dkouts, Mike builds a great skelly!!! his setup is pretty much the same as I do.

Skeletons can be a pain in the butt, the nodes are set up and parented diffrent ways depending on what your little guy will be performing.

Most of the time just selecting the root joint, is all you need to get the character to bend at the knee's (like getting ready for a jump) while the foot stays planted.

What node are you selecting in the hypergraph? Did you put your IK nodes into the same chain as the rest of the skelly?

If you did that might be the problem right there, most of the time if the character is just going to be runing and walking about, the ik nodes can stay out, If you want to jump and tumble you have to make a new node buy grouping the Root joint to itself, then parenting the IK's to the new node you made.

It sounds like the node your picking in your chain might have been grouped with the root and ik's together which will select the whole skeleton together making a node that highlites all the joints and moves all the joints at once.

If you do have the iks parented to your root joint try unparenting them. Once you have done that select your root joint again and group it to itself, call it (Flip) or something along that line and add the iks to that node. Now if that was what the problem was select the root joint only, you should be able to get the up/down action your looking for while the feet stay planted. Then if you select the new node you made called flip that should select the whole skelly and you should be able to flip him if you wanted him to jump head over heels.

Its a bit hard to say what the problem is with out seeing the way you set-up the skelly=)

Hope that helps, they can be tricky


Kurt