CAT - remove stretch from FK spine?

Rigging
1

hello all,
we are doing some experiments with cat and can’t seem to figure out this little problem:

CAT’s default behavior is the procedural spline ik setup, but it can be easily switched to fk. fk is great and animators want it, but by grabbing the ribcage hub node you can translate and create stretching in the rig (we can’t have stretching on bones). is there a way to turn that off and have the rig attempt to solve to that ribcage hub? obviously without stretch, it would probably not be able to solve to a translated target, but that would be fine. the only other option would be to lock translation on that node, which is not ideal since it limits how the animators work and they are currently used to the procedural spline ik back which is based on translation of that hub node for posing.

2

If you select the joints you don’t want to scale (one by one, not all at once) then go into the Hierarchy Tab, then click the Link Info tab, there is a panel called Bone Hierarchy and other that there’s a section called Setup Mode and an option for Lock Local Scale. That should lock the stretching scale, and you won’t be able to scale it by hand but you can still scale the rig over all via the Base CatUnits Ratio, and still translate the chest around all FKy style and rotate it and junk. Don’t forget the head/neck either.

Try that out and let me know if that was what you were looking or or does the job for you. Not sure off hand if there’s a way to un-wire that if that’s what you’re looking for specifically.