Help rigging for my animation final

[viathan]

Here is my character:
http://students.uat.edu/micgrass/images/character01.jpg
http://students.uat.edu/micgrass/images/character02.jpg
http://students.uat.edu/micgrass/images/character03.jpg

Very simple, I know, but it took me a while since I don't have a very broad knowledge of modeling. Here is what I am trying to do, I am trying to use Character Studio to rig the model so I can do an animation. As of right now I have the model converted to editable mesh. Do I need to convert this to something else? Also, all the pieces are seperate, the legs, the ball joints are still a ball with a cylinder, ect. If you notice in the picture I have ball joints so the arms, legs, feet, head, and chest have to bend right at those joints without deforming the ball and cylinder. My teacher had told me to convert the entire thing to an editable mesh, then attach everything to the chest, then do the character studio skeleton, but when I bent the skeleton the arms would bend the cylinder that the ball is attached to. I would guess I would have to edit the envelope so the upper arm would include the upper arm and the ball and cylinder right? I only have about 50 minutes worth of character studio so I am lost here. I had also tried to do bones with IK but the bones would not bend right. Also what I had was a parent/child relationship for everything so when I grabbed the upper arm and rotated it up everything attached would move with it and rotate at the ball joint. This worked well but I could not animate it because there was no IK/FK. I am lost here, do I need to convert the model? Do I need to link anything before applying the character studio skeleton? My final model is the armor one and I have to do the animation for next week. If I can get it rigged properly the animation won't take long at all. Let me know if you can give me some pointers to setting it up.
I am following this tutorial:
http://cal3d.sourceforge.net/modeling/tutorial.html

but again, I don't know how to set up my model to start the process of adding the character studio model to it. If there is anyone that could help please let me know.