Rigging for production Tutorial question

[krickit]

So I am doing the Rigging for production tutorials, but instead of using the blue DT character I am using a friends anthro cat model. Everything has been going great until now. Before lunch I had just finished the center of gravity control along with the point helper that is linked to it, and the axis order. I saved and locked my computer before lunch and when I came back and was testing it again before i started back up, and it is no longer working.
If I rotate the center of gravity point helper to see if it works, two of the bones fly off and everything else just rotates in place. If I link the legs to see if they will work properly and rotate the body forward, the knees go in towards each other.(Note the bones don't fly off when I rotate the actual control, but the knees still do the same thing)
What I need to know is if I can just continue with it doing this or if I have to redo the whole spine?

With the last set of tutorials I had to redo a few parts for somewhat similar reasons, I would save come back and controls no longer worked, they started skewing and the part they controlled would fly away. I had to completely redo the spine and head point helpers and controllers and I had to make sure I did not use text as controllers because that seemed to do it more than shapes.

<3 Please help.
Edit- To help clarify I uploaded some screenshots- One of the legs normal, one after they are linked to the spine and one of rotating the point helper.
706970717073

New Edit-
I tried rebuilding the whole spine again and I still get the issue with the legs. I am just going to continue and hope for the best I guess.

[delano]

Hey, krickit. Sorry to hear you're running into some trouble. This type of setup (e.g., the spine rig) can get very tricky. To avoid skewing as your controls move, it's important that they (the control objects) are first Reset. Our Intro to Character Rigging course (http://www.digitaltutors.com/09/training.php?cid=109&pid=336) elaborates on this process.

As for the spine bones not functioning properly, from the looks of it, it appears that the Spine Curve has not been skinned, which is needed to control the spine's flexibility. And for the bone that is flying away from the rest of the rig, it looks like you may be running into double transformations, in which case, you'd want to check what it's being influencing by.

Please carefully make sure each step has been followed. It is very easy to overlook a critical step when rigging.

Hope this helps, and keep it up :) Rigging gets challenging at times, and it's a lot of fun when one manages to step over those hurdles.

[Kris]

< Same person different account
I have complete step by step notes and keep going back to the video. When I recreated the spine again I had everything working...Save, close, open again and it's no longer working...
Thankfully I saved increments so I can go back to where it was working and try again.

[Kris]

Oh my goodness I have it!....I had been linking the bone ends to the stupid helper and that was deleting the link to the bones. I have the spine working!
But the legs still do the same thing when I link them...I will figure it out but at least now I think I can continue.

[delano]

Congrats on figuring the spine out! Try Resetting the Xform on your controls, then freezing the transforms of the bones and controls before the bones are linked.

[Kris]

Yeah I just did that before lunch :) on to the face!
Also I figured out the leg issue, I used point helpers linked them to the hip and position constrained the legs to the helpers.

[Viscte]

Yeah I just did that before lunch :) on to the face!
Also I figured out the leg issue, I used point helpers linked them to the hip and position constrained the legs to the helpers.

"Linked them to the hip?" The hip helper or what?

[Kris]

linked the helpers to the hip bone.