I am doing an image for a contest as some of you know and I have rigged a couple of characters that I modeled in Hexagon. My character rig uses Ik chains for the arms and legs with Ik targets at the hands and feet,I rig the character in a separate file and when I am happy with the way the character looks I save the file. Now I import this character into my larger scene ,it seems that my characters hands and feet have a mind of there own as they are in different positions from my original file. Sometimes it does this after I thought that the import went smoothly . Is there any way to freeze the pose of my characters so I don't get unwanted movement Mike

Group everything together.

Hey Brian, I do have everything grouped together that I thought I could group together . Can you group the mesh together with the skeleton? I tried group the ik targets,skeleton and mesh but Carrara wouldn't let me . So, maybe you are meaning the ik targets and skeleton. I can move my character to the correct spot in the scene without the character going wildly out of pose, it is just mildly out of pose. I will let you know how this goes. Thanks for the tip.

Create a target helper object. And move the IK targets as children of it. Then make the target helper a child of the root of the skeleton. I think its the IK targets that are the issue.

Brian , Thanks, I will give that a try.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is complicated stuff, and I've run into this same problem... the target helper technique is very useful. If someone who has this down do a quick tutorial or post a simple model with this done and explain how to attach the helper objects? I've had such trouble with IK targets, and importing them causes arms to twist backwards. Thanks R

Never Give Up!

I am getting a little frustrated, here is where I am at. I can import the first figure, scale it to the right size and move it into the correct location. Nothing gets distorted or moved on the character. Now I import the second character and bam, the first characters hands and feet get twisted. I did do the target helper idea , how many target helpers do you need 1 per character or 1 per IK target . Where do you place the target helper , do you align it with each IK target. I also have the Constraints icon disabled which helped me get this far. The thing that is getting under my skin is I can get it to work in a test scene but when I go to import it into my file(which is 80mb) it won't work, the characters get distorted. Mike

Make sure that the target helper and IK targets are different names.

Here is a look at the 2 characters bones system , hopefully you can see the problem from these screen grabs. I duplicated the first monk to create the second monk , could this be causing problems

I did figure out my rigging problem,here is a bit of an explanation. When I imported my first figure with bones,it imported fine all the bones for the Ik targets had the correct name in the properties tray. I then imported the second figure and I looked at the bones with the IK targets and they are targeted at the correct name. When I moved the 2nd figure all the bones with IK targets get rename so all the limbs go wild. I just had to rename the bones to match the ik targets again and everything went fine. Mike

The modelling looks very good Mike! You are (again) promoting unexpected possibilities of Carrara in this contest!