IK Handle won't move with skin mesh? ( i'm new to maya)

[GardenA]

hi, im rigging my first model, (it’s pretty simple) and I was trying to combine an IK Handle I made with the mesh. It says that it’s already in a skin cluster so I don’t think anything is wrong there. But now when I try to move the mesh of the character the spine does not follow at all, or sometimes follows lagged behind. At first I thought it was double transformation happening but in my Outlier I cant see any deformers, curves, bends,ect, that could be causing it. I have the characters eyes as a separate mesh thats grouped with the body mesh but thats it.If anyone knows whats causing this and how to fix it I would REALLY appreciate it, this assignment is long overdue. Thank you!
(sorry should have named things better, group2 is the cactus body and eyes.)

[PerfectLine]

You’re thinking about it wrong.

Once you skin the mesh to the joints you no longer select the mesh. The joint chain will move the mesh now.

Though you don’t select the joints now either. You run it with the iK chain… BUT… you also don’t want to key the iK chain. You want controllers driving the IK chain.
This way the controllers can be frozen to 0 in their default neutral position pose while the iK setup is registering whatever numbers it needs to resolve the iK.

What you want to do is setup controllers, which are usually nurbs shapes that aren’t visible to the render engine, to drive the iK chain.
Maya has very specific rigging rules.
They seem tricky at first but once you get the rules it is quite simple to setup any rig.

If you created an iK chain then after skinning the mesh to the joints you will move the Ik source or iK handle.
Create a nurbs circle for the Ik base at the bottom of the pot and a nurbs circle for the iK handle at the top of the head.

Once the nurbs controllers are snapped into the positions of the iK base and iK handle you can then make them the parents of the iK.

to snap… hold “V” key while middle mouse dragging the nurbs circles. They will snap to geometry to joints.

freeze their transforms once they are placed.

Use parent constrain once they are in position (selecting the parent first, being the Nurbs controller then hold shift selecting to add the IK chain top) to make the controller drive the entire iK joint chain.
Then hard parent (middle mouse drag) the second controller (for the ik handle) underneath the main controller. This will make the iK handle controller move with controller at the base so that the whole rig moves with the base controller. Then parent constrain the iK handle controller to the iK Handle so it will drive the iK handle. Then you can hide the IK entirely.

If you want to scale the rig you’ll need to drop the controller driving the iK handle into a group (select it press ctrl+G). then call this iK_Controller_GRP.
Then scale constrain the base controller to the ik_Controller group.

This will scale the group which will then leave the local space of the ik handle controller alone since it is inside the group…

There is a lot to learn about Maya rigging rules BUT… once the “ah hah” moment happens you’ll be making spider mechs climb up walls in no time.