full body ik oddities
 

-Using Maya 2008-

I'm new to character animation and am experiencing some distortion in the character's hands when I start keyframing different poses. That is - when I start moving him around - his hands start to get HUGE or shrink. I've rigged him with a skeleton and using maya's preset full body IK. One of the weird things is - when I drag the boxes around his wrists - they'll pull his arm till it is fully stretched then the box will drag away from his wrist. I don't know what I've changed, but it used to work where when I'd grab the effector box around his wrist - it would eventually pull the entire model with it.

Help me out, here.

could you post a picture of the distortion happening...

also with the effector box's problem, i think it depends how your rig's setup is weather it pulls the root/entire body, or dislocates itself from its origin and stretches.

I've actually figured it out - it was a pinning problem. I'm still learning here.

Then again, seems like in this line of work - we're ALWAYS learning...

oh cool, glad you've sorted it out ...
definitely :D