Thanks NeoStrider,

neat idea, unfortunately that's what I was doing. I left the control layer visible (but not renderable) while I was doing the batch render and the result was still that his head went all over the place.

I'm pretty much done rebuilding the rig now, I couldn't figure out what was wrong with the old one but I've improved it for mark 2. The main differences being that I've built a no flip knee into the legs and have hand built the IK to FK set up instead of using the awful pre-set one that's built into the IK handles on Maya, it's far sturdier now!!

Cheers for your input,

Mat.