,

but there must be something more with "full body IK", I mean the plugin costs over 1k $$.

lightwave has had full body ik for years, called IK BOOSTER, there was a site dedicated to it called ik booster, but i think it has shut down now.

Yes, modo rigging/animation smell LW...

Seems like Sega Animanium was also very interesting. I think Mirai had FBIK as well.

modo is the LW modeller and some more. I have owned softimage and LW for 5 years, I personally don't see the point in buying modo especially now as both apps are being developed further.

here is a short IK Booster tutorial showing full body ik setup and action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsSdcMrdpZE&feature=player_detailpage

I've heard 3d Studio for DOS was first with full body IK
According to feelings expressed from all sides of 3d world, definitively there is
*something* with Modo 601. Now I'm 101% sure I'll try it, as soon as possibe.

What is this "something"?

About rigging/skinning in Lux forum was opened a thread from a Lux staff member:
http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=63414
My interest in modo is diminished when I heard about the more slow rendering in this release and the now sound timeline "feature"

About rendering, in 501 modo was more faster about 30% compared to mental ray, but don't have all the (many) features MR has from years. Now they increase the features (volumetric, skin shader...), but speed decrease on average 20% , and, in some case, a user declare skin shader arrived an 3 hours rendering against 32 min 501 SSS material. Impressive
Another discussion about speed decrease in 601:
http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=63262

so it's 'real' full body IK, definitively. Got my copy of 601 before few days, still I don't know how to pan a viewport . So just a few first impressions. There is a good number od control for local rotation limits, stiffness, so on. FBIK don't need to apply to full skeleton, it's possible to have multiple separate solvers. Also FBIK don't need to drive a "final" interpolation, there's what is called 'pose tool'. As name says, 'pose tool'
allows to tweak the joints in a way of Max'es select-and-move. RMB makes a fixed joint, LMB is tweak, really easy to get the pose.You tweak it as FBIK, it playback as FK.
I'd believe it's possible to finally overcome the classic, layered rig from '90s...

Another interesting things I've seen so far, that's Dual Quaterinion skinning. Also some kind of node-driven expression editor, able to deal with vectors and matrices too.
Of course all that is not Maya, but FBIK itself gives enough energy to fight with possible problems.

Renderer.... (at least from my point of view of using MR for years), woooooooooooow, radiosity is miracle.... motion blur is impressive too.
Hair doesn't seem to shine (nicely to say) compared to 3delight, but I didn't even expected this..Would be interesting to render ICE particles with Modo volumes, volume render seems to be faster and nicer too (compared to MR).

Slick....

Is it even possible to get ICE particles into modo? It's Maya nCache right? I'm debating rendering in modo or vray right now.