It generates animation skeleton in either BVH or anim format, starting from your rigging skeleton, bringing also the character mesh with it.

I made MyAniMATE exactly with this in mind: any custom skeleton shape is fine.

This now should be a compliant skeleton and shouldn't give trouble. Then go to skeleton menu -> joint orient ->option box to view the options, tick on 'orient to world' checkbox, up on top (it greys out everything else) and apply When shaping is done, select the mPelvis joint, then go to Select menu ->hierarchy and freeze transformations Remove manually those joints you know you're not going to use beforehand (like the spine joints or the fingers) In my opinion, you can go ahead with this skeleton. So basically it doesn't know where those spine joints go on the mesh, defaulting their location to their parent in the hierarchy definition and thus moving the hierarchy downwards like you're showing. This is most likely due to the additional spine bones in the Bento skeleton, not being weighted to the default avatar mesh, but still present in the hierarchy definition. I went on and tried the same file from yesterday, and i have a crunching on the abdomen/chest area. Alright, i went over this again and yes, you're right, i didn't have the option box checked.

Rigging quadrupeds in maya