Positioning the Baby rig

Strange stuff. Making poses for babies and I kept having the worst time getting the babies to stay rotated the way I put them. Finally, I opened an in game pose and found something that made me realize what had happened. You don't position the baby rig the same way you position any of the other rigs. Take a look:

Working on this pose set I had to constantly test and retest, repositioning the baby rig time and time and time again. I'd position the baby, a,a,locrot, save, reset, import pose and the above is what it would look like each and every time. I could not figure out why. Since I know of no tipsy omsp of random degrees I was really in a quandry. Why wouldn't the baby save in it's pose?

So I imported an animation from the game to see if I could spot the problem. Shockingly, I could. There was one particular from the above picture that was the same in both poses. The crosshairs of the b_root_bind.

 See right there? They're highlighted, the joint inside is not. Notice something about them? It's lined up perfectly with the global axes.

Here you can see all three axes. What's happening is it will save the location of the b_root_bind, but it won't save a rotation of it. It will stay oriented with the axes no matter what you do or where in space you put it. So how do you rotate the rig and get it to stay?

Using either (or both if you prefer) of these joints. The joint on top in the picture (not in the center of the crosshairs) is actually about 4 different joints. In my testing so far, using any of them will save baby's rotation just fine.

In this picture, I've moved the baby into position (again! UGH!) using those joints. Notice that I even moved the location of the joint that was originally in the center of the crosshairs and it saved fine.

So rotate those babies! Just don't drop them. ;)