Animation Bit
 

Any answers would be of much help.

Why does "freeze transformations" not work on joints? Is there ANY tool that will achieve the same? (set transformations to zero w/o moving the joint)

Thank you.

P.S. Also, if possible, might I ask where I could find info on using joints to automatically movie secondary action bits? (hair strands, floppy bunny ears, etc.) A simply "go back in the tutorials and looks a bit deeper" will do, but I didn't find anything last time. ^-^

Freeze transformations work on joints but only for rotation and scale values. You cannot freeze the translation because joints always operate relative to their parent nodes. If you've translated the joints and want to freeze their transforms to the actual offset from the parent joint, you can freeze the rotations then run Skeleton > Orient Joint to zero all translations except the actual offset (for default joint hierarchies, the offset value is along the x-axis).

For your second question, you can probably setup a soft body curve to control spline IK on the secondary action parts.

So when creating a skeleton, I need to place a joint pefectly for its translation values to be 0,0,0?

The problem with all this placement usually falls into view when I try to use an IK handle and suddenly the skeleton twists wierdly.

Your joints will never be 0 0 0 unless you want the joint sitting directly on top of its parent. Like I said, all joints will have some sort of offset from their parents. Usually, it is along the x-axis.

If you're getting weird twisting when manipulating IK handles, it could be because the local rotation axes of the joints in the IK chain are not oriented correctly. Quick solution is to run Skeleton > Orient Joints on the entire joint hierarchy before creating the IK handle.

Are there any options I need to set on Orient Joint, or will the defaults work?

It's odd, no matter what I do, the second I turn on the ikSCsolver, it twists my skeleton's foot in. I could show pictures or throw in a sample .ma file in if need be.

That is to say, whenever I use the IK joint handle tool w/ ikSCsolver turned on...

You should considering using an ikRPsolver instead. That might take care of your twisting problems.