Saxophiliac

Okay.. Some success now, literally everything started to go as planned.  And then suddenly I zoomed out and the left leg is messed up, starting with the hip link bone. (left shoulder) What would cause this? It's not animated, none of the bones in the entire rig are animated, clear pose and everything else doesn't resolve this. It looks fine in edit mode, the skinning layer clears ok, but everything reverts back to this awkward leg pose. Hopefully I won't have to redo my rig.. pasting the pose of the right leg x-mirroed doesn't work correctly now either. Maybe I accidentally toggled something in Avastar?

I'm not entirely sure how the deformation of the face bones work - which parts of the body to deform together (I've separated this by head, tail, wings, body), or why it looks like a mess on import. I couldn't find the answer I was looking for here in this forum (though I did not look through each and every page), are there specific export settings in the most recent Avastar that I need to deform the face bones properly?  They look really odd but everything else looks ok. The forepaws are only goofy looking because 1. I repurposed the Bento wing bones as fingers and 2. nothing is animated. :matte-motes-bashful: I also do not know how to make a basic deform animation, or what priority it should be. Guess that's not Bento related though. :matte-motes-crying: I used to use the mSkull bone for the head's root rotation, then I used mFaceRoot instead, and made it not assigned to the entire head. The eyelid bones are set up in a way so that the mesh will use only partial animation in that area, the rest will just be alpha switches.  So I guess my questions are not only the ones above but, how should I tackle these issues? Should I upload all of the meshes without anything but skin weights, then set up a deformer (like a cube with the bones per part, then link them together in-world), or just have skin weights and a deform animation..? These new bones will be so helpful but only if I know what to do with them. I'll also mention that the green bones have been edited and re-parented, not sure if those maybe aren't ok to change child status on or not. I could also wait until Bento is at RC status.  Edit: added another picture of one of my problems, didn't mean to reply directly to Teager  Another edit: Seems like I sort of am on the right track to figuring this out.. A deform animation that has the joints offset correctly then? I had a useless animation from a week or two ago and it seemed to pop the head into existence at least better than it was before. Will tinker with this while waiting for a reply.