Hey all - I recently discovered the trick of a using nurbs curves as the shape node of a joint. It’s great, as mirroring behavior is easier to setup, but I just ran into a snag.
If an animator has “Automatically Orient Joints” turned on, they’ll be re-orienting anytime they translate one of these curves. I hadn’t locked/hidden translation, just so they’d have more options, but it appears this is a setup designed to fail.
Also, zeroing out is less than ideal, as the t-pose translate values for joints are non-zero.
Does all this sound right? Is removing access to translation on these types of controllers the best solution?
Could you just have a piece of fake geometry skinned to the joints so auto-orientation fails? It will shoot a warning at you, but you maintain your control.
Interesting idea. Seems like a good band-aid solution. I could make the geo an actual band-aid. 
You could lock the orient channel of the joints also I guess.
As for the translate values of the joints, you have to create offset groups above each of the joints which has the translate values you want to zero out. When parenting the joints to zero out to these offset groups, their translate values will be zero relative to their parent group.
I think it’s weird that Autodesk decided to enable the auto orient by default
