The scale is set in meters.  The character is about 1.8m tall.  It is all correctly grouped together with the pivot at 0 0 0 and the transformations are frozen.  When the skeleton is initially generated is is approximately the correct size.  However if I try to do almost anything to it - saving edits, mirror, change scale - it always reduces down to a size about 1cm tall !!!  And there i was thinking that this system was supposed to make things easier.  I might as well rig the whole thing manually…

It just doesn’t work at all - and they make it look really simple in those nice videos… Just do this and it will distort, shrink to the size of a pin and be completely unusable - brilliant…

Human IK simply does not work right using any scale other than centimeters (the Maya internal unit). Until and unless this is remedied, change your scale to centimeters. You can adjust the grid size to be larger in Display -> Grid [options].

Note units seen in the channel box (for example) will now be 180.0 instead of 1.8. Adjust your FBX export scaling if you need to export 1.8 meters instead of 180 cm… internally, the model has always been using cm, so you really do not have to adjust the mesh scale.

<* Wes *>