Maya rigging beginner question: setting keys breaks my rig

Phillipsa

ok so I've been following the tutorial :

https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/maya-2017-rigging-introduction

Everything is working great until the "weight dance" section. Basically as soon as I set keys for all controls, I seem to lose all function of my spine/IK set up. It basically freezes. I can stil move the control curves but the rotation now happens from the central spine with the lower back frozen.

has anybody had this before? Am I just having an "it's not working" panic and the answer is obvious?

alkiloyd

I just went through this one not that long ago. I didn't have this same problem but I did hit a few snags along the way.
This might be something like you missed your Orient Constraint for one of the JNT to DEF joints in the spine.
Or maybe misplaced one of the joints for the spine IK, like maybe you snapped it to the wrong JNT joint.
Otherwise, maybe you accidentally locked your rotate channels on something or the other?

Phillipsa

Hmmm maybe, thanks. All the tests seem to work and I've used the same scripts etc. It's literally after I set a key that the spine stops working. All the other joints are fine